Technology

Final victory for them is to lobotomise all your higher order thinking skills. Your just a body to lie there and be fucked.

Sounds fun! Any plans to release something on itch/steam?

Reading this then your reply made me smile.

One trap is to trust it as a means to accomodate unreasonable schedule pressure.

Sure - this thing looks like it works, hell it probably does work, do you really want to launch a probably works product? If your management does - consider shopping around for a raise/promotion under different management. It's never easy to move, but if you're moving on your own terms you can often make the effort worth your while.

Another note: I find the LLMs to be wickedly detail oriented code reviewers - like, they'll point out the tiniest little discrepancies and edge cases, and what they (Claude, at least) report is usually "real." Now, that doesn't mean they find everything that's wrong on the first pass, but once you've addressed everything in the first pass, you can make a second pass, and a third, etc. each time with different focus: documentation complete? implementation functions as intended? technical debt? test coverage? security issues? issues with maintainability? documentation in sync with implementation? specific aspect of implementation functions as intended? etc. - if you address all the findings after each review cycle (and addressing a finding can be clarifying a requirement to relax about certain unimportant aspects...) eventually the findings slow down / only find ridiculously unimportant things.

We already invented a tool for that, it's called a library.

Usually, the LLM's response will be incomplete or partially incorrect, but it's often good enough to get un-stuck.

Usually it will have some keywords you can look up, some bits that bring up further questions for you to answer (and for which the LLM should also not be your first choice).

Not really, google results have been just that bad for the last 10 years. I can spend 10min looking for a piece of documentation on something and not find it. Or I can prompt an internet-connected AI and have it spit out links to relevant docs. It's gotten THAT bad.

If it's a tool you can use yourself and it makes you more efficient, you don't need a study to recognize its efficiency.

If you're a software engineer, just try it yourself. Your own experience is the best proof you can find to judge if a tool is useful to you or not.

In this case the evidence is literally first-hand experience. There is nothing that will change my mind on this because it's my direct personal experience from actual use.

I honestly don't care what marketing says, and if other people have different experiences then that's just them. In my personal actual real-world experience I found that they let me get tons more done and their quality of work is perfectly fine as long as you're using the right tools and giving them the right instructions.

The article says that developers are disagreeing with that in situations where they are "forced" to use AI, and that's fair, it doesn't make sense to force a tool to be used for something it's not good at. They might be using it wrong. I use it whenever it's better than not using it, and that ends up being quite often in my workflow.

I kind of agree it’s a multiplier.

It's definitely a force multiplier, it's just that the factor after the X can be less than 1.0.

Have you tried giving it coding standards and other such preferences about how you like your code to be organized? I've found that coding agents can be quite adaptable to various styles, you can put stuff like "try to keep functions less than 100 lines long" or "include assertions validating all function inputs" into your coding agent's general instructions and it'll follow them.

For me, one of the things that's a huge fundamental improvement is telling the agent to create and run unit tests for everything. That way when it does mess up accidentally it can immediately catch the problem and usually fixes it in the same session without further intervention. Unit tests used to be more trouble than they were worth most of the time, now I love them.