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AI produces code that often looks really good, at a pace quicker than you can read it. It can be really, really hard to tell when what it's producing is a bag

AI produces code that often looks really good, at a pace quicker than you can read it. It can be really, really hard to tell when what it's producing is a bag of ** and it's leading you down the garden path. I've been a dev for 20 years (which isn't to imply I'm any good at it yet) and it's not uncommon I'll find myself leaning on the AI a bit too hard and then you realise you've lost a day to a pattern that wasn't right, or an API it hallucinated, in the first place. It basically feels like I'm being gaslit constantly, even though I've changed my tools to some that feel like they work better with AIs. I expect it's difficult for junior devs to cope with that and keep up with senior devs, who normally would have offloaded tasks to them instead of AI.

nathan_compton 1y ago
One thing about AI that I did not anticipate is how useful it is for refactoring though. Like if I have walked down (with the help of an AI or not) a bad path, I can refactor the entire codebase to use a better strategy in much less time than before because refactoring is uniquely suited to AI - if you provide the framework, the design, the abstractions, AI can rewrite a bunch of code to use that new design. I'm frankly not sure if its faster than doing a refactor by hand, but its certainly less boring. If you have good tests and a good sense for design and you know how to constrain and direct the AI, you can avoid a lot of boring work. That is something.
- cs02rm0 1y ago
  It is, but again I'd caution that it will go and do things you don't want it to. For instance, I've been working on an app recently with some social share icon logos in svg. Whenever I get it to tweak bits of code elsewhere in the same file, 80% of the time it goes and changes those svg icons, completely corrupting some of the logos, curiously consistent in how it does it. Several times I've had that slip through and had to go and undo it again, at which point it starts to feel like the superfast junior dev you're using has malign intent!

nathan_compton 1y ago

One thing about AI that I did not anticipate is how useful it is for refactoring though. Like if I have walked down (with the help of an AI or not) a bad path, I can refactor the entire codebase to use a better strategy in much less time than before because refactoring is uniquely suited to AI - if you provide the framework, the design, the abstractions, AI can rewrite a bunch of code to use that new design. I'm frankly not sure if its faster than doing a refactor by hand, but its certainly less boring. If you have good tests and a good sense for design and you know how to constrain and direct the AI, you can avoid a lot of boring work. That is something.

cs02rm0 1y ago
It is, but again I'd caution that it will go and do things you don't want it to. For instance, I've been working on an app recently with some social share icon logos in svg. Whenever I get it to tweak bits of code elsewhere in the same file, 80% of the time it goes and changes those svg icons, completely corrupting some of the logos, curiously consistent in how it does it. Several times I've had that slip through and had to go and undo it again, at which point it starts to feel like the superfast junior dev you're using has malign intent!