zlacker

>>laurex+(OP)
I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up.

Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it.

But any time I've tried to get AI services to help with bugfixing/feature development on a large, complex, potentially multi-language codebase, it's useless.

And those tasks are the ones that actually take up the majority of my time. On the occasion that I'm spinning a new thing up quickly, I don't really need an AI to do it for me -- I mean, that's the easy part!

Is there something I'm missing? Am I just not using it right? I keep seeing people talk about how addictive it is, how the productivity boost is insane, how all their code is now written by AI and then audited, and I just don't see how that's possible outside of really simple rote programming.

>>brooke+Hm
I appreciate you voicing your feelings here. My previous employer requested we try AI tooling for productivity purposes, and I was finding myself in similar scenarios to what you mention. The parts that would have benefitted from a productivity gain weren’t seeing any improvement, while the areas that saw a speedup weren’t terribly mission-critical.

The one thing I really appreciated though was the AI’s ability to do a “fuzzy” search in occasional moments of need. Or, for example, sometimes the colloquial term for a feature didn’t match naming conventions in source code. The AI could find associations in commit messages and review information to save me time rummaging through git-blame. Like I said though, that sort of problem wasn’t necessarily a bottleneck and could often be solved much more cheaply by asking around coworker on Slack.