Mentions personal use of Copilot cursor.

Transcript context

…Yeah. Skill issue for sure. Skill issue. For people who are not aware, that’s a hashtag thing sometimes used mockingly in this case. There’s several layers mockingly, but also seriously, meaning the criticism is grounded in the fact that you lack the skill versus some kind of fundamental truth. Yes. I think that that’s the reason I use actually Copilot cursor a lot is for developing the skill of editing AI so I can just learn how to do that better and better. Because I think as I do that better and better, I start to utilize AI better. At this time, it is a bit of a boilerplate code thing, but you can do out of the box novel design decisions or tricky design decisions from scratch but fill out stuff using AI and then just learn the skill of modifying. I personally just… It’s more fun to program with AI. Even when I delete a lot of the code, it’s more fun. It’s less lonely. It’s what I imagine pair programming to be. And I’ve never done it, but it just feels like that friction that you get when you’re staring at an empty thing is not there. Empty function, empty class, it’s just more fun, less lonely. And I do think that a lot of the easier type of coding, it really helps with like interacting with APIs, basic things that I would usually have to look up to stack overflow for. It’s just really fast at that. As example, just interacting with the YouTube API. The YouTube API documentation is not very good. And you can just load it all in there and ask it to generate a set of functions that access the API, all kinds of read and write operations, and it figures it all out. Well, you do have to read. You have to read and check everything. And you start to develop the skill of understanding where it misinterpreted the task. What is that skill? I don’t even know. You have to be empathic about what the AI, what its limitations are. A lot of the times that has to do with prompt engineering. You have to at the same time understand what the AI is aware of. What did you actually give it as data to be able to generate the code? A lot of times, we don’t realize that we’re not giving it enough information. Okay, okay, all right. You have to be empathic. Be like, okay, these are the files it’s aware of. This is the specifics of the question you asked it. You have to imagine you’re an intern that doesn’t know anything else. Oftentimes, we want the AI to just figure out the things that’s left unspoken. But you can’t know those things, you have to specify those things. And so you have to actually be much more deliberate and rigorous in the things you specify, is to spell it out. And so I just have this sea of prompts that I have saved up, and I’m building these library of different templates for prompts and it’s a mess. And I’m sure there’s a lot of developers that have this similar kind of mess. is sea of prompts that I have saved up, and I’m building these library of different templates for prompts and it’s a mess. And I’m sure there’s a lot of developers that have this similar kind of mess. A lot of it has to do long-term with the tooling that’s going to improve that. One, the systems are going to get much more intelligent when you don’t need the nuance. And two, there’s going to be the tooling that allows you to specify those things and load it in correctly and give all the context that the system needs in order to make the good decisions. And maybe the system asks you follow up questions with, “Here’s things you didn’t make clear,” all that kind of stuff. A lot of that has to do with the interface, with the actual design of the tools. Like we said with Cursor, it’s going to keep getting better and better and better. My sense is developers in general should be learning this to not be left behind, to see how that can be used as a superpower to boost their productivity, their effectiveness, their joy of programming versus be seen as a competitor to them or something like that. But for me already, it’s been a big boost to productivity. If you measure the actual how quickly you’re able to get a thing done, it’s been a big… And measured not across minutes and hours but days also. Sometimes there’s things I have to do that are not that important that I’ll just out of procrastination will push off.…

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