I wouldn't say I'm old, but I suddenly fell into the coding agent rabbit hole when I had to write some Python automations against Google APIs.
Found myself having 3-4 different sites open for documentation, context switching between 3 different libraries. It was a lot to take in.
So I said, why not give AI a whirl. It helped me a lot! And since then I have published at least 6 different projects with the help of AI.
It refactors stuff for me, it writes boilerplate for me, most importantly it's great at context switching between different topics. My work is pretty broadly around DevOps, automation, system integration, so the topics can be very wide range.
So no I don't mind it at all, but I'm not old. The most important lesson I learned is that you never trust the AI. I can't tell you how often it has hallucinated things for me. It makes up entire libraries or modules that don't even exist.
It's a very good tool if you already know the topic you have it work on.
But it also hit me that I might be training my replacement. Every time I correct its mistakes I "teach" the database how to become a better AI and eventually it won't even need me. Thankfully I'm very old and will have retired by then.
When it comes to dealing with shitty platforms AI is really the best thing ever. I have had the misfortune of writing automations for Atlassian with their weird handling of refresh keys and had AI not pointed out that Atlassian had the genius idea of invalidating refresh keys after single use, I would have wasted a lot more of my time. For this sort of manual labout, AI is the best tool there is.
Found myself having 3-4 different sites open for documentation, context switching between 3 different libraries. It was a lot to take in.
So I said, why not give AI a whirl. It helped me a lot! And since then I have published at least 6 different projects with the help of AI.
It refactors stuff for me, it writes boilerplate for me, most importantly it's great at context switching between different topics. My work is pretty broadly around DevOps, automation, system integration, so the topics can be very wide range.
So no I don't mind it at all, but I'm not old. The most important lesson I learned is that you never trust the AI. I can't tell you how often it has hallucinated things for me. It makes up entire libraries or modules that don't even exist.
It's a very good tool if you already know the topic you have it work on.
But it also hit me that I might be training my replacement. Every time I correct its mistakes I "teach" the database how to become a better AI and eventually it won't even need me. Thankfully I'm very old and will have retired by then.