Thanks for this.
I mentor lots of people and i met with someone last week for the first time, and as we were chatting he mentioned several times things like “So I just asked the AI what to do, and then did that exact thing”…. Uh, so… I don’t use AI that way.
I started using it basically as soon as it came out and I started like everyone else, writing out all these requirements into the system, marveling at how it just spit back out a whole program, and then obviously ran into all the pitfalls that that entails.
So, these days, my AI use is limited to what I’d say is syntax conversion/lookup (like “What’s the syntax for instantiating and adding to a set in python?”) and anything I’d immediately verify.
I should also say I’m aware of leetcode/things like that. I play around a lot on Codewarriors and see how others put together solutions and learn a lot from that. I really enjoy the silly grindy aspects of coding like figuring out how to extract all the content from a json object that should be a string but can’t be a string for <reasons>, and building larger/complex systems like game engines (engines to make my games work, not the underlying engine). Components/react and that style of development makes a lot of intuitive sense to me as well.
Anyway I say all that to say I’d be sort of embarrassed to use AI during an interview like I’d be embarrassed to need to google anything, but it would be primarily about syntax and I’d be as likely to distrust anything the AI was saying as to use it unless it aligned with what I’d expect the code to look like.
Do you mind if I ask what a “weeder” task might be vs. a more involved one? As someone who hasn’t worked on a dev team before, I only vaguely know what you mean by “We were hoping to say they needed to write some tests to get a code review”.
That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the detailed reply. I think one of the reasons I feel like I’m slower than I want to be is I tend to think a lot about those kinds of edge cases. My main problem now is learning to find the right-size for prototyping/building.
That said, I’ve written thousands of loops at this point but I’ve only done an input loop like that in python once or twice (in classes as I recall), so that specific method of getting the application started would probably be in that “I’d be embarrassed I’d need to google that” category. But I think once I got started I’d code out a decently competent prototype of a basic store (I’ve built an ecommerce store before so I’m familiar with some but not all of those edge cases). I would never think that code would be ready to ship though.