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Comment by jliptzin

2 days ago

I am probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for this but if you’re going to have AI write your code, you’ll get the most mileage out of letting it do its thing and building tests to make sure everything works. Don’t look at the code it generates - it’s gonna be ugly. Your job is to make sure it does what it’s supposed to. If there’s a bug, tell it what’s wrong and to fix the bug. Let it wade through its own crap - that’s not your tech debt. This is a new paradigm. No one is going to be writing code anymore, just almost like no one is checking the assembly output of a compiler anymore.

This is just my experience. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I try to get AI to write code that works and is elegant, or if I’m working inside the same codebase that AI is adding cruft to, I don’t get much of a speed up. Only when I avoid opening up a file of code myself and let AI do its thing do I get the 10x speed up.

What is the time of the longest-lived actively developed and deployed codebase where this approach has been successful so far and your co-maintainers aren't screaming bloody murder?