alt Hacker NewsInteresting, every developer I've spoken to is extremely skeptical and has not found any actual productivity boosts.
Ok that's not true. I know one junior who is very excited, but considering his regular code quality I would not put much weight on his opinion.
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I mean there are two different things. One is whether there are actual productivity boosts right now. And the second is the excitement about the technology.
I am definitely more productive. A lot of this productivity is wasted on stuff I probably shouldn't be writing anyways. But since using coding agent, I'm both more productive at my day job and I'm building so many small hobby projects that I would have never found time for otherwise.
But the main topic of discussion in this thread is the excitement about technology. And I have a bit mixed feelings, because on one hand side I feel like a turkey being excited for the Thanksgiving. On the other hand, I think the programming future is bright. there will be so much more software build and for a lot of that you will still need programmers.
My excitement comes from the fact that I can do so much more things that I wouldn't even think about being able to do a few months ago.
Just as an example, in last month I have used the agents to add features to the applications I'm using daily. Text editor, podcast application, Android keyboard. The agents were capable to fork, build, and implement a feature I asked for in a project where I have no idea about the technology. Iif I were hired to do those features, I would be happy if I implemented them after two weeks on the job. With an agent, I get tailor made features in half of a morning. Spending less than ten minutes prompting.
I am building educational games for my kids. They learn a new topic at school? Let me quickly vibe the game to make learning it fun. A project that wouldn't be worth my weekend, but is worth 15 minutes. https://kuboble.com/math/games/snake/index.html?mode=multipl...
So I'm excited because I think coding agents will be for coding what pencil and paper were for writing.
I am using AI a lot to do tasks that just would not get done because they would take too long. Also, getting it to iterate on a React web application meant I can think about what I want it to do rather than worry about all the typing I would have to do. Especially powerful when moving things around, hand-written code has a "mental load" to move that telling an AI to do it does not. Obviously not everything is 100% but this is the most productive I have felt for a very long time. And I've been in the game for 25 years.