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Programming and Me

The journey began in 2017, when I decided to try Unity, and installed C## on windows. After a week with the mythic Brackeys tutorial, I realised I lacked the experience necessary to debug the old code, and was forced to give up.

The Dark Ages

The early 2020s then left everyone locked in, and with time on my hands, and ofcourse Linux being a new thing in my life, I picked up python. Everything then snowballed into multiple languages, and a state where I can now find C## a nothingburger when it comes to things I previously found daunting!

Copilot

Being a student, I was given free access to GitHub Copilot around 2022. And soon found myself using it to fill in boiler plate so that I could spend precious brain power on more logical part of the code. Soon enough, as one might expect, I found myself relying on it far more than any self respecting programmer should. Thankfully, Zed was on the horizon and I was more than happy to leave Microslop’s IDE, and questionably trained ML model, in the dust.

The Advent of Ai “helpers”

AI enabled IDEs like Cursor came upon my radar thanks to friends who were already using them. I was intrigued by the idea of having AI “writing code for me”, and decided to give it a try. After falling into obvious bugs and errors for weeks, I realised this was another copilot moment, and it was soon abandoned in favour of the “natural” way.

Hello darkness my old friend

A year later, I find myself looking at it in a different light, ofcourse it is still as terrible as it was a year ago, but peeling the layers back I find the old boiler plate builder in there. It’s like a ghost from the past, haunting me with its inefficiency.

Hence we are here, with me wasting kilowatts of electricity to do what the simple copilot was doing without an LLM, there may come a time when we can go back to the sweet spot of boiler place generation without the overkill of an LLM powering it with some really excellent hallucinations.

Why should you care

Articles like the vulgar display of power, and hundreds of skilled programmers mad about the AI in workspace push, there are already better critics than I, and all you must do is know where to find it.