Comment by verifex

Comment by verifex 6 days ago

Some of my favorite things to use AI for when coding (I swear I wrote this not AI!):

- CSS: I don't like working with CSS on any website ever, and all of the kludges added on-top of it don't make it any more fun. AI makes it a little fun since it can remember all the CSS hacks so I don't have to spend an hour figuring out how to center some element on the page. Even if it doesn't get it right the first time, it still takes less time than me struggling with it to center some div in a complex Wordpress or other nightmare site.

- Unit Tests: Assuming the embedded code in the AI isn't too outdated (caveat: sometimes it is, and that invalidates this one sometimes). Farming out unit tests to AI is a fun little exercise.

- Summarizing a commit: It's not bad at summarizing, at least an initial draft.

- Very small first-year-software-engineering-exercise-type tasks.

mvdtnz 6 days ago

I'm not trying to be presumptuous about the state of your CSS knowledge so tell me to get lost if I'm off base. But if you haven't updated yourself on where CSS is at these days I'd recommend spending an afternoon doing a deep dive. Modern-day CSS is way less kludgy and hacky than it used to be. It's not so hard now to manage large CSS codebases and centering elements is relatively simple now.

Having said that I still lean heavily on AI to do my styling too these days.

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michaelsalim a day ago

I get the temptation to use it for CSS too. But whenever I do, it produces a bunch of debts that are annoying to spot. Sure it looks nice visually, but you need to review it even more so than normal code.

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ivanbalepin 2 days ago

same here, i dread CSS because it has to look good visually, not regress, work on a ton of devices and is very time-consuming to get right. But every time i tried Cursor with different models it produces CSS code that is just really bad. And the CSS hacks it knows somehow just don't add up to a good solution. Maybe it'll catch up, but so far the result has been worse than mine, so - still coding manually.

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topek 6 days ago

Interesting, I found AIs annoyingly incapable of writing good CSS. But I understand the appeal of using it for a task that you do not like to do yourself. For me it's writing ticket descriptions which it does way better than me.

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Aachen 5 days ago

Can you give an example?
Descriptions for things was the #1 example for me where LLMs are a hindrance, so I'm surprised to hear this. If the LLM (not working at this company / having a limited context window) gets your meaning from bullet points or keywords and writes nice prose, I could just read that shorthand (your input aka prompt) and not have to bother with the wordiness. But apparently you've managed to find a use for it?

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