> Where is the line between a spelling/grammar/tone checker like Grammarly
For me, the line is precisely at the point where a human has something they want to say. IMO - use the tools you need to say the thing you want to say; it's fine. The thing I, and many others here, object to is being asked to read reams of text that no-one could be bothered to write.
My objection to all this stuff is the requirement to share government ID / biometrics / credit card info etc with arbitrary third party sites, their 228 partners who value my privacy and need all my data for legitimate interest, and whatever criminals any of those leak everything to, and also give the government an easily searchable history of what I read when those sites propagate the info back.
Any scheme that doesn’t require this won’t get pushback from me.
As an alternative: I already have government-issued ID and that branch of government already has my private info; have it give me a cryptographic token I can use to prove my age bracket to the root of trust module in my computer; then allow the OS to state my age to third parties when it needs to with a protocol that proves it has seen the appropriate government token but reveals nothing else about my identity.
> is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer”
Indeed, of all the possible things to say!
AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.
I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Wrestling the computer is stuff like figuring out how to recite the right incantation so Gradle will do a multi-platform fat bundle, and then migrate to the next major Gradle version. Unless you have a very specific set of kinks, tasks like these will make you want to quit your career in computers and pick up trash on the highway instead.
You very likely have some of these toil problems in your own corner of software engineering, and it can absolutely be liberating to stop having to think about the ape and the jungle when all you care about is the banana.
Now we have to figure out how to recite the right incantation to Claude to get it to recite the right incantation to Gradle in an exchange redolent of "guess the verb" from old Adventure games. Best case if you get it wrong: nothing happens. Worst case: grue will eat you.
Sanchez's Law of Abstraction applies. You haven't abstracted anything away, just added more shit to the pile.
There’s no incantation though. You ask Claude in whatever terms feel right to you to do the thing, say "update the gradle config to build a multi platform jar", and it does make it happen.
The hard part of software engineering, and indeed many other pursuits, is working out what it is you actually need to happen and articulating that clearly enough for another entity to follow your instructions.
Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.
> Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.
This just isn't the case.
English can communicate very simply a set of "if.. then.." statements and an LLM can convert them to whatever stupid config language with I'm dealing with today.
I just don't care if Cloudflare's wrangler.toml uses emojis to express cases or AWS's Cloudformation required some Shakespearean sonnet to express the dependencies in whatever the format of the day is.
Or don't get me started on trying to work out which Pulami Google module I'm supposed to use for this service. Ergh.
I can express very clearly what I want, let a LLM translate it then inspect the config and go "oh that's how you do that".
It's great, and is radically easier than working through some docs written by a person who knows what they are doing and assumed you do too.
Expressing "I want to build a Java app in a single file that I can execute on Windows, MacOS, and Linux" is absolutely straightforward and non-ambiguous in English, whereas it requires really a lot of arcane wizardry in build tooling languages to achieve the desired result.
Claude will understand and carry out this fairly complex task just fine, so I doubt you have actually worked with it yet.
No, it is not. What you are doing is something not too different from asking your [insert here freelance platform] hired remote dev to make an app and enter a cycle of testing the generated app and giving feedback, it is not wrestling the computer.
Spotify used to be good, but have enshittified their UI past the point of usability for me. It really wants to play me tracks that are profitable for Spotify, not tracks I want to hear.
What you say is still true of the Amazon and Apple offerings, though. Haven't tried Youtube Music, so can't comment on that.
For me, the line is precisely at the point where a human has something they want to say. IMO - use the tools you need to say the thing you want to say; it's fine. The thing I, and many others here, object to is being asked to read reams of text that no-one could be bothered to write.
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