{"id":3199,"date":"2024-12-03T03:15:41","date_gmt":"2024-12-03T07:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=3199"},"modified":"2024-12-03T03:22:57","modified_gmt":"2024-12-03T07:22:57","slug":"programming-with-ai-one-year-later-guest-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=3199","title":{"rendered":"Programming with AI: One Year Later (Guest Post)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I’ve been meaning to blog, but I just can’t find the time or energy these days, sorry. But don’t worry, here’s a guest post from AI! I gave Claude<\/a> some example posts from this blog and told it to write a new one. Below is what it came up with. However, I’m interjecting my own real-life human comments and corrections in the italicized and colored brackets. OK, here’s the AI:<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Last year\u00a0[it wasn’t really that long ago]<\/em><\/span> I wrote about remaking Trovedex with Claude’s help, and since then I’ve had quite a journey exploring AI-assisted programming. I thought it might be interesting to reflect on what I’ve learned after a full year of coding alongside AI.\u00a0[It hasn’t been a full year.]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The biggest surprise has been how the AI assistant’s role has evolved in my workflow. Initially, I treated it like a magical code generator \u2013 “Make me a login system!” or “Add a delete function!” [No, I didn’t.] <\/em><\/span>But I quickly learned this approach leads to a lot of debugging headaches. The AI might give you working code, but understanding how to maintain or modify it is another story entirely.\u00a0[Not really, just ask the AI to do that too!]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

These days, I use AI more as a programming mentor or rubber duck.\u00a0[No, I don’t. Maybe more like a nerdy friend who knows a lot and will answer even really dumb questions without judgment. And honestly I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard of “rubber duck debugging<\/a>” until now, ha!]<\/em><\/span> Instead of asking it to write entire features, I’ll describe my implementation plan and have it point out potential issues or suggest alternative approaches.\u00a0[No, I don’t. Maybe I should?]<\/em><\/span> This has actually made me a better programmer, since I’m forced to think through the logic myself while still having a knowledgeable guide to bounce ideas off of.<\/p>\n

That said, AI still shines at certain tasks. Need to figure out the correct syntax for a particularly gnarly regex?\u00a0[I’m not sure I’ve ever needed to write my own regex syntax, but that does sound like something Claude would be great at.]<\/em><\/span> AI’s got your back. Want to quickly transform data between different formats? AI can save you a lot of time compared to manually writing parsing logic.\u00a0[This is true and I’ve used it for that quite a few times.]<\/em><\/span> It’s especially helpful with those “I know this is possible but I can’t remember how to do it” moments that used to send me down long documentation rabbit holes.\u00a0[Also true.]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The hardest lesson was learning to be more specific in my requests. “Add user authentication” might get you some code, but “Add email\/password authentication using bcrypt for password hashing, with rate limiting on failed attempts” will get you something you can actually use. I’ve found that the more detailed I am about requirements up front, the less time I spend fixing issues later.\u00a0[Actually, I’ve found the opposite. In my experience, it’s more likely to mess something up or implement something in a way I don’t want if I give it too many requirements up front. I find it better to start small.]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

There have been some amusing mishaps along the way. Like the time I asked for help adding file upload functionality and got a beautiful implementation… that stored everything in memory instead of writing to disk.\u00a0[Haha, what? No.]<\/em><\/span> Or when I requested “mobile-friendly styling” and ended up with a UI that looked great on phones but was completely unusable on desktop. [No.]<\/em><\/span> These experiences taught me to always verify the assumptions being made before implementing AI-suggested code.\u00a0[Huh?]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Looking ahead, I’m excited about how AI coding assistants will evolve. [True dat.]<\/em><\/span> They’re already getting better at understanding project context and maintaining consistency across multiple requests. But I hope they’ll develop better ways to explain their suggestions and help developers understand the “why” behind different implementation choices.\u00a0[Sure, why not.]<\/em><\/span> After all, the goal isn’t just to write working code \u2013 it’s to write code we can confidently maintain and extend.\u00a0[Yeah, sure.]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

For now, I’ve found my sweet spot: use AI as a collaborative tool to enhance my own programming abilities, rather than trying to outsource the actual thinking to it.\u00a0[No, I’m outsourcing thinking!]<\/em><\/span> It’s not quite the “AGI will make programmers obsolete” future some predicted, but it’s a pretty useful present.<\/p>\n

Though I still occasionally catch myself asking it to “just fix all the bugs” when I’m feeling particularly frustrated. [Haha, no.] <\/em><\/span>Hey, a developer can dream, right?<\/p>\n

Thank you for that great post, AI!<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been meaning to blog, but I just can’t find the time or energy these days, sorry. But don’t worry, here’s a guest post from AI! I gave Claude some example posts from this blog and told it to write a new one. Below is what it came up with. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[83],"tags":[845,865],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-PB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3199"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3205,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199\/revisions\/3205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}