Comment by victorbjorklund

Comment by victorbjorklund 8 hours ago

2 replies

I have three uses of agentic coding at this time. All save me time.

1) low risk code

Let's say that we're building an MVP for something. and at this moment we just wanna get something working to get some initial feedback. So for example, the front-end code is not going to stick around. we just want something there to give a functionality and a feeling but it doesn't have to be perfect. AI is awesome at creating that kind of front-end code that will just live for a short time before it's probably all thrown out.

2) fast iterations and experimentation

In the past, if you had to build something and you were thinking, thinking maybe I can try this thing, then you're gonna spend hours or days getting it up and working to find out if it's even a good idea in the first place. but with AI And I find that I can just ask the AI to quickly get a working feature up and I can realize no this is not the best way to do it remove everything thing start over. I could not do that in the past with limited time to spend and they just doing the same thing over and over again with different libraries or different solutions. But with AI, I can do that. and then when you have something that you like you can go back and do it correctly.

3) typing for me.

And lastly, even when I write my own code, I don't really write it but I don't use the AI to to say, "hey, build me a to-do app" instead I use it to just give me the building blocks so more like in very advanced snippet tool so I might say "Can you give me a gen server that takes in this and that and returns this and that?" And then of course I review the result.

theshrike79 8 hours ago

#2 is a big thing

I have an actual work service that uses a specific rule engine, which has some performance issues.

I could just go to Codex Web and say "try library A and library B as replacements for library X, benchmark all three solutions and give me a summary markdown file of the results"

Then I closed the browser tab and came back later, next day I think, and checked out the results.

That would've been a full day's work from me, maybe a bit more, that was now compressed to 5 minutes of active work.

shafyy 8 hours ago

This is a pretty good summary how it works for me, too. My main use case being the "advanced autocomplete" or what you call "typing for me".

But to answer the OP's question: I am on the same boat as you, I think the use cases are very limited and the productivity gains are often significantly overestimated by engineers who are hyping it up.