180973956
submission
DaPhil writes:
Say you're an indie dev with a great idea. You work on that in your own time, and you've got yourself a costly subscription to any of the current LLM/Coding Assistant providers. You get a lot of stuff done, but then its "hit your limit" and you are forced to buy groceries. And then you wake up in the middle of the night thinking "hey my 5 hour window is up, I need to input some more stuff to maximize my investment". Needless to say, your wife and kids do not approve. So you go for one of the credit-based providers. You buy some credits and realize quickly that no matter what query you send — and how long it takes — it'll use the same amount of credits. Even "Thank you" consumes credits.That doesn't make sense either. You might want to buy a local board to do "your own stuff", but that is going to cost you 4-to-5 figures money and you're dependent on OSS models being good enough, which is very probably not the case since you are not writing the 300th instance of a shopping app. So now you're in that weird situation where you are very happy that LLMs exist, but you are very unhappy about the way you can only interact with them through, lets say, "problematic" monetary plans. What do you do?
175475503
submission
DaPhil writes:
I taught myself to code at 12yo in the 90s and I've always liked the back-and-forth with the runtime to achieve the right result. I recently got back from other roles to code again, and when starting a new project last year, I decided to give the new "AI assistants" a go.
My initial surprise at the quality and the speed you can achieve when using ChatGPT and/or Copilot when coding turned sour over the months, as I realized that all the joy I felt about trying to get the result I want, slowly improving my code by (slowly) thinking, checking the results against the runtime, and finally achieving success is, well, gone. What I do now is typing English sentences in increasingly desparate attempts to get ChatGPT to output what I want (or providing snippets to Copilot to get the right autocompletion), which — as they are pretty much black boxes — is frustrating and non-linear: It either "just works", or it doesn't. There is no measure of progress. In a way, having Copilot in the IDE is even worse, since it actually disrupts my thinking when suggesting completions.
I've now disabled Copilot. Interestingly, I myself now feel somehow "disabled" without it in the IDE — however, the abstention has given me back the ability to sit back and think, and through that, the joy of programming. Still, it feels like I'm now somehow an ex-drug addict always on the verge of a relapse. I was wondering if any of you felt the same, or if I'm just... old.
