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rsalusyesterday at 9:46 PM1 replyview on HN

what a patronizing response. I'd be embarrassed.


Replies

gridspyyesterday at 10:27 PM

I guess you didn't understand my comment ;)

Look, goals can differ. If you don't need to understand and predict every part of the code the AI is generating and you just need it to meet a "sketch" of what you want - by all means use AI. I do use AI in that situation for related or unimportant code.

But if you need full understanding, in my experience the only way to get that is to program it yourself. Unless what the AI is generating is so trivial you already understand it and it's grunt work, you will learn the detail by doing it yourself. Controlling the approach here is important.

However often the best way to handle grunt work is to write better abstractions, something AI sucks at.

It's the programming equivalent of many PG essays. https://www.paulgraham.com/useful.html for instance. There was one on how PG refined their thoughts via writing. It's in there somewhere.

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