Really enjoyed the Salvatore's write up. Two things grabbed my attention:
1. He is also an admirer of the Claude! I can't emphasize this enough but coding has almost always been an isolating state for me. But now, you can feel some support with some intelligence! This is sci-fi! it's much more efficient than Google Search and docs. Not sure about the value added here, but when Salvatore explains how he's using the Gen AI for writing software, I really get to grips with my impostor syndrome.
2. Second: "One thing I particularly liked about the article was that Salvatore explained how he is using the Claude (any Gen AI) in his work. Salvatore is one of the programming figures for me (started professional programming in 2016~2017) and I am feeling really relived that these people confess using the Gen AI trick for writing software." this is were SWE ends and product starts!
Absolutely, I get any help I can, to do better work.
Trick for the sci-fi story I used. Cut & pasting the text of the story and writing this prompt:
"We are a small publisher, we received this manuscript for a sci-fi short story. We only publish top quality stuff, we don't want any garbage. Please tell us if this story is worth publishing in our high quality series, and what we should reply to the author."
This way it is really sharp and identifying what is lacking. It's like an editor review. Then you go back to work for 2/3 days. And check back to see if your work improved. But the important part here is that many bad things he says you know are true. You needed somebody to tell you, to put more efforts into it.
With programming, while I have some knowledge of math, sometimes for the kind of programming I want to do I need to explore stuff I didn't study or know. And also in this regard Claude has been totally incredible. And so forth.
I also use it to find potetial issues in my desing ideas. Of course if it says something that I don't recognized as a true issue, I just don't care.
I got similar experiences with Claude, it's so convenient to use it to get an idea for a concept and being able to go back-and-forth with it about some kind of a feature that needs to be built.
> I can't emphasize this enough but coding has almost always been an isolating state for me. But now, you can feel some support with some intelligence!
This part from the original commenter resonates so well with me. Working basically as a solo dev, it's fantastic to have something that provides feedback and can challenge the ideas I have, so that the final result is good.
Many interesting leads for where to look to learn more has been provided in the comments, but I wanted to point out the fact that learning most of these concepts and many more technical concepts boils down to understanding the problems they're intended to solve, and understanding those problems requires having struggled with them. Reading or studying alone will not take you there.
Despite some market imperfections, and non-monetary contributions like caregiving or volunteer activities, the money you make is a very good proxy of the value of what you produce and the impact you have. I can not simply think of a better proxy.
