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.
A novice with no idea could blunder through but get lost quickly.
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.
It’s as bad as untangling the last guy’s typescript spaghetti. He quit, so I can’t ask him about it either.
Most of the time, programmers don’t record all of the assumptions and design decisions in code or documentation.
most of the time there’s an old ticket in the work tracker.
I’d bet those tickets contain at least as much info as any prompt.