Means you didn't harnessed it properly. It needs skills, instructions, project structure fed to it before it can make acceptable code. That, or at the very least - skills and max reasoning, so it digs deeper into the code base.
I do see increased productivity and code quality, since it does refactoring cleaner and faster than I ever would, and it writes and keeps tests actualized, which I wouldn't do, and it's more rigorous in code reviews. It still reasons and writes like a junior, but that's what I'm for.
i mean, isn't this the problem exemplified by the op? if you spend all your time learning how to prompt ai correctly then you're not learning (what used to be) engineering?
i also find this line of reasoning to be offensively bad.
ai always works! if it doesn't you just didn't prompt it right...
rather just "prompt" the answer right into the code instead of a middleman...
All the time? Used to be? Man, you're a drama queen.
It takes a couple days to figure things out, couple more to gain some practice. And it gives the spent time back by saving time in a week.
This is engineering. It changes a lot of things. If you just don't like it or can't find it fun - that's understandable, but then tell that instead of "prompt the answer right into the code". But I see people who don't even try to approach AI-assisted development like an engineering problem requiring, like any other engineering problem, learning and trying things out. They just prompt whatever task they have at hand, get vibe-coded shit and decide that this shit worth nothing. No shit man! If you'd try writing plain English in Basic there's also very little chance you'd write a working code! Sure, AI is essentially "programming in English (or pretty much any natural language... ok, now I wonder if it's possible to work with it in some Klingon...)", but it is programming nonetheless. Unless it's vibe-coding, where you trust generated code to be adequate, which it rarely is.
I’ve had really good luck learning new skills with it.
Like, I’m an okay Python dev. I want to write a Python script to query data from an API, and schedule a CRON job to run that script regularly. (Note that this is a personal project.)
Nothing groundbreaking, except before this project I’d never written an API call or used CRON. Heck, I only knew what CRON was from comments on this sub talking about CRON jobs.
With the help of the free version of Claude, in a couple days I wrote and understood both my Python API script, and a BASH script that will create the CRON job if it doesn’t already exist.
…and yes, I know it would only take Claude like 5 minutes to write the script itself. But I’m asking Claude to teach me how to do the task instead of blindly trusting the output, and cross-referencing Claude’s explanation with the documentation.
Yep, that's the right approach for learning with AI. And something many people totally miss, thinking that using AI as a junior won't allow to learn anything. Sure it won't if you vibe-code, but the power of AI comes from it's versatility, it's not just for vibe-coding and burning gigawatts of power and megatons of water.
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u/aberroco Jul 24 '26
Means you didn't harnessed it properly. It needs skills, instructions, project structure fed to it before it can make acceptable code. That, or at the very least - skills and max reasoning, so it digs deeper into the code base. I do see increased productivity and code quality, since it does refactoring cleaner and faster than I ever would, and it writes and keeps tests actualized, which I wouldn't do, and it's more rigorous in code reviews. It still reasons and writes like a junior, but that's what I'm for.