One of my more effective uses of AI is for rubber duck debugging. I tell it what I want the code to do, iterate over what it comes back with, adjust the code ( 'now rewrite foo() so 'bar' is is passed in'). What comes back isn't necessarily perfect and I don't blindly copy and paste but that isn't the point. At the end I've worked out what I want to do and some of the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.
I had some results last week that I felt were really good - on a very tricky problem, using AI (Claude 3.7) helped me churn through 4 or 5 approaches that didn't work, and eventually, working in tandem, "we" found an approach that would. Then the AI helped write a basic implementation of the good approach which I was able to use as a reference for my own "real" implementation.
No, the AI would not have solved the problem without me in the loop, but it sped up the cycle of iteration and made something that might have taken me 2 weeks take just a few days.
It would be pretty tough to convince me that's not spectacularly useful.
I've tried it, and ended up with the completely wrong approach, which didn't take that long to figure out, but still wasted a good half hour. Would have been horrible if i didn't know what I was doing though.
> some of the tedious boiler-plate code is taken care of.
For me that is the bit which stands out, I'm switching languages to TypeScript and JSX right now.
Getting copilot (+ claude) to do things is much easier when I know exactly what I want, but not here and not in this framework (PHP is more my speed). There's a bunch of stuff you're supposed to know as boilerplate and there's no time to learn it all.
I am not learning a thing though, other than how to steer the AI. I don't even know what SCSS is, but I can get by.
The UI hires are in the pipeline & they should throwaway everything I build, but right now it feels like I'm making something they should imitate in functionality/style better than a document, but not in cleanliness.
