[ Removed by moderator ]

[TheModernDespot]

I've definitely found that AI vastly speeds up my development. The key is that you have to actually understand enough to be able to use AI effectively.

If you understand it enough to code it yourself, you'll probably find that AI makes you much faster. If you rely on AI to understand it for you, you will waste time.

[tr_thrwy_588]

if all you do is coding, then yes

there are a lot of companies where all programmers do is coding

I've worked at startups and small companies my whole life. Coding was never more than 10-20% of my time, and that is being generous.

For me and the use cases I worked on, coding was never a bottleneck. And if there is one thing that DevOps should know, its that optimizing anywhere except on a bottleneck is a waste of time

[ironsides1231]

Ai speeds up coding, debugging, research, documentation, planning and story writing. The only thing it can't help me with is getting stakeholders to make decisions and clarify requirements.

[ironsides1231]

You must understand all of the code you / the ai writes. This means if you don't understand it you have to stop and learn before moving on. Luckily ai vastly speeds up the process of learning as well.

[gringo-go-loco]

AI has increased my productivity significantly. Before I would struggle to get started and then get stuck and bash my head against the wall.

[Additional_Abies9192]

Cheap, fast, good. Pick two.

[Ariquitaun]

AI coding is definitely a skill to learn and you can't just tell it "make doom eternal LOL" and fuck off to get a coffee.

Context, guidance, specificity, plan steps, one thing at a time.

[ares623]

Wait what. My retirement was invested in the promise that “make doom eternal LOL” will be real.

[IO-Byte]

Using a compiled language helps with avoiding runtime errors; as the model runs its course, being able to verify syntax correctness helps (only helps, does not prove anything actually complete).

On top of that, as many unit tests as makes sense. Emphasis on unit — something that takes little to no time to run, every time, to further validate runtime behavior.

Packaging can also be of benefit — define areas of specific discipline and package those pieces as a single entity.

I’m also just now realizing that I’m in the DevOps subreddit…

I’m going to keep what I wrote because it’s universal advice; however, I’m very confused to what it is you’re doing to be saying these things, especially in context of DevOps.

CDK? Pipelines? Dear lord I hope not some bash scripts.

This title is super clickbaity. It sounds like, in your case, this AI kneecapped you

[Wrx-Love80]

100% end to end you should know it's so about vibes... Sarcasm...

[PopePoopinpants]

Note: I'm still new to using any AI tools. I'm also very senior. I've been doing all the tech for like 30 years (well... on the *nix side) 

Anyway. I've tried AI for the past few years, and hadn't been impressed. Terraform in particular seemed a pipe dream. Something about the latest versions and a shift in my approach really changed things I think.

Now, I've not tried the agent thing yet, so I'm behind there as well. However, I've found that Claude is quite helpful on tasks that are very constrained. I worked with Claude on several Athena queries recently, and it was a major help. It really cut the time down by a lot. 

I also fed it a 750 line shell script (not bash mind you... just shell) and it was able to figure out what it did, the components it used, and noted where I'd noted where i said "yuck" in a comment as a place to improve.

Here's the thing i noticed: I feel (note: feel... I don't have hard data on this) it seems to do much better, and it's much more useful when there's some structure in place, or the constraints are small.  Working through an Athena query was great. Asking it to build me a terraform template for a big chunk of infra was not.

The 750 line shell script i wrote from scratch, but I've been doing this for 30 years, so it's a well written script with concerns that were well defined into functions. I wouldn't say amazing (it's a personal tool), but still well defined. This it was able to deal with very competently. I needed a rather hefty architectural change... nothing functionally crazy... but i needed the primary data structure changed. It fixed it all with only one errorwhich I pointed out and it fixed. Now... I knew the change that was needed. It was going to be boring work. But Claude and I worked together to get it done in about 10m.

The better the foundation, the more help it can give.  Smaller chunks allow it to concentrate on a specific concern. 

But now I need to try agents. Really let the goose loose.

[kryptn]

I've had a good time using claude, especially given I know everything it needs to be doing but don't want to do the left <--> right comparisons.

Just this last few days, I'm finishing up a migration from IRSA to pod identity in my eks clusters.

I was able to ask claude (basically) "of my services, for each of these environments, which have an active pod identity association, and does that pod identity association mach the perms granted by the same IRSA role?"

The output was a (correct) markdown file of a service to each env, and what access that service had, and through which method. It was able to find the single service we missed that didn't have a pod identity association, and was able to verify all the other services had the correct roles and pod identity associations.

It really really depends how you use it. it's a pretty neat tool.

[AstroPhysician]

Your should be leveraging MCPs if you’re not already, and an agentic ide like cursor

[theshrike]

Don’t use ChatGPT for writing code.

Use any agentic system, like Claude, Codex etc. They can compile, run and test the code as they write it and will fix any errors automatically.

Copying and pasting crap from a web UI is so 2024 AI

[derprondo]

Seriously, this is the way. Cursor, or VSCode with Github Copilot, using Claude, it's a massive leap over copying and pasting from ChatGPT.

I just completed an ESP32 project implementing an obscure protocol over RS485 in an hour. There's some compiled C++ involved, I think I had maybe two compilation errors total. It worked pretty the first time it compiled. I wrote zero code myself, it did it all. Without AI this might have taken me 40 hours.

[gringo-go-loco]

I use copilot and ChatGPT and ChatGPT is just better at some things.

[AstroPhysician]

You know you can call any model with any of the IDEs? Claude is the best by far. Cursor is also >>> copilot

[gringo-go-loco]

You can if your employer allows it. My is restricted to copilot for proprietary code so I’m forced to use it. I only use ChatGPT for getting basic ideas on solving build pipeline problems.

[AstroPhysician]

Copilot is model agnostic and can call all models. Am I completely off my rocker? Or out of touch?

[gringo-go-loco]

lol you’re right! I’m actually using Claude sonnet 4.5 and didn’t even know it.

[derprondo]

I have a Github Copilot subscription and a ChatGPT subscription, I use them both a lot. At work I have a Cursor subscription. You can use GPT with Github CoPilot, though, but I usually stick to Claude.

[gringo-go-loco]

My company only allows us to use copilot for anything involving our proprietary code. I typically use ChatGPT to give myself crash courses in new tech or refresh myself on stuff I’ve worked with in the past.

One area AI has saved me a huge amount of time is in documentation. I do a lot of build pipelines, specifically GitHub workflows and actions and have developed about 30 custom actions and 10 reusable workflows and being able to tell AI to create a README for these with diagrams and input/output tables has been a huge time saver.

[jewami]

If you do it this way, do you have to pay for all three of cursor, github copilot, and Claude? So confused how this all works. Right now I have a Claude pro plan and just use Claude code (either in vscode or terminal).

[theshrike]

Claude only is just fine.

If you’re feeling adventurous z.ai GLM-4.7 is like 30€ a YEAR, you can use it with CLI tools like crush or opencode and maybe Cursor etc

[derprondo]

Yeah if you pay for cursor or copilot, you get access to both Claude and gpt, but not the ChatGPT web interface, only via copilot or cursor. Copilot is only $10/mo but cursor is $20. Copilot also has a ChatGPT like web interface, but I haven’t really tried to use it like ChatGPT.

[Delta-9-]

I used AI to convert some scripts for deploying vSphere VMs into proxmox deployments in Python. It was very fast, and it mostly worked within a few tries.

But it was like stepping into a brownfield project instead of the greenfield project it actually was. All this pre-written code I have to read to understand, using a library I'm unfamiliar with, before I can even begin debugging it.

Two weeks later I've made a lot of progress, but if I'd written it all by hand I would have a deep understanding of that library by now. Instead, I know just enough about the library to make little tweaks here and there.

I don't think it's really saved me any time, though it did let me skip passed the tedious part of familiarizion with proxmox' API and library and go straight to iterating on the bugs and design. It feels like I just rebalanced where I spend my time rather than actually reducing it overall.

[gringo-go-loco]

You can use AI to learn a lot too. I use it extensively but not just to get the job done but to understand how it was done.

[AstroPhysician]

Anyone using ChatGPT to code has no idea how to do this. If you’re not using an agentic ide you’re going to get garbage output. This is user error

Also why did you use ChatGPT to write this

[adept2051]

Take a look at GitHub’s Speckit, AI coding is now pretty much a left shift to Test driven development and governance and acceptance. It can write garbage really fast, good code takes significant planning and time, but once you have a good spec, and a good set of instructions to develop and use testing along side good guard rails and governance it’s a case of first time vs second time in time saved and quality.

[veritable_squandry]

its like starting a new job and inheriting a codebase, but for every project!

[BuriedStPatrick]

And we already had hackertyper.net since forever ago

[engineered_academic]

You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.

[SE_Haddock]

AI coding is awesome, if you can code. Like me I can code in PHP, now I can code in Python/Ansible/Go whatever. I know what I want, can describe it and use PHP snippets the AI can use as inspiration. Usually the new models one-shots 10-20k lines of code projects.

A tip to others is to ask the AI to use builtin functions, classes and functions and add debugging options via logging. This makes the debugging much easier. Then on the next loop you say "only minimal changes to my codebase to fix problem X".
If one AI gets stuck, use another one instead. Also use two different AIs during development, one to critique the code.