I've come to this same conclusion pretty strongly in the past few months in particular. I actually had negative comments on my experience with AI previously.
For all the talk of AI hitting a ceiling the latest tools have improved greatly. I'm literally doing things in hours that'd previously take weeks with little issue. I do of course have to think about the prompts and break it down to a fine grained level and i also have the AI integrated well with the IDE.
The biggest wins are the times you hit a new framework/library. Traditionally you'd go through the 'search for code samples on usage of new library/language/framework -> work those samples into a form that accomplishes your task' cycle. AI is much better for this to the extent it even often surprises me. "Oh the library has a more straightforward way to accomplish X than i thought!".
For those who are still skeptical it's time to try it again.
> I do of course have to think about the prompts and break it down to a fine grained level
This is where I’ve found usefulness falling off. Code is much more succinct and exact than English. I was never slowed down by how fast I could type (and maybe some are? I’ve watched people finger type and use the mouse excessively) but by how fast I could understand the existing systems. By the time I could write an expressive prompt in English I might as well have made the changes myself.
I’ve found it enormously useful as google on steroids or as a translator (which many changes that require code often end up being).
> This is where I’ve found usefulness falling off. Code is much more succinct and exact than English.
Depends on how you use English. If you describe all the details down to the last line of requirements — then, yeah. But actually, a lot of requirements are typical and can be compressed to things like "make a configuration page following this config type" and LLM will figure it out and put checkboxes for booleans, drop-downs for enums, and all the boilerplate that goes with them. Sometimes you have to correct this output, but it's still much faster than describing the whole thing.
> I'm literally doing things in hours that'd previously take weeks with little issue.
What's an example of this? Some of the ones I see most are: converting legacy code to something modern, building a greenfield app or feature in an unfamiliar language / framework / space.
But at work I don't have these types of jobs, and I want to get this productivity speed up, but right now I'm stuck at it helps a lot but not turning weeks of work into hours, so trying to get there
I recently had a need to create educational animations. These were programmatically created using the Manim library in Python.
I'm a mobile dev by trade. The best interaction i had recently was with Python and the Manim library specifically which are not my area of expertise. This was a series of "Create an animation that shows X with a graph of the result over variables Y". AI gave a one shot successful results with good coding practices for all of this. I could have spent a week coming up to speed on that library and re-remembering all the Python syntax or i could have fought against doing it at all but instead, one hour of prompting, "here it is boss, done".
I had similar results doing some updates to the app itself too fwiw. Android dev has a lot of boilerplate. "Create a new screen to show a list of images in a recycler view". Everyone who's done Android knows the boilerplate involved in what i just stated. Again 1 shot results. Unlike the above this is something i know how to do well, i just didn't want to type 100's of lines of boilerplate.
Would that have taken you weeks though?
I imagine reading through a few articles and examples could have gotten you there. I never heard of Manim before but found these pretty quickly:
https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/examples.html
https://manimclass.com/plot-a-function-in-manim/
I am not trying to pick at you, but it feels like what I am currently able to do with AI, shave off a few hours, but not weeks.
I agree with you the ease of cutting through boilerplate is a big win, but it also doesn't register as weeks worth of work for me...
A single graph might save hours. A full feature series where each graph type has yet new syntax to learn is indeed much more. Especially when there's followups, "let's make the graph move over the left half of the screen and then the next animation shows in the right half?" which again were one shot done in minutes with AI. For me just to gain the context of how to move the animation into the left half smoothly and then move all animations that were drawn into a separate animation file into this file and reposition each element from that second file into the right half of the screen would have probably taken a day.
We tend to underestimate engineering time generally. So i wouldn't look at the above and say "that seems doable in X hours". I stand strongly by my assertion that it saved me a week (at least!) all up.
> I stand strongly by my assertion that it saved me a week (at least!) all up.
Fair enough. More power to you then. I'll keep looking for some other examples. Thanks for sharing!
How do you integrate it with your IDE? I have used intellij for 15 years, anything worse than it's actually code-aware auto complete feels like a downgrade. ie. hallucinating APIs feels totally unnecessary when my old IDE never did that. If our projects had an orderly structure, some test coverage and a reasonable way to manage database migrations, I might let the AI a lot more loose, but alas.
I use intellij. Latest versions have claude 4 as an option to enable. I almost exclusively use the code aware chat function rather than allow the ai to suggest changes as i type and i use the ability to merge changes from the ai chat window to bring things across as the responses are generated.
This leaves the autocomplete untouched. Basically it’s a way of working where the ai only jumps in when asked. It works really really well.
For me the LLMs are failing laughably to be able to generate some examples of any actively developing library, even for simple stuff. They invent non-existing APIs, use years old functions that are long deprecated, et cetera.
Which IDE are you using?
The jetbrains collection which now have claud built in with a subscription option.