Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what's on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information
Ok....

Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don't have to keep track of everything. No... Thats all wrong... Yeah I know it's complicated, that's why I wanted it refactored. No you can't do that... fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.

Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.

If you give it the right task, it’s super helpful. But you can’t ask it to write anything with any real complexity.

Where it thrives is being given pseudo code for something simple and asking for the specific language code for it. Or translate between two languages.

That’s… about it. And even that it fucks up.

So you treated it like a junior developer and did a thorough review of its output.

I think the only disagreement here is on the semantics.

Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what's on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information
Ok....

Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don't have to keep track of everything. No... Thats all wrong... Yeah I know it's complicated, that's why I wanted it refactored. No you can't do that... fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.

Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.

Same. I also like it for basic research and helping with syntax for obscure SQL queries, but coding hasn't worked very well. One of my less technical coworkers tried to vibe code something and it didn't work well. Maybe it would do okay on something routine, but generally speaking it would probably be better to use a library for that anyway.

I like the saying that LLMs are good at stuff you don’t know. That’s about it.

Fun how the article concludes that AI tools are still good anyway, actually.

This AI hype is a sickness

That's still not actually knowing anything. It's just temporarily adding more context to its model.

And it's always very temporary. I have a yarn project I'm working on right now, and I used Copilot in VS Code in agent mode to scaffold it as an experiment. One of the refinements I included in the prompt file to build it is reminders throughout for things it wouldn't need reminding of if it actually "knew" the repo.

• I had to constantly remind it that it's a yarn project, otherwise it would inevitably start trying to use NPM as it progressed through the prompt.
• For some reason, when it's in agent mode and it makes a mistake, it wants to delete files it has fucked up, which always requires human intervention, so I peppered the prompt with reminders not to do that, but to blank the file out and start over in it.
• The frontend of the project uses TailwindCSS. It could not remember not to keep trying to downgrade its configuration to an earlier version instead of using the current one, so I wrote the entire configuration for it by hand and inserted it into the prompt file. If I let it try to build the configuration itself, it would inevitably fuck it up and then say something completely false, like, "The version of TailwindCSS we're using is still in beta, let me try downgrading to the previous version."

I'm not saying it wasn't helpful. It probably cut 20% off the time it would have taken me to scaffold out the app myself, which is significant. But it certainly couldn't keep track of the context provided by the repo, even though it was creating that context itself.

Working with Copilot is like working with a very talented and fast junior developer whose methamphetamine addiction has been getting the better of it lately, and who has early onset dementia or a brain injury that destroyed their short-term memory.

Most ides do the boring stuff with templates and code generation for like a decade so that's not so helpful to me either but if it works for you.

This was the case a year or two ago but now if you have an MCP server for docs and your project and goals outlined properly it's pretty good.

They're also bad at that though, because if you don't know that stuff then you don't know if what it's telling you is right or wrong.

I have limited AI experience, but so far that's what it means to me as well: helpful in very limited circumstances.

Mostly, I find it useful for "speaking new languages" - if I try to use AI to "help" with the stuff I have been doing daily for the past 20 years? Yeah, it's just slowing me down.