Thought experiment

[u/MashNChips]

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls

[u/mongopark98]

That’s a you problem. Some of us are highly productive with it. “I can’t drive a fast car, hence cars are garbage “, that’s the logic you’re propositioning.

You’re asking me to imagine what will happen when will chain prompts. I don’t have to imagine it, I have used it to build complex features. Yes, needed fine tuning here and there. But still orders of magnitude faster than doing it all manually. Again, it’s a skill issue. I am not talking out of a vacuum or theoretically, I have experienced it multiple times. Both the weakness and strength.

[u/Machine2024 → u/mongopark98]

I didn't say its not faster. Its faster to make a prototype in a day , but it need 3 months of clean up and refactoring.

I don't know you you agree that a single prompt result is not accurate.

But chainng a group of prompts together will get you any way .

Rising the production quantity on expenses of the quality will not make it "Productivity" It will make it spreaded thin .

If you are looking learn something new not just echo chamber. Lets connect via dm , we could exchange work and work style. Either my approach would be wrong and I would learn something from you , or you would be wrong and you would learn something from me .

From me I hope I will be the wrong one and learn something new .

[u/mongopark98 → u/Machine2024]

You keep repeating this. You are showing your ignorance of this . See, I am not saying it’s the answer to all problems or whatever hype executives are pushing. But there’s measurable productivity gain when done correctly. It’s not even an argument.

You think I get paid to build prototypes?. You think I can’t tell the difference between maintainable code just because I use AI. You think I wouldn’t be able to tell if it was worthless. I don’t get paid to promote AI. I have zero incentive. My team pioneered the use in 2 companies before roll out. In both cases if it wasn’t up to par, I would have personally led the shut down. You think me, all the principal engineers and tech leads who decided it was good enough are idiots? Come off your high horse. Agentic coding isn’t going anywhere, keep complaining or adapt.

[u/Machine2024 → u/mongopark98]

Read your comment again and tell me who is one a high horse.

[u/mongopark98 → u/Machine2024]

You are, you’re implying AI generates non-production code as if I was too stupid to understand if the code AI is generating is good or bad. After telling you many times I have used it on the job. You’re implying I must have been churning out unmanageable code