> have you considered that you haven't used the tools correctly or effectively?
The problem is that this comes off just as tone-deaf as "you're holding it wrong." In my experience, when people promote AI, its sold as just having a regular conversation and then the AI does thing. And when that doesn't work, the promoter goes into system prompts, MCP, agent files, etc and entire workflows that are required to get it to do the correct thing. It ends up feeling like you're being lied to, even if there's some benefit out there.
There's also the fact that all programming workflows are not the same. I've found some areas where AI works well, but a lot of my work it does not. Usually things that wouldn't show up in a simple Google search back before it was enshittified are pretty spotty.
I suspect AI appeals very strongly to a certain personality type who revels in all the details in getting a proper agentic coding environment bootstrapped for AI to run amok in, and then supervises/guides the results.
Then there’s people like me, who you’d probably term as an old soul, who looks at all that and says, “I have to change my workflow, my environment, and babysit it? It is faster to simply just do the work.” My relationship with tech is I like using as little as possible, and what I use needs to be predictable and do something for me. AI doesn’t always work for me.
Yes, this rings true, it took me over a month to actually get to at least 1x of my usual productivity with Claude Code. There is a ton of setup and ton of things to learn and try to see what works. What to watch out for and how to babysit it so it doesn't go off the rails (quite heavy handed approach works best for me). It's kind of like a shitty, but very fast and very knowledgable junior developer. At this moment it still maybe isn't "worth it" for a lot of devs if productivity (and developer ergonomics) is the only goal, but it is clear to me that this is where the industry is heading and I think every dev will eventually have to get on board. These tools really just started to be somewhat decent this year. I'm 100% sure that in a year or two it will be the default for everyone in a way that you simply won't be able to compete without it at all. It would be like using a shovel instead of an excavator. Remember, right now is the worst it'll ever be.
> In my experience, when people promote AI, its sold as just having a regular conversation and then the AI does thing.
This is almost the complete opposite of my experience. I hear expressions about improvements and optimism for the future, but almost all of the discussion from active people productivly using AI is about identifying the limits and seeing what benefits you can find within those limits.
They are not useless and they are also not a panacea. It feels like a lot of people consider those the only available options.
The problem is that this comes off just as tone-deaf as "you're holding it wrong." In my experience, when people promote AI, its sold as just having a regular conversation and then the AI does thing. And when that doesn't work, the promoter goes into system prompts, MCP, agent files, etc and entire workflows that are required to get it to do the correct thing. It ends up feeling like you're being lied to, even if there's some benefit out there.
There's also the fact that all programming workflows are not the same. I've found some areas where AI works well, but a lot of my work it does not. Usually things that wouldn't show up in a simple Google search back before it was enshittified are pretty spotty.