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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

We’re using Copilot at work to build reporting and automation tools. Nothing ground breaking, but very useful and tailored to our needs.

Frankly without AI assistance many of these tools just wouldn’t exist at all. We can build stuff in 6 weeks part time as a side project that would have taken at least 3 months full time, and therefore would not have been feasible. Then we can iterate on it at least 2-4 times faster than with hand coding.

So I’d love to have an extra few developers to just work on that stuff full time, but I don’t.

Whether that means our organisation spend on AI overall is a positive, I really can’t say. Quite possibly not, but my team are getting real benefits.

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I’m building reporting for my company and what you said mirrors my experience nearly 100%.

I’m a backend developer so I know what it takes to build a half decent reporting system. Writing all those queries, slice and dice charts and what not takes real time and effort. All that has been outsourced to Claude Code. I now focus on ensuring that the system is sound architecturally and that useful reports are being surfaced.

How are you dealing with the problem of making sure the reporting queries are correct?

My experience so far is that it's harder and slower for me to understand the genAI code than to write it myself.

Skipping thorough comprehension seems to be the popular choice in my workplace, but it's not one I can justify.

I make sure to understand the query to the fullest extent. I run explain plan to make sure no nasty things like full table scans are happening.

I guess just like any algorithm it’s easier to verify a solution than come up with one.

Nothing you wrote is connected in any way to the comment I wrote.

Have you read the code the AI produced? Do you understand all of it? Is it bloated? Would you be proud to say you wrote it?

I don't care how fast you created something. You didn't create it, the AI did, and you have no control over it, the AI does.

An engineer doesn't care about how fast something is made (at least, not as a primary metric engineering). A salesman cares about how fast they can push to market.

It's clear HN is a bastion of salesmen who happen to have "engineer" in their work title. But the mentality towards actual engineering makes it clear they are primarily salesmen.

> An engineer doesn't care about how fast something is made

That is absurd, these are tools only my own team use. Why would I not care whether I had them in a month or two, or fur many of these tools quite possibly never because we don’t have the spare capacity for how long it would take without AI?

>Why would I not care whether I had them in a month or two,

Because you're thinking like a salesman. What difference does a month make for a supportive tool without financial incentive? Why can't you justify a month of development without the idea of corporate breathing down you neck?

Just wait until AI companies stop subsidizing everything and you get the ac

I run local models. They are very good now (roughly 30 billion parameters).

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