I’ve seen a few articles saying that instead of hating AI, the real quiet programmers young and old are loving it and have a renewed sense of purpose coding with llm helpers (this article was also hating on ed zitiron, which makes sense why it would).
Is this total bullshit? I have to admit, even though it makes me ill, I’ve used llms a few times to help me learn simple code syntax quickly (im and absolute noob who’s wanted my whole life to learn code but cant grasp it very well). But yes, a lot of time its wrong.
I used supermaven (copilot competitor) for awhile and it was sorta ok sometimes, but I turned it off when I realized I’d forgotten how to write a switch case. Autocomplete doesn’t know your intent, so it introduces a lot of noise that I prefer to do without.
I’ve been trying out Claude code for a couple months and I think I like it ok for some tasks. If you use it to do your typing rather than your thinking, then it’s pretty decent. Give it small tasks with detailed instructions and you generally get good results. The problem is that it’s most tempting to use when you don’t have the problem figured out and you’re hoping it will, but thats when it gives you overconvoluted garbage. About half the time this garbage is more useful than starting from scratch.
It’s good at sorting out boilerplate and following explicit patterns that you’ve already created. It’s not good at inventing and implementing those patterns in the first place.