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Comment by overfeed

6 days ago

> On the flip side, it has allowed me to accomplish many lower-complexity backlog projects that I just wouldn’t have even attempted before

This has been my experience at well - AI coding tools are like a very persistent junior-- that loves reading specs and documentation. The problem for AI companies is "automated burndown of your low-complexity backlog items" isn't a moneymaker, even though that's what we have. So they have to sell a dream that may be realized, or may not.

The benchmark project in the article is the perfect candidate for AI: well defined requirements with precise technical terms (RFCs), little room for undefined behavior and tons of reference implementations. This is an atypical project. I am confident AI agent write an HTTP2 server, but it will also repeatedly fail to write sensible tests for human/business processes that a junior would excel at.

I'm currently still somewhat in the AI skeptic camp but you've intrigued me... I'm curious about taking a lesser-known RFC and trying to see what kind of implementation one of the current code-generating models actually comes up with from the spec.