rfitz

Solid read. Been hearing a lot of great things about GLM 5.2 lately specifically, I need to slot some time in to try it out

I can definitely relate to wanting to feel accomplished after a coding session and how AI can sort of strip you of that feeling at times. For me personally, I started to find the joy in the AI + coding relationship once I realized I just had to reframe my thinking a bit.

It's less about code generation for me and more about opportunities to learn new things. It could be as simple as having it optimize my code in a way I hadn't even thought of or it could be me wanting to learn a new complex architectural pattern I haven't had the time to deep dive but have wanted to. Now I can spin something up and have a base understanding of it in minutes. That's exciting to me more than anything else. In a way, it takes me back to way earlier in my career when every day felt like I was learning something new and cool on the job from more seniors devs. I think as you get more senior and experienced, those "cool" learning moments start to happen a little less, so having AI be able to reignite that is exciting in a lot of ways.

It's definitely easy to get caught up in that and I think for a while I was probably in that headspace, but where the excitement started to set in was the realization that it could be leveraged to reduce the less "fun" parts of my day so I could focus on what I enjoy most. It's not purely a "AI writes code for me" kind of hype (although that's a nice benefit). I spend a lot less time debugging tiny issues hidden in legacy code or sifting through poorly written docs for libs that the codebase depends on, for example. That's a huge win and it lets me focus my time on producing quality work.

No need to apologize for the jadedness at all! I think we're in an era of AI fatigue where every piece of content you see feels like it's AI generated (or assisted). Arguably most points in this post can be looked at as common sense to some degree. I think what I was trying to get across was my mental models and view on AI in tech since I still see a shocking amount of devs who look at it simply as a means to generate code for them and nothing more.

I'm planning on writing more that dives a bit deeper into experimentation I've done as far as tooling, MCP servers, etc that may be a bit more intriguing to those who have already dove into the AI side of things.

Hey HN, ChromeExtensionKit is a side project of mine that includes a bunch of different starter templates for basic (HTML/CSS/JS) and React-based Chrome extensions (with setup and publish scripts) as well as some fully functional example extensions for inspiration. I originally built the starter templates as I found myself setting up and configuring every extension project roughly the same way and wanted to speed that process up in the future. The kit also includes an ebook with actionable growth tips and tricks.

If anyone has any questions, I would love to answer them!