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I've tried using it. I can't get it to do anything useful.

I wanted to get it to help write a very simple Django website, basically a phone directory thing. After dicking about trying to get Copilot to actually help I had about 5000 lines of code that didn't work.

I was able to write something that did work in about an hour and about 50 lines of code.

Do you actually understand how the program your AI created works?



>> Do you actually understand how the program your AI created works?

Of course yes I designed and architected it.

>> I've tried using it. I can't get it to do anything useful

Look I really don’t want this to come across as mean or snarky, but you can’t be trying very hard if you haven’t explored the unbelievable power of Claude ChatGPT and Gemini. Or worse if you have, but couldn’t work out how to get them to do anything useful. Id encourage you to go try them and give them all a real go and invest some time learning how to get the best from them.


I've tried it a few times. It took generally ten times as long to come up with code that I could have written more clearly by myself.

Can you give me an example of the kind of things you ask it to do, and the results you get?

I genuinely don't understand why people think it's good. I don't want to waste time trying to work out how to ask a computer to write code for me, when I could just be writing code.


it takes time:

- to learn (strengths and limitations)

- to configure (memory, slash commands, subagents, mcp, skills)

- to iterate and adjust everything

- …

- …

I spend a minimum of 1hr per day on this alone. The rewards are worth it.


Okay, so I need to invest a lot of time and effort into something that will take longer to produce worse code?

Because so far I've seen no evidence at all that AIs can generate functioning code, never mind good code.


As I wrote “ The rewards are worth it.” perhaps I should have added “to me.” I would invest even more time as for me it is an insane multiplier and I have been coding for 29 years “by hand” before LLMs.

I see evidence everywhere - there are many influential people in our professional writing/showing/… (e.g. https://antirez.com/news/158) the benefits and that personally made me make a significant investment to learn/setup/… I took it as a challenge, if other people can make them into a huge multiplier I was gonna be “with them” vs naysayers




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