points by jwrallie 3 days ago | 0 comments
AI companies did promise that, and for some time back in 2024 and early 2025 it did feel so to me. I just had a kid and suddenly could not work the extra hour every day I used to, but kept producing as usual.
Nowadays I’m receiving longer emails than usual and longer code to review. Less spelling errors, but long and pointless prose. Less superficial bugs but more sneaky, fundamental problems.
There is also the trap where you go from 0-80% immediately but end up spending time anyway fixing the last 20%, and it’s unclear if there was a benefit or loss in productivity. Sometimes the almost there rabbit hole of prompting can be misleading.
I've done it a handful of times, I'll get a little ambitious... "Oh, 6.1 Sol can totally handle this" and have it spin up a project, keep going, keep going.
Eventually, I get to a point where I start to do the homework and I have to step way back to "fully understand" the work from the ground up... It sucks, but I've largely stopped losing time to that.
For me, "pair programming" and incremental changes beats the "one shot" approach every single time.
We cannot seem to skip the stage of understanding (as much as some people on my team want to!)