By the end of the day (10-ish hours) all I got to show was about 3 screens with few buttons each… Something a normal React developer probably would’ve spat out in about a hour. On top of that, I can’t remember shit about the application itself - and I can practically recite most of the codebases that I’ve spent time on.
And here I read about people casually generating and erasing 20k lines of code. I dunno, I guess I am either holding it wrong, or most of the time developing software isn’t spent vomiting code.
I've also been writing code for a long time, did the 6502 assembly thing way back when, and lots since then. For this current project I wanted to build a web app with a frontend in Angular and a backend in Java 21 relying on javalin.io for the services layer. It had a few other integrations as well - into a remote service requiring OAuth and also into subtlecrypto. After less than 10 hours I had a fully functioning MVP that was far superior to anything I could have created without an assistant. It gave me build files, even a test skeleton. Restyling the UI or reflowing the UX to include confirmations, additional steps, modals, ... was really easy. I just had to type it, and those changes would get made. It felt like I was "director of development" for a day.
I used Aider, plugged into Gemini 2.5.
Was it productivity boost for me - yeah, cause I know mostly shit about React. But as an end result it just felt very underwhelming. Discussing it today with my brother (who lives and breathes FE) it apparently was.
I guess I was just expecting... I dunno... more - people are claiming nX productivity boosts, and considering how the UI is mostly boilerplate...
I think I was expecting that it will turn me into a FE developer and it will feel as natural and smooth as usual when I am in my element.
It didn’t. And the results weren’t what you would get from a real FE dev. And it felt unsatisfactory, stressful and ultimately hollow.
I guess _for me_ it would be fine for a throw away MVP - something that I don’t want to put my heart into.
If a tool does not consistently produce results, you HAVE to take that at face value. You can’t just remove the numbers bringing down the average and say you have reached 95% success. When you see polar opposite experiences from so many people, the only reasonable takeaway is “so it’s unpredictable, very hard to use, or both.”
of course not everything is how i'd truly like it, but it's 80% there.
before LLMs I wouldn't have bothered with starting. I knew exactly what I want to do, but it'd take me a couple days to proof the idea in Python and then translating it to web ui in TS? forget it