[koliber]

The article is gone, but going off the title here...

If the easy stuff takes up 90% of the time, and the hard stuff 10%, then AI can be helpful. Personally, I can do "the easy stuff" with AI about 3-5x faster. So now I have a lot more free time for the hard stuff.

I don't let the AI near the hard stuff as it often gets confused and I don't save much time. I might still use it as a thought partner, but don't give it access to make changes.

Example: this morning I combined two codebases into one. I wrote both of them and had a good understanding of how everything worked. I had an opinion about some things I wanted to change while combining the two projects. I also had a strong opinion about how I wanted the two projects to interact with each other. I think it would have taken me about 2 workdays to get this done. Instead, with AI tooling, I got it done in 3 or so hours. I fired up another LLM to do the code review, and it found some stuff both I and the other LLM missed. This was valuable as a person developing things solo.

It freed up time for me to post on HN. :)

[causal]

Helpful, absolutely, but only if you're solving the right problem. Solving the wrong problem with AI is doubly harmful because it will almost always give you something that runs, but now you are on a path that takes a lot of willpower to give up.