mortalapeman

I mean laws and rights are only useful if enforced. If the arm of government responsible for enforcement just doesn't and the people allow it, then what good is that purported freedom?

My company recently had to cut back our usage to effectively nothing and I get to code by hand again. I'm going to appreciate it while I can. The AI just wasn't providing enough value for us

Where it really shines for me is when the best solution is explicit and obvious code, but really tedious to write. Now I'll choose to have AI write it instead of me, where before I might have tried to write a bad abstraction. Things like generating a TypedDict for a JSON A document I'm returning as a convenience from a postgres query.

As someone who has made a career by having unique insights into solutions for software problems, I can confidently says it's not the same as the calculator. AI is bad at gathering context from an in-person customer meeting, linking their experience to fundamental structural problem with the data model and formulating a solution. You know how you know to make that insight? You have to have read and internalized the code. The easiest way to do that is by having written it yourself by hand or direct instruction to the AI. This exact scenario has played out for me more times than I can count, and it's why I find so little value in using AI.

With generated code, the directory structure, interface design and general state management is usually a haphazard mess. Even with the best frontier models. But what really gets me is the model often tries to make assumptions for me that I didn't specify in the prompt. Subtle things like which error states are "oh shit we need to bail" vs "this isn't a deal breaker." Sometimes it will ask, but more often than not it will just make a decision and it's often the wrong one. If I don't have a fully kitted out test suit and a good type checker to verify the final product against, the the whole looping thing is just useless to me and I'm back to reviewing every line of code it puts out and having to draw on my years of architecture experience to make sure we don't build a giant pile of trash.

This has been my experience as well. The best model I have access to right now is Opus 4.8. It's really good at fixing bugs in an established architecture or adding a similar feature, but it's absolutely mid tier at putting together a simple effective architecture for even common software problems. I can tell that functional programming practices are not a large part of it's training material.

That's funny, I found the article to align exactly with my own personal experience of working with LLMs in cobdebases with poor test coverage, uncertain requirements and non standard production deployments. As soon as you are off the happy path, they start making really bad assumptions that break in production. Even the smartest LLMs haven't come close to what I'd consider good architecture for those environments.

As a senior dev who has been using these tools to their fullest effectiveness in production environments, until AI can reduce the entropy of a codebase while still adding capability I will continue to be underwhelmed.

I partially agree, directives are not easy to learn, and there is not enough good documentation or literature on how to write them well. However, I have found the api to be very expressive , concise, and flexible once mastered. I can't say the same for most real languages I work with everyday.

The only reason one would use scope.$watch in this fashion is to have a function executed when a digest occurs. The original purpose of the $watch function is to take 2 functions, one that returns the watched value and another to be executed when that value changes. The fiddle provided is not a very good example of "reusable" directives. The fiddle could be rewritten to use a directive that adds or removes a given class based on a boolean, and the rest of the state could be handled by built in directives.

A single element cannot have more than once isolated scope. It only makes sense to use an isolated scope when a directive has a template associated with it. Otherwise, one should rely on the $parse + the "attrs" object + $scope.$watch to correctly handle expressions.

Directives are a DSL for creating new behavior using HTML. Once you learn the language, the symbols make sense and directives are easy to read. I think you are confusing "intuitive" with "familiar". Since you are not familiar with directives, you do not find them intuitive.