zlacker

I disagree. I think this notion comes from the idea that creating software is about coding. Automating/improving coding => you have software at the end.

This might be how one looks at it in the beginning, when having no experience or no idea about coding. With time one will realize it's more about creating the correct mental model of the problem at hand, rather than the activity of coding itself.

Once this realized, AI can't "save" you days of work, as coding is the least time consuming part of creating software.

>>mdavid+(OP)
The actual most time-consuming parts of creating software (I think) is reading documentation for the APIs and libraries you're using. Probably the biggest productivity boost I get from my coding assistant is attributable to that.

e.g: MUI, typescript:

   // make the checkbox label appear before the checkbox.

Tab. Done. Delete the comment.

vs. about 2 minutes wading through the perfectly excellent but very verbose online documentation to find that I need to set the "labelPlacement" attribute to "start".

Or the tedious minutia that I am perfectly capable of doing, but it's time consuming and error-prone:

    // execute a SQL update

Tab tab tab tab .... Done, with all bindings and fields done, based on the structure that's passed as a parameter to the method, and the tables and fieldnames that were created in source code above the current line. (love that one).

>>rerdav+D1
what are you using for this? one thing I can't wrap my head around is how anyone's idea of fun is poking at an LLM until it generates something possibly passable and then figuring what the hell it did and why, but this sounds like something i'd actually use.

>>andybp+O9
vscode?

>>calvin+Jc
vscode comes with that out of the box?

>>andybp+nf
pretty much, the plugin is called Copilot. click a button and install it

>>rerdav+D1
Yes, I currently lean skeptical but agentic LLMs excel at this sort of task. I had a great use just yesterday.

I have an older Mediawiki install that's been overrun by spam. It's on a server I have root access on. With Claude, I was able to rapidly get some Python scripts that work against the wiki database directly and can clean spam in various ways, by article ID, title regex, certain other patterns. Then I wanted to delete all spam users - defined here as users registered after a certain date whose only edit is to their own user page - and Claude made a script for that very quickly. It even deployed with scp when I told it where to.

Looking at the SQL that ended up in the code, there's non-obvious things such as user pages being pages where page_namespace = 2. The query involves the user, page, actor and revision tables. I checked afterwards, MediaWiki has good documentation for its database tables. Sure, I could have written the SQL myself based on that documentation, but certainly not have the query wrapped in Python and ready to run in under a minute.

>>calvin+ni
that's a whole different piece of software that it doesn't come with out of the box lol.

Copilot was what i was looking for, thank you. I have it installed in Webstorm already but I haven't messed with this side of it.

>>andybp+Ll
idk i click 'copilot' and it adds it. it took maybe 2 minutes.

>>calvin+5v
And if you don't add it, VSCode nags you incessantly until you do. :-P

>>andybp+O9
Yes. Vscode/Copilot/Claude Sonnet 4. The choice of AI may make a significant difference. It used to. The GPT AIs, particularly, were useless. I haven't tried GPT 4.1 yet.

>>mdavid+(OP)
I think for some folks their job really is just about coding. For me that was rarely true. I've written very little code in my career. Mostly design work, analyzing broken code, making targeted fixes...

I think these days coding is 20% of my job, maybe less. But HN is a diverse audience. You have the full range of web programmers and data scientists all the way to systems engineers and people writing for bare metal. Someone cranking out one-off Python and Javascript is going to have a different opinion on AI coding vs a C/C++ systems engineer and they're going to yell at each other in comments until they realize they don't have the same job, the same goals or the same experiences.