What? I’ve already written the design documentation and done all the creative and architectural parts that I consider most rewarding. All that’s left for coding is answering questions like “what exactly does the API I need to use look like?” and writing a bunch of error handling if statements. That’s toil.
Definitely depends on the person. There are definitely people who are getting 90% of their coding done with AI. I’m one of them. I have over a decade of experience and I consider coding to be the easiest but most laborious part of my job so it’s a welcome change.
One thing that’s really changed the game recently is RAG and tools with very good access to our company’s data. Good context makes a huge difference in the quality of the output. For my latest project, I’ve been using 3 internal tools. An LLM browser plugin which has access to our internal data and let’s you pin pages (and docs) you’re reading for extra focus. A coding assistant, which also has access to internal data and repos but is trained for coding. Unfortunately, it’s not integrated into our IDE. The IDE agent has RAG where you can pin specific files but without broader access to our internal data, its output is a lot poorer.
So my workflow is something like this: My company is already pretty diligent about documenting things so the first step is to write design documentation. The LLM plugin helps with research of some high level questions and helps delve into some of the details. Once that’s all reviewed and approved by everyone involved, we move into task breakdown and implementation.
First, I ask the LLM plugin to write a guide for how to implement a task, given the design documentation. I’m not interested in code, just a translation of design ideas and requirements into actionable steps (even if you don’t have the same setup as me, give this a try. Asking an LLM to reason its way through a guide helps it handle a lot more complicated tasks). Then, I pass that to the coding assistant for code creation, including any relevant files as context. That code gets copied to the IDE. The whole process takes a couple minutes at most and that gets you like 90% there.
Next is to get things compiling. This is either manual or in iteration with the coding assistant. Then before I worry about correctness, I focus on the tests. Get a good test suite up and it’ll catch any problems and let you reflector without causing regressions. Again, this may be partially manual and partially iteration with LLMs. Once the tests look good, then it’s time to get them passing. And this is the point where I start really reading through the code and getting things from 90% to 100%.
All in all, I’m still applying a lot of professional judgement throughout the whole process. But I get to focus on the parts where that judgement is actually needed and not the more mundane and toilsome parts of coding.
This is actually the primary strength of imperial and the impetus behind most of its conversion ratios. Base 10 is just terrible for being divided. But if you have a mile of railroad, you can place your rail and stakes regularly at almost any foot-length and come out even.