Comment by estimator7292

It's been a weird experience for sure. Last week I spent 20 minutes sorting wires while the AI did a refactor that would have taken 2-6 hours by hand.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. On one hand, in certain situations it speeds up my work 10x. On the other, it's way, way too easy to just stop thinking and have the AI iterate on a problem for an hour or two only to end up with utter gibberish, revert everything, and realize the fix was trivial with the slightest application of critical thinking.

I'm certainly a faster programmer with AI, but I'm not sure if I'm any more productive or producing better code instead of just more.

The one thing it's utterly amazing at is my most hated part: going from a blank page to something. Once there's some code and a hint of structure, it's much easier for me to get started.

I will say that I was shocked at how well codex handled "transform this react native typescript into a C++ library". I estimated a week or two of manual refactoring. Codex did it in half an hour (and used 25% of my weekly token budget).