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cjohnson318 10 minutes ago [-]
Was this written by AI? This is just "I automated some things, use skills instead of scripts". Like, what did you automate? How much time did you save? How can I reproduce that?
seizethecheese 4 minutes ago [-]
I too found the article lacking, however I also feel we should have a new HN guideline to not talk about whether or not something was written by AI. It’s rather tiresome, and in this case probably wrong (AIs hate leaving things incomplete).
skybrian 41 minutes ago [-]
This reads like it made things worse:
> There was an unexpected consequence: By automating the laborious parts of my work, I had, in turn, filled my day with more laborious parts.
> A menial task that took me 5 minutes once or twice a day turned into a menial task that I was doing 10-20 times a day. As I had automated the obvious parts, it left behind the glue work that never bothered me before. Now it was a substantial part of my day, and the context switching was killing me.
I assume that’s not the whole story, but I would have liked to read about the ways it made things better, too.
devolving-dev 7 minutes ago [-]
He means that he's working 10 times faster so the manual things that he does once per task have to be done 10 times, and so he starts automating those too. I'm not claiming that he's actually 10x faster, just explaining.
But it kind of fits my experience too. Less time coding, and more time gathering requirements, testing, and doing knowledge transfer etc. Then you start thinking about how to make those parts automatic via automated tests or automated documentation generation that you review etc.
eager_learner 27 minutes ago [-]
It seems the author left in a hurry because he had a lot of new laborious and menial tasks to attend to. :)
zackify 1 hours ago [-]
I just approach everything as a one off task. Fresh context.
"Use this CLI tool and figure it out. Look up this sentry issue using it"
"Add a service that watches for an error in the log. Look at the home assistant MCP data and find my phone, send a notification to it and make it send when there's an error"
Now after it manually does it and makes the code. "Make this into a skill for anytime I paste a URL with sentry inside the message"
But also important: "make that procedure a prompt file so when I invoke it I just pass X after it and it works fully"
Having too many skills for things that are very specific where you can directly invoke it via slash command, wastes context space with the skill headers I find. So I make those prompts instead
GalaxyNova 1 minutes ago [-]
What? Am I missing something? I was expecting more of a story ;-;
> There was an unexpected consequence: By automating the laborious parts of my work, I had, in turn, filled my day with more laborious parts.
> A menial task that took me 5 minutes once or twice a day turned into a menial task that I was doing 10-20 times a day. As I had automated the obvious parts, it left behind the glue work that never bothered me before. Now it was a substantial part of my day, and the context switching was killing me.
I assume that’s not the whole story, but I would have liked to read about the ways it made things better, too.
But it kind of fits my experience too. Less time coding, and more time gathering requirements, testing, and doing knowledge transfer etc. Then you start thinking about how to make those parts automatic via automated tests or automated documentation generation that you review etc.
"Use this CLI tool and figure it out. Look up this sentry issue using it"
"Add a service that watches for an error in the log. Look at the home assistant MCP data and find my phone, send a notification to it and make it send when there's an error"
Now after it manually does it and makes the code. "Make this into a skill for anytime I paste a URL with sentry inside the message"
But also important: "make that procedure a prompt file so when I invoke it I just pass X after it and it works fully"
Having too many skills for things that are very specific where you can directly invoke it via slash command, wastes context space with the skill headers I find. So I make those prompts instead