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Comment by cmdtab | Hacker News Reader

Are they? I find Agentic mode on most editors barely useful. Autocomplete and inline editing is great though.

To use these tools properly, you need to know how to build the same thing precisely.

Nah you don't to know to build the same thing precisely. Just the other day I wanted to write a vanilla JS component that could let you select a picture from something like a carousel and be able to blow up the selected picture when clicked. I know JS / HTML but am not used to working with vanilla JS. Copilot didn't write it all by itself but it did teach me things I didn't know like making a custom tag in vanilla JS by extending an HTMLElement.

The code isn't the most readable because I don't need it to be however if you make me write it from scratch in an interview style setting I'd have trouble doing it. If I read the code I can follow it and it makes sense + it's an easy component to manually test. So.. no, I don't need to know how to precisely build the same thing.

And before you worry that I'm committing code I can't build from scratch.. This is a simple component for a 5 page landing page build with astro where I'm the "main" dev ( wrote like 80% of the code). The web-page won't even need maintainance once it's deployed

It’s not a common use case though, dipping into an unfamiliar tech stack only to dip out after committing the code. Typically, when you learn a new stack (eg. for a job), you’ll be living in it for at least a few months, and at that point, you’d be better served by perusing the docs and getting deeply familiar with the API.

The copilots get you going quick at the expense of your learning, which is great for one-offs, but not lasting work quality.

I believe if you spend months / hundreds of hours using any framework / tool you will eventually read so much of it that it's easy to get "deeply familiar" and even then.. it's often times faster to have an LLM write 80-90% of the code for you and just refine / finish it.

> Copilot didn't write it all by itself but it did teach me things I didn't know like making a custom tag in vanilla JS by extending an HTMLElement.

> This is a simple component for a 5 page landing page build with astro

You're already in the over-engineered section there.

Not that over engineered, here's the code :

https://gist.github.com/lazarcf/c80ae6f9362aaf3aa92e21e3a0dd...

you can see the component (the "image gallery") here : https://pixico.roware.ro/apa-distilata/

But that still doesn't exclude copilot, which is the most intuitive and genuinely useful version of ai after chatgpt itself.

I don’t deny it.

I used claude + gemini to whip out a rewrite of a show HN project in less than half an hour to deployment yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43071381

But this sort of work is fairly low value and boilerplate-y.

I think autocomplete alone would be enough to make coding a killer app for AI.

I agree the tools are overhyped for allowing non-developers to write code. It’s not (today) a replacement for a dev agency that takes a set of requirements and runs with it, it’s a replacement for a junior developer who you need to micromanage a bit. But that’s still a boon to productivity!

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