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Pvtw

AI = stupid

Ok, hear me out. When you're using AI, when does it actually help you? I found out for myself that AI is useless and doesn't make me more productive than not using AI.

I've used Cursor for some time now and don't get me wrong, it is awesome to have a AI companion that gives you code suggestions and you can prompt for more advance tasks. But does that mean the code it generate is good? Not always, and mostly not. By my experience it is not good enough. This is not Cursor's fault but the models. Even tho it feels like every day a new model is released.

I use AI for Laravel by typing what I want. For example, I wanted AI to generate code for me to add a comments feature. It gives me some text and... a suggestion to run a artisan command. I mean it is not wrong but I can just run it myself?! I don't need AI for that. And the code suggestions are not good. It used old Laravel syntax unless you explicitly tell it to use the latest Laravel features (which I forgot at first).

When I used AI for a small Nextjs project, the suggestions aren't good. Not sure if it is just a bad prompt or a skill issue on my side. I've never used nextjs before so I had no idea on how to add specific features. AI helped me a little bit. It gives me the basics on how the framework works but its not perfect and I had to change the code anyway.

My first rule is if you already know how to code it, don't use AI. Thinking about the prompt and reviewing the code that it suggests, doesn't make you more productive than just writing the code yourself.

I think there are two situations where AI can be helpful:

  • If you don't know how to transform your idea in code and want a bit of help getting started. This include learning a new language and/or framework where you have no idea where to begin and want a little bit of help in understanding what to do.
  • A task where you're just to lazy to perform and want a quick example of doing the task.

However, It depends. Sometime you want a little bit of help. It doesn't mean I will never use AI again but for me, I'll use it rarely.