I haven't tried copilot yet. I have tried Claude 3.5, which is unexpectedly brilliant. I use it very regularly. But almost entirely useful for writing new code,

I haven't tried copilot yet. I have tried Claude 3.5, which is unexpectedly brilliant. I use it very regularly. But almost entirely useful for writing new code, not fixing old code. I take your point with respect to understanding large existing codebases. AIs don't yet seem to deal well with strategic large-context thinking. But things are changing at such a furious pace, so that may change sometime much sooner than either of us expect. But you are right. At the present moment in time, AIs are not particularly good at that. But overall, I am much more optimistic than you are. I think AIs will save us time, so that we can spend more time on issues of overall structure that make "spending months to understand a codebase" a thing of the very distant past. I have certainly worked on codebases that require "months to understand". But I would (perhaps naively) like to think that's a symptom of a disease that codebases shouldn't have, and that modern codebases usually don't have anymore (but sometimes do).