> 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!