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Comment by krackers | Hacker News Reader

What level is copy pasting snippets into the chatgpt window? Grug brained level 0? I sort of prefer it that way (using it as an amped up stackoverflow) since it forces me to decompose things in terms of natural boundaries (manual context management as it were) and allows me to think in terms of "what properties do I need this function to have" rather than just letting copilot take the wheel and glob the entire project in the context window.

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I still do this too for tough projects in languages I know. Too many times getting burned thinking 'wow it one shot that!' only to end up debugging later.

I let agents run wild on frontend JS because I don't know it well and trust them (and an output I can look at).

IMO, the front end results are REALLY hit and miss... I mostly use it to scaffold if I don't really care because the full UI is just there to test a component, or I do a fair amount of the work mixed. I wish it was better at working with some of the UI component libraries with mixed environments. Describing complex UX and having it work right are really not there yet.

Yes, I think what I left off my sentence was that I trust AI on frontend more than myself. Backend and data processing where I know more, I can't handle it's constant hallucinations. I also feel like hallucinations in data pipelines are way more problematic for me. They take a long time to "fix" and can be quite easy to miss, imagine a mean of a mean or something that is 'mostly' right (thus harder to catch) but factually incorrect.

1.8: chat ide the slow way :)

This is also where I do most of my AI use. It’s the safe spot where I’m not going to accidentally send proprietary info to an unknown number of eyeballs(computer or human).

It’s also just cumbersome enough that I’m not relying on it too much and stunting my personal ability growth. But I’m way more novice than most on here.

I've found it's easy enough to have AI scaffold a working demo environment around a single component/class that I'm actually working on, then I can copy the working class/component into my "real" application. I'm in a pretty locked down environment, so using a separate computer and letting the AI scaffold everything around what I'm working on is pretty damned nice, since I cannot use it in the environment or on the project itself.

For personal projects, I'm able to use it a bit more directly, but would say I'm using it around 5/6 level as defined here... I've leaned on it a bit for planning stages, which helps a lot... not sure I trust swarms of automated agents, though it's pretty much the only way you're going to use the $200 level on Claude effectively... I've hit the limits on the $100 only twice in the past month, I downgraded after my first month. And even then, it just forced me to take a break for an hour.

I think you bring up a good point, it falls under Chat IDE, but its the "lowest" tier if you will. Nothing wrong with it, a LOT of us started this way.

I find the CLI agents a decent middle ground between the extremes you describe. There’s a reason they’ve gained some popularity.

I do this too with the chatgpt mac app. It has a "pop out" feature it binds to option + space then i just ask away.

anything, if it brings the results

Your techinque doesn't keep the kool-aid flowing. Shut up. /s

The more I try to use these tools to push up this "ladder" the more it becomes clear the technology is a no more than a 10x better Google search.

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