by locknitpicker 3 days ago
> This is what I've always found confusing as well about this push for AI. The act of typing isn't the hard part - its understanding what's going on, and why you're doing it.
This is a very superficial and simplistic analysis of the whole domain. Programmers don't "type". They apply changes to the code. Pressing buttons in a keyboard is not the bottleneck. If that was the case, code completion and templating would have been a revolutionary, world changing development in the field.
The difficult part is understanding what to do and how to do it, and why. It turns out LLMs can handle all these types of task. You are onboarding onto a new project? Hit a LLM assistant with /explain. You want to implement a feature that matches a specific requirement? You hit your LLM assistant with /plan followed by apply. You want to cover some code with tests? You hit your LLM assistant with /tests.
In the end you review the result,and do with it whatever you want. Some even feel confident enough to YOLO the output of the LLM.
So while you still try to navigate through files, others already have features out.
> If that was the case, code completion and templating would have been a revolutionary, world changing development in the field.
And yet this is "AI is world changing, look at how fast it can change code!"
> So while you still try to navigate through files, others already have features out.
Your argument is "it can also read code faster too" - but it doesn't have the same tacit knowledge within the codebase. Documentation and comments can be wrong sometimes. Names are poorly chosen
That's the thing about reviews: the implementor doesn't know what's needed for the feature, but the reviewer now needs to. The latter can't trust the former anymore.
/Explain is constantly wrong. /Plan is constantly over engineered. /Tests are constantly fragile
The only benefit AI has produced to existing codebase is now people care a lot more about getting documentation right and adding little snippet/how-tos called "skills" or whatever.