macphisto178

> Why ask HN?

bc hn is a community of smart ppl. I'm sure these discussions are happening at most software companies so I was just curious how others are dealing with it

> Have you actually tried using the tech? Then you should have the answers. There are lots of different types of software development and in some areas gen AI will be extremely useful, but a net negative in others. Only you can answer the questions about your environment.

yes, daily. :) here's my rough answer to my own question:

- as another commenter mentioned, context windows aren't large enough to capture every detail in our system - coding is actually the easy part of the job. Generally speaking, once we know the details of the task (i.e. building table X with N fields, build a service that does XYZ, etc), the coding portion doesn't take a lot of time. So the cost saving of outsourcing that to Claude/GPT/etc can be helpful, but it's not a game changer - team alignment is hard and figuring out what to build is hard - we lose eng time on the unknowns that gen ai doesn't really help with: debugging an issue with a vendor's sdk, identifying the cause of a race condition, figuring out how to mitigate a bot issue, etc.

a few examples where AI has been extremely helpful for work related things:

- writing complex sql queries for throw-away code, i.e. need to create a few charts from big query - writing internal front end tooling - polishing any internal messages - helping design docs with clarity - helping unblock highly technical areas where i haven't had any experience - helping learn the sdk from new vendors - helping read api documentation, i.e. does the instagram api allow for ABC

areas where it's been mildly helpful:

- helping to write verbose methods that i'm too lazy to write. e.g. maybe a custom date parser that takes a datetime and outputs some custom text according to a spec

areas where it hasn't been that helpful

- building features e2e. as you mentioned, the context window issue is really the crux here. - building simple code like a crud api. our system, like all others, has its own idioms and spinning up a new crud api is easy enough. getting an llm to write it is do-able but by the time i've edited things to make it consistent with the rest of our system, i've lost the benefit

Do I have to use Canary? I'm on latest Chrome and it says my browser isn't supported.

for the ignorant (i.e. me) among us, what are the implications of factoring large numbers?

do junior front end dev's count as software engineers?