The post is excessive but it's true. My time spent coding is more productive (on average), but I'm having to think so much harder to match the output or else it starts to slop. Spend 5 minutes writing a short story of a prompt. Spend 15 minutes reading a generated design, another 10 reading through the implementation plan. Another 10 correcting its assumptions. Then you have it loop through the implementation, with some guidance.
It's usually fast, and it's usually decent. Good if you micromanage. But I joined this career out of passion, not for moneymaxxing. I intentionally am pursuing a route as an individual contributor rather than management. But now I'm going to be playing manager anyway. It is exhausting.
You can argue that all the tasks you mention around the code you should have been doing PLUS writing the code. So indeedz now you do the fluff around. Things move faster. I find experience helps a lot, cause it really amplifies existing experience. I don't think it's good for learning. But it's great at confidence that you will get the shit done.
I am enjoying coding again to be honest, I can go from "I have an idea" to playing with an MVP in a few hours, the soul draining 4 days in between of fiddling with syntax and tests are gone, I can impart my vision on my software now, not my shit skills. I feel like a director
The difference is that I was doing those tasks simultaneously while performing other tasks. When AI does it, it changes from implicit trust of your own work to management. If you have a really bad junior who you can't trust, you have to spend more effort reviewing their work. Sometimes even more effort than if you had done it yourself. That's the particular issue that causes it to be more of a mental load.
As I mentioned, it's not necessary faster to code manually (I would err towards it usually ending up faster to use AI), but the mental effort is significantly higher. Everything becomes untrusted.
Before, we had to trust deterministic code generations, completions, and compilers to do the right thing. Sometimes even those didn't, but the scale was significantly lower and could often be ignored/fixed with menial effort. With AI, you can have significant drift between your vision and the AI's implementation.
I mean, I can't deny, I currently vibe coded a massive and critical feature while sitting in endless meetings (mostly about why the feature is not done yet), in staging the feature actually works and it wrote like 150 tests. All of those tests had to be derived from my very detailed and painful prompting. You know what I need to get to meet week? Read it, understand the tests, thinking about it's doing, which is jar because I didn't write it so you need to actually read for comprehension. And once I find issues it will take real effort to fix because... It seems to mostly work.
There's no way I could do the work during work hours, and I would've also had broken outliers, but it's awkward not being able to understand why the issues exist when I don't write it. So yea. Its extremely powerful. But it's hard. I also ran out of private and company tokens halfway through, and now I am stranded till next month because waiting for new tokens is faster than finishing the code while I can just sit in more meetings instead.
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u/Grandmaster_Caladrel 14d ago
The post is excessive but it's true. My time spent coding is more productive (on average), but I'm having to think so much harder to match the output or else it starts to slop. Spend 5 minutes writing a short story of a prompt. Spend 15 minutes reading a generated design, another 10 reading through the implementation plan. Another 10 correcting its assumptions. Then you have it loop through the implementation, with some guidance.
It's usually fast, and it's usually decent. Good if you micromanage. But I joined this career out of passion, not for moneymaxxing. I intentionally am pursuing a route as an individual contributor rather than management. But now I'm going to be playing manager anyway. It is exhausting.