Comment by wokwokwok
5 months ago
"no lines of code directly written, just directing the AI"
/skeptical face.
Without fail, every. single. person. I've met who says that, actually means "except for the code that I write", or "except for how I link the code it build together by hand".
If you are 50kloc in to a large complex project that you have literally written none of, and have, eg. used cursor to generate the code without any assistance... well, you should start a startup.
...because, that's what devin was supposed to be, and it was enormously and famously terrible at it.
So that would be either a) terribly exciting, or b) hyperbole.
I’m currently doing something very similar to what GP is doing - I’m building a hobby project that’s a desktop app with web frontend. It’s a map editor with a 3D view. My estimate is that 80-90% of the code was written by AI. Sure, I did have to intervene or write some more complex parts myself but it’s still exciting to me that in many cases it took just a single prompt to add a new feature to it or change existing behavior. Judging from the complexity of the project it would take me in the past 4-5x longer if I were to write it completely by hand. It’s a game changer for me.
> My estimate is that 80-90% of the code was written by AI
Nice! It is entirely reasonable both to do that and to be excited about it.
…buuut, if that’s what you’re doing, you should say so.
Not:
“no lines of code directly written, just directing the AI”
Because those (gluing together AI code by hand and having the agent do everything) are different things, and one of them is much much MUCH harder to get right than the other one.
That last 10-15%. Self driving cars are the same story right?
I don’t think this is a fair take. For self driving cars, you care about that because safety is involved and the reliability of the AI is the product itself.
For OP, the product is the product, how they got there is mostly irrelevant. We don’t really care what IDE they used (outside of being a tooling nerd).
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That's the point of the experiment I'm doing, what it takes to get these things to be able to generate all the code, and I'm just directing.
I literally have not written a line of code. The AI agent configures the build systems. It executes the `go install` command. It configures the infrastructure via terraform.
It takes a lot of reading of the code that's generated to see what I agree with or not, and redirecting refactorings. Understanding how to describe problem statements that are translated into design docs that are translated into task lists. It's still a lot of knowledge work on how to build software. But now I can do the coding that might have taken a day from those plans in 20 minutes.
Regarding startups, there's nothing here I'm doing that isn't just learning the tools of agentic coding. The business here might be advising people on how to do it themselves.
If you know how to architect code well, you can guide the AI to create smaller more targeted modules. That way as you 'write code with AI', you give it a targeted subset of the files to edit on each prompt.
In a way the AI becomes the dev and you become the code reviewer. Often as the AI is writing the code, you're thinking about the next step.
It's not like you go to claude and say "Grug now use AI, Grug say AI make app OR GRUG HIT AI WITH HAMMER!" and expect 50kloc of code to appear.
You do it one step at a time, similary to how you would structure good tickets (often even smaller).
AI often still makes shit, but you do get somewhere a whole heap load of time faster.