alt Hacker Newsif you don't plan perfectly, you'll have to start over from scratch if anything goes wrong
This is my experience too, but it's pushed me to make much smaller plans and to commit things to a feature branch far more atomically so I can revert a step to the previous commit, or bin the entire feature by going back to main. I do this far more now than I ever did when I was writing the code by hand.
This is how developers should work regardless of how the code is being developed. I think this is a small but very real way AI has actually made me a better developer (unless I stop doing it when I don't use AI... not tried that yet.)
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LLMs are really eager to start coding (as interns are eager to start working), so the sentence “don’t implement yet” has to be used very often at the beginning of any project.
Developers should work by wasting lots of time making the wrong thing?
I bet if they did a work and motion study on this approach they'd find the classic:
"Thinks they're more productive, AI has actually made them less productive"
But lots of lovely dopamine from this false progress that gets thrown away!
I do this too. Relatively small changes, atomic commits with extensive reasoning in the message (keeps important context around). This is a best practice anyway, but used to be excruciatingly much effort. Now it’s easy!
Except that I’m still struggling with the LLM understanding its audience/context of its utterances. Very often, after a correction, it will focus a lot on the correction itself making for weird-sounding/confusing statements in commit messages and comments.