If you know what you’re doing, AI is actually a massive help. You can make it do all the repetitive shit for you. You can also have it write the code and you either clean it or take the pieces that works for you. It saves soooooo much time and I freaking love it.
I knocked off an android app in Flutter/Dart/Supabase in about a week of evenings with Claude. I have never used Flutter before, but I know enough coding to fix things and give good instructions about what I want.
It would even debug my android test environment for me and wrote automated tests to debug the application, as well as spit out the compose files I needed to set up the Supabase docker container and SQL queries to prep the database and authentication backend.
That was using 3.5Sonnet, and from what I’ve seen of 3.7, it’s way better. I think it cost me about $20 in tokens. I’ve never used AI to code anything before, this was my first attempt. Pretty cool.
I turned on copilot in VSCode for the first time this week. The results so far have been less than stellar. It’s batting about .100 in terms of completing code the way I intended. Now, people tell me it needs to learn your ways, so I’m going to give it a chance. But one thing it has done is replaced the normal auto-completion which showed you what sort of arguments a function takes with something that is sometimes dead wrong. Like the code will not even compile with the suggested args.
It also has a knack for making me forget what I was trying to do. It will show me something like the left side picture with a nice rail stretching off into the distance when I had intended it to turn, and then I can’t remember whether I wanted to go left or right? I guess it’s just something you need to adjust to. Like you need to have a thought fairly firmly in your mind before you begin typing so that you can react to the AI code in a reasonable way? It may occasionally be better than what you have it mind, but you need to keep the original idea in your head for comparison purposes. I’m not good at that yet.
Try Roocode or Cline with the Claude3.7 model. It’s pretty slick, way better than Copilot. Turn on Memory Bank for larger projects to reduce the cost of tokens.
I don’t mess with any of those in-IDE assistance. I find then very intrusive and they make me less efficient. So many suggestions pop up and I don’t like that, and like you said, I get confused. The only time I thought one of them (codium) was somewhat useful is when I asked it to make tests for the file I was on. It did get all the positive tests correct, but all the negative ones wrong. Lol. So, I naturally default to the AI in the browser.
Thanks, it makes me feel relieved to hear I’m not the only one finding it a little overwhelming! Previously, I had been using chatgpt and the like where I would be hunting for the answer to a particularly esoteric programming question. I’ve had a fair amount of success with that, though occasionally I would catch it in the act of contradicting itself, so I’ve learned you have to follow up on it a bit.
Tell me about it. I teach a python class. Super basic, super easy. Students are sometimes idiots, but if they follow the steps, most of them should be fine.
Sometimes I get one who thinks they can just do everything with chatgpt. They’ll be working on their final assignment and they’ll ask me what a for loop is for. Than I look at their code and it looks like Sanscrit. They probably haven’t written a single line of code in those weeks.
I’ve tried this, to convert a large json file to simplified yaml. It was riddled with hallucinations and mistakes even for this simple, deterministic, verifiable task.
I don’t even know what aider is. Lol. There are so many assistants out there. My company created a wrapper for chatgpt and gave us unlimited number of tokens and told us to go ham.
Aider is an LLM agent type app that has a programming assistant and an architect assistant.
You tell the architect what you want and it scans the structure of your code base to generate the boilerplate. Then the coder fills it in. It has command prompt access to then compile and run etc.
It’s taken me a while to learn how to use it and where it works best but I’m coming around to where it fits.
Just today i was doing a new project, i wrote a couple lines about what i needed and asked for a database schema. It looked about 80% right. Then asked for all the models for the ORM i wanted and it did that. Probably saved an hour of tedious typing.
I’m telling you. It’s fantastic for the boring and repetitive garbage. Databases? Oh hell yeah, it does really well on that, too. You have no idea how much I hate working with SQL. The ONLY thing it still struggles with so far is negative tests. For some reason, every single AI I’ve ever tried did good on positive tests, but just plain bad in the negative ones.
Lmao. I don’t give a shit. I’ve been saving a ton of time ever since I started using it. It gobbles up CSS, HTML and JS like hotcakes, and I’m very much ok with that.
If you know what you’re doing, AI is actually a massive help. You can make it do all the repetitive shit for you. You can also have it write the code and you either clean it or take the pieces that works for you. It saves soooooo much time and I freaking love it.
I knocked off an android app in Flutter/Dart/Supabase in about a week of evenings with Claude. I have never used Flutter before, but I know enough coding to fix things and give good instructions about what I want.
It would even debug my android test environment for me and wrote automated tests to debug the application, as well as spit out the compose files I needed to set up the Supabase docker container and SQL queries to prep the database and authentication backend.
That was using 3.5Sonnet, and from what I’ve seen of 3.7, it’s way better. I think it cost me about $20 in tokens. I’ve never used AI to code anything before, this was my first attempt. Pretty cool.
I turned on copilot in VSCode for the first time this week. The results so far have been less than stellar. It’s batting about .100 in terms of completing code the way I intended. Now, people tell me it needs to learn your ways, so I’m going to give it a chance. But one thing it has done is replaced the normal auto-completion which showed you what sort of arguments a function takes with something that is sometimes dead wrong. Like the code will not even compile with the suggested args.
It also has a knack for making me forget what I was trying to do. It will show me something like the left side picture with a nice rail stretching off into the distance when I had intended it to turn, and then I can’t remember whether I wanted to go left or right? I guess it’s just something you need to adjust to. Like you need to have a thought fairly firmly in your mind before you begin typing so that you can react to the AI code in a reasonable way? It may occasionally be better than what you have it mind, but you need to keep the original idea in your head for comparison purposes. I’m not good at that yet.
Try Roocode or Cline with the Claude3.7 model. It’s pretty slick, way better than Copilot. Turn on Memory Bank for larger projects to reduce the cost of tokens.
I don’t mess with any of those in-IDE assistance. I find then very intrusive and they make me less efficient. So many suggestions pop up and I don’t like that, and like you said, I get confused. The only time I thought one of them (codium) was somewhat useful is when I asked it to make tests for the file I was on. It did get all the positive tests correct, but all the negative ones wrong. Lol. So, I naturally default to the AI in the browser.
Thanks, it makes me feel relieved to hear I’m not the only one finding it a little overwhelming! Previously, I had been using chatgpt and the like where I would be hunting for the answer to a particularly esoteric programming question. I’ve had a fair amount of success with that, though occasionally I would catch it in the act of contradicting itself, so I’ve learned you have to follow up on it a bit.
That’s the thing, it’s a useful assistant for an expert who will be able to verify any answers.
It’s a disaster for anyone who’s ignorant of the domain.
Tell me about it. I teach a python class. Super basic, super easy. Students are sometimes idiots, but if they follow the steps, most of them should be fine. Sometimes I get one who thinks they can just do everything with chatgpt. They’ll be working on their final assignment and they’ll ask me what a for loop is for. Than I look at their code and it looks like Sanscrit. They probably haven’t written a single line of code in those weeks.
If you’re having to do repetitive shit, you might reconsider your approach.
I’ve tried this, to convert a large json file to simplified yaml. It was riddled with hallucinations and mistakes even for this simple, deterministic, verifiable task.
Depending on the situation, repetitive shit might be unavoidable
Usually you can solve the issue by using regex, but regex can be difficult to work with as well
Nah, I’m good the way I do things. I have a good pace that has been working out very well for me :)
I’ve been trying to use aider for this, it seems really cool but my machine and wallet cannot handle the sheer volume of tokens it consumes.
I don’t even know what aider is. Lol. There are so many assistants out there. My company created a wrapper for chatgpt and gave us unlimited number of tokens and told us to go ham.
Aider is an LLM agent type app that has a programming assistant and an architect assistant.
You tell the architect what you want and it scans the structure of your code base to generate the boilerplate. Then the coder fills it in. It has command prompt access to then compile and run etc.
I haven’t really figured it out yet.
Damn, sounds like it could do some wonders.
It’s taken me a while to learn how to use it and where it works best but I’m coming around to where it fits.
Just today i was doing a new project, i wrote a couple lines about what i needed and asked for a database schema. It looked about 80% right. Then asked for all the models for the ORM i wanted and it did that. Probably saved an hour of tedious typing.
I’m telling you. It’s fantastic for the boring and repetitive garbage. Databases? Oh hell yeah, it does really well on that, too. You have no idea how much I hate working with SQL. The ONLY thing it still struggles with so far is negative tests. For some reason, every single AI I’ve ever tried did good on positive tests, but just plain bad in the negative ones.
Shhhh! You’re not supposed to rock the AI hate boat.
I hate the ethics of it, especially the image models.
But frankly it’s here, and lawyers were supposed to have figured out the ethics of it.
I use hosted Deepseek as an FU to OpenAI and GitHub for stealing my code.
Lmao. I don’t give a shit. I’ve been saving a ton of time ever since I started using it. It gobbles up CSS, HTML and JS like hotcakes, and I’m very much ok with that.