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> Man people sure are taking my little project seriously. Honestly I don't care whether you take my word for it? We don't sell an AI code assistant. I just thou

by kiitos 1y ago

> Man people sure are taking my little project seriously. Honestly I don't care whether you take my word for it? We don't sell an AI code assistant. I just thought the experience was interesting so I published it. When you write a blog article about your "little project" and publish it on your very public company's public blog, then the obvious result is that people on the internet will take that article and your project seriously. It's disingenuous to say that you were just writing this stuff up because you found it interesting, by putting it on the CloudFlare blog, and committing it to the CloudFlare GitHub org, it's undeniably something more than that. > But yeah here we are. Take from it what you will. Again I'm not trying to sell you an AI code assistant! Nobody is claiming that you're trying to sell anyone an AI code assistant. But you absolutely *were* trying to sell us on using AI to write production code as a process or development model or whatever. > "Ugh everyone is going to blame this on the AI." It's really not the AI's fault, it was my responsibility to check this and I somehow didn't. I don't think anyone would assign blame to the AI itself, I think the issue is in exactly how that AI was integrated into whatever development workflow was used to commit and push and ship to production the relevant code. You can say "well this particular bug would have just as easily happened even if I wasn't using AI" and that may be true, but it's not really an interesting or convincing argument. The project was pretty clearly documented and advertised, explicitly, as an exemplar of AI-driven development of production-quality code, so it's gonna be judged in that context. More fundamentally, the underlying criticism is more along the lines that: using AI to generate code on your behalf, doesn't meet the same standards of quality as the code you should be expected to write yourself, as a senior domain expert, and (presumably) well-compensated engineer on the project. And also, that this gap in quality isn't actually adequately bridged by code review. Which seems to be a position supported by available evidence.

kentonv 1y ago
> When you write a blog article about your "little project" and publish it on your very public company's public blog, then the obvious result is that people on the internet will take that article and your project seriously. Huh? What blog post? I never wrote any blog post about this, nor did anyone else at Cloudflare. All I did was publish an OAuth library on GitHub. I wrote it because we needed one as part of a broader project. The goal of the project was never to demonstrate AI coding practices, the goal was to build a framework for MCP servers, and one thing we needed for that was an OAuth implementation. It happens that I used AI to build it, so I made note of this in the readme, and also included the prompts in the commit history, as this seemed like the honest and appropriate thing to do. Two months later, someone posted it to Hacker News, highlighting this note -- and then everyone got very excited and/or angry about it. Other people wrote a bunch of blog posts about it. Not me.

by kiitos 1y ago

kentonv 1y ago

> When you write a blog article about your "little project" and publish it on your very public company's public blog, then the obvious result is that people on the internet will take that article and your project seriously. Huh? What blog post? I never wrote any blog post about this, nor did anyone else at Cloudflare. All I did was publish an OAuth library on GitHub. I wrote it because we needed one as part of a broader project. The goal of the project was never to demonstrate AI coding practices, the goal was to build a framework for MCP servers, and one thing we needed for that was an OAuth implementation. It happens that I used AI to build it, so I made note of this in the readme, and also included the prompts in the commit history, as this seemed like the honest and appropriate thing to do. Two months later, someone posted it to Hacker News, highlighting this note -- and then everyone got very excited and/or angry about it. Other people wrote a bunch of blog posts about it. Not me.