I Created My First AI-assisted Pull Request and I Feel Like a Fraud

I used AI to contribute to an open source project. The code was merged. I didn’t learn anything and I felt bad as an engineer.

This is the wrong way to think about tool use.

You wanted this feature for years. You understood the problem, but the amount of time that it would have taken to properly implement and test it held you back from doing it. Obviously, anyone else who wanted this feature came to the same conclusion.

This new tool reduced the amount of time that it would take. So you used the tool. You used the tool to bring the feature into existence, checked the tests, and took enough time to ensure that it was good. You didn't lie about your contribution in the PR, and the maintainer deemed it acceptable. And now everyone has this feature!

When you eat a strawberry do you feel like an impostor for not growing it yourself?

> When you eat a strawberry do you feel like an impostor for not growing it yourself?

No, but if I asked an intern to eat it for me, I wouldn't feel like I did anything or experienced anything at all.

That's what LLM coding feels like--like I'm not doing anything meaningful. It's like hiring someone to love my kid for me.

> No, but if I asked an intern to eat it for me, I wouldn't feel like I did anything at all.

That's a poor analogy.

If I asked an intern to implement a function, I know I did the instruction and that I worked through them. The intern did work, but I did fancy high level work and killed several birds with one stone.

Even better analogy: if I'm a film director, I'm working through a lot of people. The DP, the cast, the crew, the AD (though they're my boss, telling me what I can/can't budget for)...

The best analogy for AI is the "film director" analogy.

There are good directors and bad directors, good films and bad films. No director works alone (unless it's some kind of avant-garde film school project).

You wouldn't say a film director isn't doing work. That they can't be uniquely felt through their work. That what they're doing isn't hard, doesn't require talent/taste, and doesn't get better over time.

We're all basically becoming film directors.

Making movies is hard. Ai basically made the smaller personal sized things easy, but substantial projects are still out of reach. There isn't anything for an individual to feel good about.