Comment by pSYoniK

I've been reading these posts for the past few months and the comments too. I've tried Junie a bit and I've used ChatGPT in the past for some bash scripts (which, for the most part, did what they were supposed to do), but I can't seem to find the use case.

Using them for larger bits of code feels silly as I find subtle bugs or subtle issues in places, so I don't necessarily feel comfortable passing in more things. Also, large bits of code I work with are very business logic specific and well abstracted, so it's hard to try and get ALL that context into the agent.

I guess what I'm trying to ask here is what exactly do you use agents for? I've seen youtube videos but a good chunk of those are people getting a bunch of typescript generated and have some front-end or generate some cobbled together front end that has Stripe added in and everyone is celebrating as if this is some massive breakthrough.

So when people say "regular tasks" or "rote tasks" what do you mean? You can't be bothered to write a db access method/function using some DB access library? You are writing the same regex testing method for the 50th time? You keep running into the same problem and you're still writing the same bit of code over and over again? You can't write some basic sql queries?

Also not sure about others, but I really dislike having to do code reviews when I am unable to really gauge the skill of the dev I'm reviewing. If I know I have a junior with 1-2 years maybe, then I know to focus a lot on logic issues (people can end up cobbling toghether the previous simple bits of code) and if it's later down the road at 2-5 years then I know that I might focus on patterns or look to ensure that the code meets the standards, look for more discreet or hidden bugs. With an agent output it could oscilate wildly between those. It could be a solidly written search function, well optimized or it could be a nightmarish sql querry that's impossible to untangle.

Thoughts?

I do have to say I found it good when working on my own to get another set of "eyes" and ask things like "are there more efficient ways to do X" or "can you split this larger method into multiple ones" etc