If you haven’t done so, try changing your prompt styles. It’s an assistant for me but I’m finding it needs less and less babysitting. What I just tried:
Ask it first to plan out a project you briefly described, focus on the planning, file structure is ok but no coding. Tell it what functionality is integrated, or what what should become a standalone module. Ask it to summarize.
I then start a new chat for the code, and tell it follow the summary. Tell it “before you make code, ask questions if there is commonly another way to do this.
Chances are you’ve done this way more than me and tried variations of this. But it’s working here as an assistant. I’m now doing wIdk I wasn’t hired for, and people are happy.
I know if I leet code ground myself into the dirt, I’d get better, and more importantly: faster.
But there’s never been any payoff to me full-time coding.. not when the pay is close to coding, and my role wants me to address test tech debt or Nice To Haves tooling, and (until Go) I had to do my 9-5 work in a scripting language…
There’s now more days behind me than ahead, and I no longer want to understand low level details and theories about the kernel or TTY.
All progress is built on abstraction. It has to be.
I’ve been writing oversized shell scripts for ages, often just for the moment in Bash.
Then if I need something similar for a Dockerfile, I’d write that also. The duplication is a sad feeling.
So I described what I wanted, /bin/sh with posix, detailed what both scripts do, and it merged both scripts without ever seeing their full codebases! (Both for work and my own code, I never share code unless it’s already in a public repository)
I fired up ShellCheck linter and zero issues. At work I Replaced both tech-debt laden scripts with a repo and people said they’d use it too, NICE cleanup, and how long did it take? :-)
Relating back to OP, that sounds like an early win on a long campaign to boredom. I hope you continue to enjoy it though, there certainly nothing inevitable about ennui.
The whole reason I got into software (besides it being easy money) was my childhood of typing in code from magazines and making it my own.
I didn’t go to university, and I didn’t focus personal time in developing coding skills enough to get me a job in it full-time. I know lots of the fundamentals I’m just not fast, and I fail to memorize lots of idiomatic stuff that’s necessary.
What changed for me? Two years ago I discovered Golang, love it. In the last few months I set aside my aversion for AI, and it’s amazing. I know AI code is mediocre sometimes, so is what I write myself. But the feedback loop is way encouraging. It has me engaged. I feel I can maintain the code. If I don’t feel comfortable with anything I take the time to review and rewrite, or run just that piece of code through a different AI.
Whether it’s right or wrong, I’m now engaged daily, instead of working a full day in “adjacent” engineering and then trying to push through tutorial hell.
Ask it first to plan out a project you briefly described, focus on the planning, file structure is ok but no coding. Tell it what functionality is integrated, or what what should become a standalone module. Ask it to summarize.
I then start a new chat for the code, and tell it follow the summary. Tell it “before you make code, ask questions if there is commonly another way to do this.
Chances are you’ve done this way more than me and tried variations of this. But it’s working here as an assistant. I’m now doing wIdk I wasn’t hired for, and people are happy.