matdevdug

matdevdug, 1 hour ago to ai

One thing that’s funny about #ai and #programming is I keep hearing the same thing. “Oh I use it for generic snippets, just common tasks and functions”.

The amusing thing about that is when I first started working with a #php app years ago there was already a solution to that problem. It was called “the PHP Cookbook” published by O’Reilly. I was told “oh we buy you a PDF copy and you just search for whatever you are trying to do and use that code. It saves a ton of time for junior programmers.”

Not only was it true, it did save me a ton of time and headaches, but we didn’t need to steal anything. The authors got paid, it worked offline, it didn’t require scraping the entirety of human knowledge to write or nuclear power plants worth of energy to distribute.

It also helped me learn. Since I would have a solid foundation to the solution, I felt more confident experimenting. I always had a known-functioning standard library solution as my base. So when something broke I knew where to start debugging.

Just an incredible thought that instead of paying $20 for a pdf once we decided this was the way to go.