dpcan

The very end of the article hit on the best point.

If you ask AI to use HTML to create an 8.5x11 designed "poster" or "one sheet" it can do a great job that is indistinguishable from what anyone/artist can do in HTML/CSS.

But, fine-tuning is still required - like ask it to use less used fonts and less gradients :)

I'd go this direction as long as it had a real keyboard... Maybe it's time for the blackberry to reemerge.

I cannot figure out what people are doing to spend all this money.

I have used a $60 per month Cursor plan on auto, and have never come close to using up my included usage, and I probably have it planning and coding and working for me all through the evenings 4 nights a week.

What on earth are people doing differently that it's costing them so much?

Maybe enabling on-demand usage or other paid models, or on higher modes? What are you doing that requires this? The output from Auto for me is crazy good for the tasks I'm working on, and have yet to run into an issue where it couldn't perform at a high enough level.

We have been interviewing people at work to join our team and they tell us they use $2K per month in tokens with their current employers.... I can't even fathom what's going on here where that would be happening.

I’m a devils advocate on this argument.

Yes, a big company can take it away, but I think they have to leave it online long enough to get your money’s worth.

So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.

The problem with “code quality” and LLM’s taking over your first 3 “pillars” is basically that LLM’s don’t care.

I recently had Cursor evaluate a huge code base that we took over. All public stuff, nothing scary security wise, but it was so convoluted that it was taking me forever to find the bugs. It was written by a person, I should add.

I did this in cursor and after one prompt using Plan, it found all the bugs, created a plan to fix them, it looked good, and I had the agent create the fix.

It took 30 minutes.

The client had this project in the hands of another company without ai tools and they couldn’t fix the bugs she told them about.

So my point is, if we are holding on to our jobs for dear life on the basis that “code quality” matters, you might as well kick down the 4th pillar. Like I said, the LLM does not care.

Day 1.

I remember firing up gpt and asking for some code. It was simple JavaScript to solve a problem and I knew immediately, this was the beginning of the end for software development as we knew it.

I built an app I struggled to create for years in a weekend.

Started playing with the API, etc.

I was very much in my oh-no period that very first few months.

You can ask AI to comment an entire code base now in as much detail as you need.

Yes, constantly.

I don’t know what I do differently, but I can get Cursor to do exactly what I want all the time.

Maybe it’s because it takes more time and effort, and I don’t connect to GitHub or actual databases, nor do I allow it to run terminal commands 99% of the time.

I have instructions for it to write up readme files of everything I need to know about what it has done. I’ve provided instructions and created an allow list of commands so it creates local backups of files before it touches them, and I always proceed through a plan process for any task that is slightly more complicated, followed by plan cleanup, and execution. I’m super specific about my tech stack and coding expectations too. Tests can be hard to prompt, I’ll sometimes just write those up by hand.

Also, I’ve never had to pay over my $60 a month pro plan price tag. I can’t figure out how others are even doing this.

At any rate, I think the problem appears to be the blind commands of “make this thing, make it good, no bugs” and “this broke. Fix!” I kid you not, I see this all the time with devs. Not at all saying this is what you do, just saying it’s out there.

And “high quality code” doesn’t actually mean anything. You have to define what that means to you. Good code to me may be slop to you, but who knows unless it is defined.

For personal projects:

Used ai to create my own mind mapping tool for private use.

I also created a private cursor-like / loveable-like tool that I can use for my own vibe code prototyping on the go with my phone.

When it comes to games I absolutely don’t care what they used AI for because the point of games is to be fun.

If it’s fun and you used AI, that’s fine with me. The game served its purpose.

The line for me is copyright on images. If you use ai to generate images to copy a popular game art style, I think that’s over the line. Create your own art or pay the artist.

Code however, I see it as a tool. You wouldn’t scold me for hiring a cheap programmer to get the work done. So to me, AI for coding isn’t any different than hiring a programmer to do the work for you. No problem there.

That being said, I do game dev, and using AI to help figure out an algorithm or do the work of creating my inputs code, etc is a big time saver. However, at the moment, it really struggles with anything else because it has no vision and explaining to it how to put code together for a weird game mechanic or level generation reminds me of that game where you explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the 3rd grade, and you tell your teacher to put the peanut butter on the bread and she scoops it out with her hand…

Adobe Fireworks - easiest vector / photo editor crossover app there ever was.

Adobe Animate is still just Flash from a tool-standoint.

Are you referring to the SWF file format?

I feel like I can't really have fun and be myself when I see people shooting video all around me.

I like to be silly with my kids and close friends, I like to act out around the people who find me fun or funny. But the rest of the world would ridicule me, or make fun of me, or make me a meme possibly.

This makes me sad because as a young man I could just be out there and fun, and at the end of the day, I held a place in the memories of my closest friends, maybe a handful of bystanders. But today, I could be gif'd and immortalized for my silly actions without my permission.

I disagree with the sentiment, you're in public, it's fair game. That just means I have to bend to your world-view, and you don't have to be considerate of mine.

My favorite example, and the ones I show my team and my employer, is that I can have AI look at a string of fields for my database table and generate all the views for the display, add, and edit forms for those fields in exactly the way I instruct, and that saves me as much as 30 minutes every time I do it. If I do this 8 times in a day, that would save me about 4 hours. Especially when those forms require things like lookups and extra JavaScript functionality.

Another great example, is the power of tabbing with Cursor. If I want to change the parameters of a function in my React app, I can be at one of the functions anywhere in my screen, add a variable that relates to what is being rendered, and I can now quickly tab through to find all the spots that also are affected in that screen, and then it usually helps apply the changes to the function. It's like smart search and replace where I can see every change that needs made but it knows how to make it more intelligently than just replacing a line of code - and I didn't have to write the regex to find it, AND it usually helps get the work done in the function as well to reflect the change. That could save me 3-5 minutes, and I could do that 5 times a day maybe, and another almost half-hour is saved.

The point is, these small things add up SO fast. Now I'm incredibly efficient because the tedious part of programming has been sped up so much.