Comment by ThrowawayTestr 3 months ago
I like solving problems but I hate coding. Wasting 20 minutes because you forgot a semicolon or something is not fun. AI let's me focus on the problem and not bother with the tedious coding bit.
I write code to solve problems for my own use or for my hobby electronics projects. Asking chatgpt to write a script is faster than reading the documentation of some python library.
Just last week it wrote me a whole application and gui to open a webpage at a specific time. Yeah it breaks after the first trigger but it works for what I need.
And that's OK! I'm not trying to gatekeeping anyone from the title of coder or programmer. But what is fine for quick small scripts and throwaway code can be quite bad even for smallish projects. If you're trying to solve a problem in a systematic way, there's a lot of concerns that pertain to the durability of the solution.
There's a lot of literature about these concerns and a lot of methodologies to alleviate them. I (and others) are judging LLMs in light of those concerns. Mostly because speed was never an issue for us in prototypes and scripts (and it can be relaxing to learn about something while scripting it). The issue is always reliability (can it do what I want) and maintainability (can I change it later). Performance can also be a key issue.
Aside: I don't know the exact problem you were solving, but based on the description, that could have been done with systemd timers (macOS services are more of a pain to write). Yes, there's more to learn, but time triggering some command is a problem solved (and systemd has a lot more triggers).
>that could have been done with systemd timers
I could have used Windows Task Scheduler but having a nice gui with a custom icon is much more pleasant to use.
This doesn't even make sense, forgetting a semicolon is immediately caught by the compiler. What positive benefits does AI provide here?
By knowing about libraries that I don't have to read and learn and being able to glue them together to quickly accomplish my task.
That comment makes me deeply suspicious about your debugging skills. And the formatting of your code.