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Comment by gooosle | Hacker News Reader

You planned and wrote a feature yesterday that would have taken yourself 2 whole days? And you already got it reviewed and deployed it and know that 'it works flawlessly'?

....

That reminds me of when my manager (a very smart, very AI-bullish ex-IC) told us about how he used AI to implement a feature over the weekend and all it took him was 20 mins. It sounds absolutely magical to me and I make a note to use AI more. I then go to review the PR, and of course there are multiple bugs and unintended side-effects in the code. Oh and there are like 8 commits spread over a 60 hour window... I manually spin up a PR which accomplishes the same thing properly... takes me 30mins.

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This sounds like a positive outcome? A manager built a proof-of-concept of a feature that clearly laid out and fulfilled the basic requirements, and an engineer took 30 mins to rewrite it once it's been specified.

How long does it typically take to spec something out? I'd say more than 20 mins, and typical artifacts to define requirements are much lossier than actual code - even if that code is buggy and sloppy.

Not at all.

What was claimed was that a complete feature was built in record time with AI. What was actually built was a useless and buggy piece of junk that wasted reviewer time and was ultimately thrown out, and it took far longer than claimed.

There were no useful insights or speed up coming out of this code. I implemented the feature from scratch in 30 mins - because it was actually quite easy to do manually (<100 loc).

This seems more of a process problem than a tooling problem. Without specs on what the feature was, I would be inclined to say you manager had a lapse in his "smartness", there was a lot of miscommunication on what was happening, or you are being overly critical over something that "wasted 30 minutes of your time". Additionally, this seems like a crapshoot work environment...there seems to be resentment for the manager using AI to build a feature that had bugs/didn't work...whereas ideally you two sit down and talk it out and see how it could be managed better next time?

Not at all, there is no resentment - that's your imagination. There is nothing about what I described that indicates that it's a bad work environment - I quite like it.

You're bringing up various completely unrelated factors seemingly as a way of avoiding the obvious point of the anecdotal story - that AI for coding just isn't that great (yet).

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