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Comment by ddoolin | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don't know why nobody says it, but I just _don't want to._ I don't want to use it too much. It's not that I'm paranoid about it outputting bad code, but I just like doing almost all of it myself. It helps that I will do better than it 100% of the time but that isn't really why I don't use it. If it's going to replace all of us, fine. I guess you can chalk me up as not being into this hyper-productivity mindset. I just want to write code, period. I use it in the same manner as I see most comments saying; that is, as a fancy code complete, but I haven't found myself wishing "if only this could do all of it for me!"

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I'll provide a counter perspective: I love building things, but the minutae and implementation details of code are merely a means to an end for me, something that stands in between me and a feature/experiment. Agentic coding, especially when doing green field or prototyping takes the grunt work away and let's me build on a higher abstraction level. And I love it, though I can see that that's not for everyone.

Totally get it. And there has been work for me where I would've offloaded the details like that for sure. It might be that it's when I really feel like the project is my baby and I'm really enjoying that part of the process.

I think a good analogy is 3D printing. Certainly, it's faster from idea to prototype, but the actual act of carving wood or molding clay is itself a creative process that for some will never be replaced because we have cheap commodity 3D printers.

3D printing is an interesting analogy. When I got my printer I really truly thought I’d be printing all sorts of things to use around the house and gadgets and stuff.

It turns out that to be a good 3D printer, you need to be really good at CAD, and measuring stuff with Vernier calipers. That’s like prompt engineering.

Then there was the nozzle temperature, print errors, and other strange results — call those hallucinations.

Once I had designed something that I needed many instances of, it was great. But for one-offs, it was a lot of work. So it goes with AI.

I've found it helpful eliminating alot of boilerplate, especially for languages with static typing. e.g. if I declare something like class Foo { int a; int b; public: void Foo() } it will normally start autocompleting the initializer.

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