[l33tman]

I can see why you would chime in to say that in your experience you don't get any value out of it, but to chime in to say that the millions of people who do are "inexperienced" is pretty offensive. In the hands of skilled developers these tools are a complete gamechanger.

[bluefirebrand]

> In the hands of skilled developers these tools are a complete gamechanger.

This is where both sides are basically just accusing the other of not getting it

The AI coders are saying "These tools are a gamechanger in the hands of skilled developers" implying if you aren't getting gamechanging results you aren't skilled

The non-AI coders are basically saying the same thing back to them. "You only think this is gamechanging because you aren't skilled enough to realize how bad they are"

Personally, I've tried to use LLMs for coding quite a bit and found them really lacking

If people are finding a lot of success with them, either I'm using them wrong and other people have figured out a better way, or their standards are way, way lower than mine, or maybe they wind up spending just as long fixing the broken code as it would take me to write it

[l33tman]

Sorry for the late reply here, but let me develop a bit more what I meant. I have a long and vast programming experience, but am also an entrepreneur with many projects that I switch between. I could have focused full-time on, say, React Native, and then I could churn out my monkey code all day long. But I don't spend full-time on RN and then suddenly 12 months passed where I didn't write any at all so my specific knowledge of that domain is always a bit behind.

But something like o4-mini-high is a domain expert in all versions of React, Redux, RN etc. and knows every internal SDK change over the last 10 years (or goes out and reads the changelogs and code itself). Countless times I've had it port old code to new and it figures it out 100%. It formulates good modern canonical ways to solve stuff. It knows all the stupid tricks you have to do to get RN stuff run well on Android and iOS that I would never be able to keep in my head unless I work full-time on that. And it does the eye-watering boring styling code that nobody likes, you can even just upload a screenshot of another app or a sketch on paper and it will correctly output code for the style in a matter of seconds.

The end result is that I can, without investing a full-time of keeping myself current, do a professional RN dual Android/iOS app development cycle because I have the general skill to understand what to ask it and how to merge its output properly. This leaves me time to do other stuff and generally be more productive.

My guess is that many who gave up on the AI coding stuff tried the bad tools like the default chatgpt 4o-mini (or tried the tools available 2 years ago) and got a bad experience. There are light-years of differences between these and something like o4-mini-high.

TL;DR: use the correct model for the job, and it doesn't really need to be an argument - if it makes you more productive it's a good tool, if it doesn't, nobody is forcing you to use it. But I don't think you should imply that everybody who likes these tools are stupid.

[cjaybo]

Are these “millions of people” in the room with us now?

[mattmanser]

Where are these millions, and where is their output? You're in an echo chamber mate, there aren't millions of people using AI to do significant amounts of work.

Indie hackers just did an article on 4 vibe coded Startups and they all seem like a joke.

And they could only find 4!

I didn't look at them all, but the flight sim is spectacularly bad, the revenue numbers obviously unsustainable and it looks like something moderately motivated school children might have made for a school project in a week.

[l33tman]

It's sort of a slow-motion avalanche. For example the price of outsourcing app development is really coming down now because it's one of the areas where the AI coding tools really excel. It's a lot of boiler-plate style code, pretty canonical stuff, no rocket science and, to be frank, not really that much that has to be clever. You can give the tools a screenshot of an UI and it gladly outputs correct styling code for it in seconds. It supercharges already skilled developers. And if you needed 6 in-house app developers before, now you only need 2. It isn't an immediate effect, but it is an effect that is slowly going to run though the business.

The question is, are companies going to use fewer people to do the same, or the same amount of people and just create better products?

For prototyping new ideas this is also an invaluable turbocharge for startups who can't really afford to have hordes of developers trying out alternative solutions.

[codr7]

Why?

What does it add that you couldn't have written yourself faster if you're so skilled?

[SpaceNugget]

> if you're so skilled?

I think this is needlessly snarky and also presupposes something that wasn't said. No one said it can write something that the developer couldn't write (faster) themselves. Tab complete and refactoring tools in your IDE/editor don't do anything you can't write on your own but it's hard to argue that they don't increase productivity.

I have only used cline for about a week, but honestly I find it useful in a (imo badly organized) codebase at work as an auto-grepper. Just asking it "Where does the check for X take place" where there's tons of inheritance and auto-constructor magic in a codebase I rarely touch, it does a pretty good job of showing me the flow of logic.