markjgsmith

VSCode and exoskeletons

I‘m still in the middle of a big heads down programming sprint, all aided by AI tools in VSCode. Having been super successful in building an Auth 2.0 REST API, I decided to have a go at migrating the simple vanilla JS frontend I had built for it to a React + Typescript frontend. It‘s definitely not without setback and frustrations, but when you get into a good rhythm, the AI tools can really give you super powers. It‘s quite astonishing. But it‘s a bit like driving a very powerful car. If you don‘t know what you are doing, and where you are heading, it can be quite risky.

So with all the programming, I haven‘t been feeling much like writing blog posts. I think this might have something to do with the programming being so different to what I‘m normally used to, I‘m spending a lot of time thinking about that, and I‘m conscious that I don‘t want to be writing just about AI programming tools, because I can imagine that could get quite boring to read. But the truth is, I think that AI programming tools is what is on many of our minds at the minute.

These AI coding tools really do feel like some sort of brain exoskeleton sometimes. You suddenly have the ability to clear your head of all the tedium that normally fill up your memory banks and concentrate on the real important stuff.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, happy 4th of July to everybody :) #

Thorsten Ball [19:43]: "Now you can give them tools and they do this on their own, and it’s truly just a for loop. The funny thing is, if you asked 100 engineers, 1/2 of them would say, it‘s just a for loop, and the others would say, with a smile on their face, IT’S JUST A FOR LOOP, like this is crazy. It‘s all in this model. You just give it output of 5 commands and then say what should I do next, and it goes and tries 15 other things because based on the previous conversation it now thinks the next best step the following, and ... and I‘m not going to use the same word again. It‘s nuts, it‘s bananas". #

Adam Stacoviak [1:13:37]: "There's a huge difference between using AI to help you think, and using AI to think for you. And if you are using AI to think for you, then we are heading for idiocracy and you're not going to make it [...] But if you are using it to help you think, now you are basically just a superhuman." #

Thorsten Ball [1:33:17]: "The really interesting bit for me is how will out engineering practices change? What code will we write by hand? What code will we generate? Thinking even further, will there be code that we don't check-in but instead we just check-in the prompt and just generate it on the fly? Will all code still be checked in?" #

Adam Stacoviak [1:33:55]: "How does this impact open source? [...] In a world where we can generate one off add hock tools, check ‘em into the code or not, keep the prompt or throw the prompt away, does the amount of open source diminish? Does my use of open source not matter as much, because can just generate anything I need?" #

It‘s insane how much velocity you can get when coding using one of these AI assistants. At times it‘s bordering on the ridiculous. That‘s when it‘s going well. But you really have to watch out, because the AI can lead you into some situations that could be quite disastrous. That‘s what I‘ve discovered this past week.

Getting Gemini working in VSCode was definitely a level up from the web based UI in terms of workflow. Once it was able to view and edit files directly in my VSCode workspace, things really started taking off, but it also has a tendency to output a lot, and to get carried away with things, often trying to fix unrelated things, sometimes even in the background without telling you. You definitely don't want to be blindly accepting all the changes it suggests, and in this programmer‘s humble opinion you for sure want to be using devcontainers.

I'm starting to get a feel for when it‘s going off in a strange direction, and how to interact in such a way as to get it to focus. I'm curious to try some of the other AI assistants now. Anyhow just wanted to post something quick. With any luck this week I‘ll be able to add an MCP server to the OAuth 2.0 REST API I've been building. I'm curious how that will turn out. With any luck you'll be able to connect to all my blogging data from the past 10 years through an LLM. #