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Comment by s_tec | Hacker News Reader

It seems to be a general principle: If AI is better than you at something, you use it. If AI is worse than you, you don't.

Each time the frontier models get better, I see another wave of AI doubters suddenly become believers. People say things like, "AI couldn't code last year, but now I use it for everything!" Interesting. Now we know how that the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or whenever the frontier was when they flipped.

Meanwhile, the rest of us keep using AI as simple tools, like the person in the article. I wonder how long it will take before computers can program better than me, and I flip too.

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I’m not sure I agree with this but maybe I just lack self awareness?

There are large portions of my codebases that are essentially extremely verbose grunt work. My UI stack, IaC YAML, thin CRUD routes, etc.

I know what the code is supposed to look like when it’s done being written, but it’s going to take me for freaking ever to type it all out.

I can just few shot it now in an hour. Plan -> feedback loop -> build -> review loop.

Does it try to do weird stuff? Yeah. And then I’m just like “that’s weird, no, the components should be broken up like XYZ” and then it’s not weird anymore. Occasionally (1% of the time) I just do a quick refactor myself instead of trying to tell the agent harness what to do.

I can get something fairly close to the ballpark of what I would have done but in like single digit percentage of the time.

And the result is that I can spit out a bunch of purpose built tools (personal tools, internal tools for teams, etc.) that I never would have been able to justify building otherwise.

> the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or whenever the frontier was when they flipped

It's not about just skill. It's a matter of skill, time, and how critical the software you are writing is. There is a lot of software that is not critical. That is not close to security mechanisms. And that even if the code quality is not the highest, it does not matter.

Even if you are the best coder in the world, you would already become more productive by using ai. Things that in the past you might have not coded yourself but delegated to an intern, or things that you wouldn't even delegate to an intern because they are just too boring to do like some refactorings.

Like I had this project at work that was written without typescript strict mode turned on. When I turned it on, it had over 700 errors. I might be better than AI to fix every single of one these errors. But my time is worth more than that in doing other things. But I can, and did, ask AI to fix every single one. And then I reviewed it batches, and something that my team wanted to do for multiple years and nobody had the time for, finally got done.

"Now we know how that the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or whenever the frontier was when they flipped."

Well, once folks like Linus Torvalds concede, this doesn't carry much sting.

the sentiment "AI couldn't code last year, but now I use it for everything!" rings true for me... but I didn't flip cause AI is now better than me... I flipped cause now I am faster with AI than without it...

A year ago the AI output was so bad that getting it up to my standards took more than writing it myself from scratch. And nowadays it is faster for me to start with AI output and iterate from there to reach quality submission.

The ninety-ninety[0] rule was a thing talked about 40 years ago, long before anyone thought of AI coding. AI can nowadays make the first 90% of the task very fast and good enough. The last 10% is still the hardest part of coding by far.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule

If AI is not better than you at a task, but it's good enough and saves you time, it also makes sense to use it. Many of my uses of AI fall in this category.

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