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’ve had good experiences using it, but with the caveat that only Gemini Pro 2.5 has been at all useful, and only for “spot” tasks.

I typically use it to whip up a CLI tool or script to do something that would have been too fiddly otherwise.

While sitting in a Teams meeting I got it to use the Roslyn compiler SDK in a CLI tool that stripped a very repetitive pattern from a code base. Some OCD person had repeated the same nonsense many thousands of times. The tool cleaned up the mess in seconds.

>>jiggaw+Ms
>Some OCD person had repeated the same nonsense many thousands of times. The tool cleaned up the mess in seconds.

What were they doing?

>>_345+JL
try { ... } catch (Exception e) { throw e; }

That does nothing except add visual noise.

It's like a magic incantation to make the errors go away (it doesn't actually), probably by someone used to Visual Basic's "ON ERROR RESUME NEXT" or some such.