skevyVibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature
Tip: I very often use AI for inspiration. In this case, I ended up keeping a lot (not all) of the UI code it made, but I will very often prompt an agent, throw away everything it did, and redo it myself (manually!). I find the "zero to one" stage of creation very difficult and time consuming and AI is excellent at being my muse.
This right here is the single biggest win for coding agents. I see and directionally agree with all the concerns people have about maintainability and sprawl in AI-mediated projects. I don't care, though, because the moment I can get a project up on its legs, to where I can interact with some substantial part of its functionality and refine it, I'm off to the races. It's getting to that golden moment that constitutes 80% of what's costly about programming for me.
This is the part where I simply don't understand the objections people have to coding agents. It seems so self-evidently valuable --- even if you do nothing else with an agent, even if you literally throw all the code away.
PS
Put a weight on that bacon!
I'm the opposite, I find getting started easy and rewarding, I don't generally get blocked there. Where I get blocked, after almost thirty years of development, is writing the code.
I really like building things, but they're all basically putting the same code together in slightly different ways, so the part I find rewarding isn't the coding, it's the seeing everything come together in the end. That's why I really like LLMs, they let me do all the fun parts without any of the boring parts I've done a thousand times before.
It's funny because the part you find challenging is exactly the thing LLM skeptics tend to say accounts for almost none of the work (writing the code). I personally find that once my project is up on its legs and I'm in flow state, writing code is easy and pleasant, but one thing clear from this thread is everyone experiences programming a little differently.
Yeah, definitely. I do agree with the skeptics to a point, as I don't let the LLM write code without reviewing (it makes many mistakes that compound), but I'd still rather have it write a function, review and steer, have it write another, and so on, than write database models myself for the millionth time.
It's not that I find it hard, I've just done it so many times that it's boring. Maybe I should be solving different/harder problems, but I don't mind having the LLM write the code, and I'm doing what I like and I'm more productive than ever, so eh!
I was just talking about this in a chat today, because 'simonw had at some point talked about getting to the point where he was letting go of reviewing every line of LLM code, and I am nowhere close to that point --- I'll take Claude's word on Tailwind classes as long as the HTML looks right, but actual code, I review line-by-line, token-by-token, and usually rewrite things, even if just for cosmetic reasons.
Yeah, there's a definite continuum for where LLMs are most to least expert. They seem to be fairly OK with JS, less so with Python, and C is just a crapshoot.
It depends on the project as well, for throwaway things I'm fine to just let it do whatever it wants, but for projects that I need to last more than a few days, I review everything.