That said, I'm deeply saddened by the fact that I won't be passing on a craft I spent two decades refining.
Reviewing and modifying code is more engaging than typing out the solution that is fully formed in my head. If the AI creates something close to what I have in my head from the description I gave it, I can work with it to get it even closer. I can also hand-edit it.
If I can build things faster, then I'm happy to spend most of my time reviewing AI code. That doesn't mean that I never write code. Some things the AI is worse at, or need to be exactly write and its faster to do them manually.
Love this. You hit the nail right on the head.
I don't know if I fit into one or the other. However, I do know that at times I feel like one, and at other times, the other.
If I am writing another new app and need to build a slew of CRUD code, I don't care about the craft. I mean, I don't want sloppy code, but I do not get joy out of writing what is _almost_ boilerplate. I still want it to reflect my style, but I don't want to type it all out. I already know how it all works in my head. The faster I get it into an IDE the better. Cursor (the AI IDE) allowed me to do this much faster than I would have by hand.
Then there is time where I do want to craft something beautiful. I had one part of this project where I needed to build a scheduler and I had very specific things I wanted it to do. I tried twice to describe what I want but the AI tool did not do what I wanted. It built a working piece of code, but I could not get it to grasp the nuance.
I sat down and wrote the code for the scheduler, but then had to deal with a bunch of edge cases. I took this code, gave it to the AI and told it to implement those edge cases. After reviewing and iterating on it, I had exactly what I wanted.
Do you really like spending most of your time reviewing AI output? I certainly don’t, that’s soul-crushing.