As I read this, I'm also working through a pretty dense feature that took a fair bit of iteration. The end result is actually significantly less code than it was about halfway through. And I was wondering if the AI actually helped me at all, since surely I could have written the code in the same time it took to iterate
But! Because of AI I was able to rapidly hack out like 4 variants of this feature that I didn't like. And felt comfortable throwing them away just as quick.
This has been one the most significant improvements of using AI for me. Before I would have to really think through the plan of a new feature before committing to the implementation and would only catch incompatibilities with existing code after a good portion of the implementation was already written. Now I can ask AI for detailed implementation plans and find these nitty gritty detail problems in a few hours if not less
True. I think this is the biggest help with AI. It does not necessarily help with reaching the end goal faster all the time but it helps in trying out different iterations for quick prototypes. I find it especially useful in fast moving startups where some times we just want to validate a few ideas before fleshing them out as proper features.
So what’s the verdict? Was it worth it?
Yea worth it. The original implementation ended up being the most complex, and also not a great UX. But I didn't really get it was a worse UX until I built it and tested it out a bit.
And I wasn't attached to that complex implementation in the way I would be if I architected it from scratch, so it was easy to move on.