Post #4389602

2026-08-04 16:45 UTC

@tbortels@infosec.exchange @mhoye@cosocial.ca Do you have an actual example to hand of a copy paste job that takes 4 hours? I can recall cases from coding myself where beating a large template into shape felt like it took forever, but in my cases, the actual wall clock time was nowhere near that.

Replies (1)

@tbortels@infosec.exchange 2026-08-04 23:09

@mhoye@cosocial.ca @Ryan1729@mastodon.social I did some stuff last week that amounted to very boring consolidation of logs from different sources (guthub CI/CD and AWS Events around spot instance evictions) and consolidating/munging them together to do some data analysis. Took me about an hour to bang it together with gemini. Looking at the resulting code - it would have been a half day of me piping to jq and working out nesting and doing simple data parsing and mapping out data structures. Nothing I haven't done in other circumstances 20 times before with different data sources, but - I only type so fast, and I have to stop and remember the weird name someone called the thing and I make typos and so on. I don't trust the AI for so so many things - but if you prompt with care, it generates code well. It works out how to query the data structures you are building and deal with quoted versus not and yeah - I'm a good 4x faster using the AI, at least for that type of task. Just doing a data dictionary for the different jaon objects formats those will output would take an hour or more. Would I ask it for medical or legal or tax advice? Lol no. Do I frequently stump it or have to say "stop, that way is a dead end, do it this other way"? Yes. But I'd do exactly the same with a grad student. And do. I'm damn near 60 years old. If I never have to puzzle out some random JSON blob's structure again just to pull the 3 items I want, works for me. And the AI is pretty good at that.

Open ##4389601