I’ve seen a few articles saying that instead of hating AI, the real quiet programmers young and old are loving it and have a renewed sense of purpose coding with llm helpers (this article was also hating on ed zitiron, which makes sense why it would).
Is this total bullshit? I have to admit, even though it makes me ill, I’ve used llms a few times to help me learn simple code syntax quickly (im and absolute noob who’s wanted my whole life to learn code but cant grasp it very well). But yes, a lot of time its wrong.
Its an absolute gamechanger, IMO - the research phase of any task is reduced to effectively nothing, and I get massive amounts of work done when I walk away from my desk, because I plan for and keep lists of longer tasks to accomplish during those times.
You need to review every line of code it writes, but that’s no different than it ever was when working with junior devs 🤷♂️ but now I get the code in minutes instead of weeks and the agents actually react to my comments.
We’re using this with a massive monorepo containing hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and in tiny tool repos that serve exactly one purpose. If our code quality checks and standards werent as strict as they have been for the past decade, I think it wouldn’t work well with the monorepo.
The important part is that my company is paying for it - I have no clue what these tools cost. I am definitely more productive, there is absolutely no debate there IMO. Is the extra productivity worth the extra cost? I have literally no idea.