I wanted to understand the state of the art by giving myself a hard problem that was also really useful to me. 

But what is the state of the art? 

That's not clear and the only way to make it clear, just like anything in life, is to do it.

To start off I have some real…

Now did AI do all the work for me.

Oh my God, no.

If you believe the Twitter hyper masters we're super close to having superhuman AI come up with complex logic and brand new algorithms in a flash. 

The great and powerful Oz of LLMs will come up with the architecture, write

Coding with AI is equal parts 'holy shit, it fucking works' and utterly frustrating drudgery/pain and back again. 

It's still mostly the second part. 

It's a wave of emotional highs and lows. 

Don't get me wrong.  It's incredible that I can get a program ex nihilio, like the…

I started off with Sublime editor.

Sublime is basically a glorified text editor.  A very nice text editor but a text editor nevertheless.

And I quickly learned that this was a very bad choice for AI coding.

Sublime is fine if you know exactly what you're doing in code but I…

I needed something better than a text editor.  My COO, a long time coder, saved me a lot of trouble by letting me know I should switch to Cursor AI, a fork of VS Code that uses AI natively throughout the app.

Cursor is brilliant.

6/

It also has incredibly important features like 'use with code base' when you ask a question, which helpfully feeds the codebase in as a reference.

7/

It even has a life saving feature where you can press 'Continue' when GPT runs out of space to finish its answer.  This happens because GPT has a limited token response output so it sometimes fails to finish outputting the updated code. The button basically instructs GPT to…

When it came to errors, I quickly learned that Perplexity was better at troubleshooting errors, because it can search the web. That means it can find much more timely answers. 

The Pro version is basically GPT4 or Claude Opus with RAG and a web index.  Plain old GPT or…

When you start out, the AI is going to give you a big single file program.  It will inevitably be called main.py.

As you add features it's going to get really, really unwieldy and unmaintainable.

If you don't ask for modularity right away you won't get it.

Even…

Here's just a few of the things it did with my program:

1) Set the OpenAI API key right in the file like so:  OPENAI_API_KEY=abc123

This is absolutely terrible practice because it's super easy to leak that key in hundreds of ways. Much better to put it in an environmental…

Even when it is given examples of the correct call it often screws it up still.

Take a look at this repeated typo/hallucination that GPT-4 makes again and again and again.  Here is the incorrect line:

client.chat_completions.create()

But the correct call is this:…