Comment by hn_throwaway_99
6 days ago
I just wanted to say thanks so much publishing this, and especially your comments here - I found them really helpful and insightful. I think it's interesting (though not unexpected) that many of the other commenters' comments here show what a Rorschach test this is. I think that's kind of unfortunate, because your experience clearly showed some of the benefits and limitations/pitfalls of coding like this in an objective manner.
I am curious, did you find the work of reviewing Claude's output more mentally tiring/draining than writing it yourself? Like some other folks mentioned, I generally find reviewing code more mentally tiring than writing it, but I get a lot of personal satisfaction by mentoring junior developers and collaborating with my (human) colleagues (most of them anyway...) Since I don't get that feeling when reviewing AI code, I find it more draining. I'm curious how you felt reviewing this code.
I find reviewing AI code less mentally tiring that reviewing human code.
This was a surprise to me! Until I tried it, I dreaded the idea.
I think it is because of the shorter feedback loop. I look at what the AI writes as it is writing it, and can ask for changes which it applies immediately. Reviewing human code typically has hours or days of round-trip time.
Also with the AI code I can just take over if it's not doing the right thing. Humans don't like it when I start pushing commits directly to their PR.
There's also the fact that the AI I'm prompting is, obviously, working on my priorities, whereas humans are often working on other priorities, but I can't just decline to review someone's code because it's not what I'm personally interested in at that moment.
When things go well, reviewing the AI's work is less draining than writing it myself, because it's basically doing the busy work while I'm still in control of high-level direction and architecture. I like that. But things don't always go well. Sometimes the AI goes in totally the wrong direction, and I have to prompt it too many times to do what I want, in which case it's not saving me time. But again, I can always just cancel the session and start doing it myself... humans don't like it when I tell them to drop a PR and let me do it.
Personally, I don't generally get excited about mentoring and collaborating. I wish I did, and I recognize it's an important part of my job which I have to do either way, but I just don't. I get excited primarily about ideas and architecture and not so much about people.
Thank you so much for your detailed, honest, and insightful response! I've done a bunch of AI-assisted coding to varying degrees of success, but your comment here helped me think about it in new ways so that I can take the most advantage of it.
Again, I think your posting of this is probably the best actual, real world evidence that shows both the pros and cons of AI-assisted coding, dispassionately. Awesome work!