Comment by drusepth
1 month ago
> Solve enough problems relying on AI writing the code as a black box, and over time your grasp of coding will worsen, and you wont be undestanding what the AI should be doing or what it is doing wrong - not even at the architectural level, except in broad strokes.
Using AI myself _and_ managing teams almost exclusively using AI has made this point clear: you shouldn't rely on it as a black box. You can rely on it to write the code, but (for now at least) you should still be deeply involved in the "problem solving" (that is, deciding _how_ to fix the problem).
A good rule of thumb that has worked well for me is to spend at least 20 min refining agent plans for every ~5 min of actual agent dev time. YMMV based on plan scope (obviously this doesn't apply to small fixes, and applies even moreso to larger scopes).
What I find the most "enlightening" and also frightening thing is that I see people that I've worked with for quite some time and who I respected for their knowledge and abilities have started spewing AI nonsense and are switching off their brains.
It's one thing to use AI like you might use a junior dev that does your bidding or rubber duck. It's a whole other ballgame, if you just copy and paste whatever it says as truth.
And regarding that it obviously doesn't apply to small fixes: Oh yes it does! So many times the AI has tried to "cheat" its way out of a situation it's not even funny any longer (compare with yesterday's post about Anthropic's original take home test in which they themselves warn you not to just use AI to solve this as it likes to try and cheat, like just enabling more than one core). It's done this enough times that sometimes I don't trust Claude with an answer I don't fully understand myself well enough yet and dismiss a correct assessment it made as "yet another piece of AI BS".
> if you just copy and paste whatever it says as truth.
It's more difficult than ever, because Google is basically broken and knowledge is shared much less these days, just look at stack overflow