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> But personally, AI coding has pushed me full circle back to ruby. This happened to me too. I’m using Python in a project right now purely because it’s easier

> But personally, AI coding has pushed me full circle back to ruby. This happened to me too. I’m using Python in a project right now purely because it’s easier for the AI to generate and easier for me to verify. AI coding saves me a lot of time, but the code is such low quality there’s no way I’d ever trust it to generate C.

somewhereoutth 2y ago
> AI coding saves me a lot of time, but the code is such low quality Given that low quality code is perhaps the biggest time-sink relating to our work, I'm struggling to reconcile these statements?
- dkersten 2y ago
  It depends on what you need the code for. If it’s something mission critical, then using AI is likely going to take more time than it saves, but for a MVP or something where quality is less important than time to market, it’s a great time saver. Also there’s often a spectrum of importance even within a project, eg maybe some internal tools aren’t so important vs a user facing thing. Complexity also varies: AI is pretty good at simple CRUD endpoints, and it’s a lot faster than me at writing HTML/CSS UI’s (ie the layout and styling, without the logic). If you can isolate the AI code to code that doesn’t need to be high quality, and write the code that doesn’t yourself, it can be a big win. Or if you use AI for an MVP that will be incrementally replaced by higher quality code if the MVP succeeds, can be quite valuable since it allows you to test ideas quicker. I personally find it to be a big win, even though I also spend a lot of time fighting the AI. But I wouldn’t want to build on top of AI code without cleaning it up myself. There are also some tasks I’ve learned to just do myself: eg I do not let the AI decide my data model/database schema. Data is too important to leave it up to an AI to decide. Also outside of simple CRUD operations, it generates quite inefficient database querying so if it’s on a critical path, perhaps write the queries yourself.

somewhereoutth 2y ago

> AI coding saves me a lot of time, but the code is such low quality Given that low quality code is perhaps the biggest time-sink relating to our work, I'm struggling to reconcile these statements?

dkersten 2y ago
It depends on what you need the code for. If it’s something mission critical, then using AI is likely going to take more time than it saves, but for a MVP or something where quality is less important than time to market, it’s a great time saver. Also there’s often a spectrum of importance even within a project, eg maybe some internal tools aren’t so important vs a user facing thing. Complexity also varies: AI is pretty good at simple CRUD endpoints, and it’s a lot faster than me at writing HTML/CSS UI’s (ie the layout and styling, without the logic). If you can isolate the AI code to code that doesn’t need to be high quality, and write the code that doesn’t yourself, it can be a big win. Or if you use AI for an MVP that will be incrementally replaced by higher quality code if the MVP succeeds, can be quite valuable since it allows you to test ideas quicker. I personally find it to be a big win, even though I also spend a lot of time fighting the AI. But I wouldn’t want to build on top of AI code without cleaning it up myself. There are also some tasks I’ve learned to just do myself: eg I do not let the AI decide my data model/database schema. Data is too important to leave it up to an AI to decide. Also outside of simple CRUD operations, it generates quite inefficient database querying so if it’s on a critical path, perhaps write the queries yourself.