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When I have to be that specific with it, it would be faster for me to just write it directly in my normal IDE with great auto complete

it would be faster for me to just write it directly in my normal IDE

Then you are a much better developer than me (which you may very well be). I'd like to think I'm pretty good, and I've many times spent hours trying to think through complex SQL queries or getting all the details right in some tricky equation or algorithm. Writing the same code with an AI often takes 2-20 minutes.

If it's faster for me, it might not be faster for everybody, but it is probably faster for many people.

The way to get better is to do it a lot. Every time you dig through a problem to solve it, you're not just learning about that problem - you're learning about every problem near it in the problem space, including the meta-problems about how to get information, solve problems, and test solutions.

In a sense you're slowly building the LLM in your head, but it's more valuable there because of the much-better idea evaluation, and lack of network/GPU overhead.

If you have to spend significant amount of time thinking things through how do you know the output from AI is correct and covers all details?
how do you know the output from AI is correct and covers all details?

Same way as any other code. You look at it, ask the 'author' to explain any parts you don't understand, reason through what it's doing and then test it.

That’s so much slower than writing it myself though.

The only reason to bother doing that with a junior developer is to teach them.

You have to do all those steps no matter if you write it yourself of if an AI helps you generate the code. Just typing the first thing that comes into your head and not bothering to test it will rarely create good code in all but the most trivial cases.

I find having an AI write out the algorithm and then walking me through the steps and generating test cases for all the corner case much faster than, looking up the algorithm online, trying to understand it, implementing all the details and then writing a test suite for it by hand. But I guess YMMV.

Ok i dont know. When I first read it, it sounded like you have to spoon feed details until AI gets it right. Or perhaps your ide could be better!

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