Exactly. I tend to like Hotz, but by his description, every developer is also "a compiler", so it's a useless argument.
My life quality (as a startup cofounder wearing many different hats across the whole stack) would drop significantly if Cursor-like tools [1] were taken away from me, because it takes me a lot of mental effort to push myself to do the boring task, which leads to procrastination, which leads to delays, which leads to frustration. Being able to offload such tasks to AI is incredibly valuable, and since I've been in this space from "day 1", I think I have a very good grasp on what type of task I can trust it to do correctly. Here are some examples:
- Add logging throughout some code
- Turn a set of function calls that have gotten too deep into a nice class with clean interfaces
- Build a Streamlit dashboard that shows some basic stats from some table in the database
- Rewrite this LLM prompt to fix any typos and inconsistencies - yeah, "compiling" English instructions into English code also works great!
- Write all the "create index" lines for this SQL table, so that <insert a bunch of search usecases> perform well.
[1] I'm actually currently back to Copilot Chat, but it doesn't really matter that much.
> Add logging throughout some code
That's one of the thing that I wouldn't delegate to LLM. Logging is like a report of things that happens. And just like a report, I need relevant information and the most useful information.
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A lot of these use cases actually describes the what. But the most important questions is always the why. Why is it important to you? Or to the user? That's when things have a purpose and not be just toys.
Code with logging is "self reporting". Adding logging statements is not reporting itself. Adding `logger.error(f"{job} failed")` is not reporting itself, and LLMs are perfectly capable of adding such statements in applicable places.
As to why, it's because I'm building an app with a growing userbase and need to accommodate to their requirements and build new features to stay ahead of the competition. Why you decided I'm describing a toy project is beyond me.
As someone else said: Launch is only the first step. That's when practicality start to matter.
The reason senior engineers are being paid that well is not because they need to type a lot of code to get new features in. It's because they need to figure how to have less code while having more features.