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Comment by OccamsMirror | Hacker News Reader

I do this a lot for React components. I could type it all out myself but that would essentially be busy work. Nothing is being solved by the AI other than me having to do less typing.

Once you start hoping the AI is going to solve your problems that is when you're asking for trouble.

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How is describing it to the AI in detail any faster than writing it yourself, or copy + pasting from a template?

If you use something like Copilot a lot of the time you don’t explicitly have to tell it to do anything, you just start typing the signature and it autocompletes it. In my use I almost never use the conversation feature of Copilot, I’m just typing e.g. function signatures or the start of a for loop or switch statement etc.

Because you have to first find the template, possibly not even knowing whether one exists. Turns out three exist: which one do you pick? Okay that one. What do we have to change in it? Oops something doesn't work: it seems to be out of date. Whom do I ask? AI combines the search for information with massaging it into the right form. Or sometimes just almost the right form, which is good enough. You just talk to it and it'll make a template for anything. Page templates with cascading style sheet? OK. Kernel driver? OK. Dockerfile? No problem. You literally you don't have to leave the same chat window.

tbh I can see even some benefit from just the need to think ahead and put it into 'regular' words, and then not having to type all the non-ergonomic markup-soup that isn't entirely avoidable.

EDIT: On the least-spectacular end of things, I guess it would just be a template with enough magic to not need the inevitable adjustments.

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