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Comment by solaris2007 | Hacker News Reader

solaris2007

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"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes"

That's a very good point.

The OP is "quite weak at JavaScript" but their AI "vastly improved the quality of the extension." Like, my dude, how can you tell? Does the code look polished, it looks smart, the tests pass, or what?! How can you come forward and be the judge of something you're not an expert in?

I mean, at this point, I'm beginning to be skeptical about half the content posted online. Anybody can come up with any damn story and make it credible. Just the other day I found out about reddit engagement bots, and I've seen some in the wild myself.

I'm waiting for the internet bubble to burst already so we can all go back to our normal lives, where we've left it 20 years or so ago.

How can I tell? Yes, the code looks quite a bit more polished. I'm not expert enough in JS to, e.g., know the cleanest method to inspect and modify the DOM, but I can look at code that does and tell if the approach it's using is sensible or not. Surely you've had the experience of a domain where you can evaluate the quality of the end product, even if you can't create a high quality product on your own?

Concretely in this case, I'd implemented an approach that used jQuery listeners to listen for DOM updates. Antigravity rewrote it to an approach that avoided the jQuery dependency entirely, using native MutationObservers. The code is sensible. It's noticeably more performant than the approach I crafted by hand. Antigravity allowed me to easily add a number of new features to my extension that I would have found tricky to add by hand. The UI looks quite a bit nicer than before I used AI tools to update it. Would these enhancements have been hard for an expert in Chrome extensions to implement? Probably not. But I'm not that expert, and AI coding tools allowed me to do them.

That was not actually the main thrust of my post, it's just a nice side benefit I've experienced. In the main domain where I use coding tools, at work, I work in languages where I'm quite a bit more proficient (Golang/Python). There, the quality of code that the AI tools generate is not better than I write by hand. The initial revisions are generally worse. But they're quite a bit faster than I write by hand, and if I iterate with the coding tools I can get to implementations that are as good as I would write by hand, and a lot faster.

I understand the bias towards skepticism. I have no particular dog in this fight, it doesn't bother me if you don't use these tools. But OP asked for peoples' experiences so I thought I'd share.

JavaScript isn't the only programming language around. I'm not the strongest around with JS either but I can figure it out as necessary -- knowing C/C++/Java/whatever means you can still grok "this looks better than that" for most cases.

Yep. I have plenty of experience in languages that use C-style syntax, enough to easily understand code written in other languages that occur nearby in the syntactical family tree. I'm not steeped in JS enough to know the weird gotchas of the type system, or know the standard library well, etc. But I can read the code fine.

If I'd asked an AI coding tool to write something up for me in Haskell, I would have no idea if it had done a good job.

I don't think so. Imagine it was vice versa, someone saying they knew JS and were weak at C/C++/Java.

This doesn't sound right to me. If someone who were expert in JS looked at a relatively simple C++ program, I think they could reasonably well tell if the quality of code were good or not. They wouldn't be able to, e.g., detect bugs from default value initialization, memory leaks, etc. But so long as the code didn't do any crazy templating stuff they'd be able to analyze it at a rough "this algorithm seems sensible" level".

Analogously I'm quite proficient at C++, and I can easily look at a small JS program and tell if it's sensible. But if you give me even a simple React app I wouldn't be able to understand it without a lot of effort (I've had this experience...)

I agree with your broad point: C/C++/Java are certainly much more complex than JS and I would expect someone expert in them to have a much easier time picking up JS than the reverse. But given very high overlap in syntax between the four I think anyone who's proficient in one can grok the basics of the others.

I've never had a job where writing Javascript has been the primary language (so far it's been C++/Java/Golang). The JS Chrome Extension is a fun side project. Using Augment in a work context, I'm primarily using it for Golang and Python code, languages where I'm pretty proficient but AI tools give me a decent efficiency boost.

I understand the emotional satisfaction of letting loose an easy snarky comment, of course, but you missed the mark I'm afraid.

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