Comment by bsimpson
5 days ago
There's been so much pressure to use AI at work.
My codebase is a zen garden I've been raking for 6 years. I have concerns about what's going to happen after a few months of "we're using AI cause they told us to."
5 days ago
There's been so much pressure to use AI at work.
My codebase is a zen garden I've been raking for 6 years. I have concerns about what's going to happen after a few months of "we're using AI cause they told us to."
This is the time to define your zen gardening style with formal tools.
You know just the way you like it, right?
Create an .editorconfig that describes the style, create linters and AST parsers that define your style in a concrete way. (You can actually create these with AI from your existing codebase btw =P)
Then when the AI comes in, it has to use those tools to confirm whatever it produces conforms to the zen garden style you've defined. It's just tools in a loop. Give it the tools to determine what it did is up to par and it will do it.
Peace and harmony for all.
That must be so satisfying. I’ve heard the phrase “code farming” before, but I like the zen garden analogy.
If the future is indeed AI, and I’m certainly hearing a lot of people using it extensively, then I think there has to be a mindset shift. Our job will change from craft to damage limitation. Our goal will be to manage a manic junior developer who produces a mixture of good code and slop without architectural level reasoning. Code will rot fast and correctness will hinge on testing as much as you can.
It seems like a horrible future. However, it does seem to me that given decades we were unable to build good development practices. Our tooling is terrible. Most of our languages are terrible. Our solution was to let inexperienced devs create languages with all the same flaws, repeating the same mistakes. Web dev is a great example of inefficient software dev that has held the world to ransom. Maybe AI slop is payback for software developers.