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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m enjoying it, mostly. It’s definitely great at some tasks and terrible at orhers. You get a feel for what those are after a while:

    1. Throwaway projects - proof of concepts, one-off static websites, that kind of thing: absolutely ideal. Weeks of dev becomes hours, and you barely need to bother reviewing it if it works.

    2. Research (find a tool for doing XYZ) where you barely know the right search terms: ideal. The research mode on claude.ai is especially amazing at this.

    3. Anything where the language is unfamiliar. AI bootstraps past most of the learning curve. Doesn’t help you learn much, but sometimes you don’t care about learning the codebase layout and you just need to fix something.

    4. Any medium sized project with a detailed up front description.

    What it’s not good for:

    1. Debugging in a complex system
    2. Tiny projects (one line change), faster to do it yourself
    3. Large projects (500+ line change) - the diff becomes unreviewable fairly quickly and can’t be trusted (much worse than the same problem with a human where you can at least trust the intent)


  • How can it not be true though? Terminal shines when you chain together more than one operation.

    Imagine doing this in a GUI: list the files in a large directory, ignore the ones with underscores in them, find the biggest file, read the last 1000 lines from it and count the number of lines containing a particular string.

    Thats a couple of pretty straightforward commands in a terminal, could take 30s for an experienced terminal user. Or the same task could take many minutes of manual effort stuffing round with multiple GUI applications.

    I’m certain that I do tasks like that (ad hoc ones, not worth writing dedicated software for) tens of times in a typical work day. And I have no idea how GUI users can be even remotely productive.