> is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer”
Indeed, of all the possible things to say!
AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.
I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Wrestling the computer is stuff like figuring out how to recite the right incantation so Gradle will do a multi-platform fat bundle, and then migrate to the next major Gradle version. Unless you have a very specific set of kinks, tasks like these will make you want to quit your career in computers and pick up trash on the highway instead.
You very likely have some of these toil problems in your own corner of software engineering, and it can absolutely be liberating to stop having to think about the ape and the jungle when all you care about is the banana.
Now we have to figure out how to recite the right incantation to Claude to get it to recite the right incantation to Gradle in an exchange redolent of "guess the verb" from old Adventure games. Best case if you get it wrong: nothing happens. Worst case: grue will eat you.
Sanchez's Law of Abstraction applies. You haven't abstracted anything away, just added more shit to the pile.
There’s no incantation though. You ask Claude in whatever terms feel right to you to do the thing, say "update the gradle config to build a multi platform jar", and it does make it happen.
The hard part of software engineering, and indeed many other pursuits, is working out what it is you actually need to happen and articulating that clearly enough for another entity to follow your instructions.
Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.
> Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.
This just isn't the case.
English can communicate very simply a set of "if.. then.." statements and an LLM can convert them to whatever stupid config language with I'm dealing with today.
I just don't care if Cloudflare's wrangler.toml uses emojis to express cases or AWS's Cloudformation required some Shakespearean sonnet to express the dependencies in whatever the format of the day is.
Or don't get me started on trying to work out which Pulami Google module I'm supposed to use for this service. Ergh.
I can express very clearly what I want, let a LLM translate it then inspect the config and go "oh that's how you do that".
It's great, and is radically easier than working through some docs written by a person who knows what they are doing and assumed you do too.
Expressing "I want to build a Java app in a single file that I can execute on Windows, MacOS, and Linux" is absolutely straightforward and non-ambiguous in English, whereas it requires really a lot of arcane wizardry in build tooling languages to achieve the desired result.
Claude will understand and carry out this fairly complex task just fine, so I doubt you have actually worked with it yet.
No, it is not. What you are doing is something not too different from asking your [insert here freelance platform] hired remote dev to make an app and enter a cycle of testing the generated app and giving feedback, it is not wrestling the computer.
Indeed, of all the possible things to say!
AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.