Comment by ChicagoDave
8 hours ago
Everything the OP says can be true, but there’s a tipping point where you learn to break through the cruft and generate good code at scale.
It requires refactoring at scale, but GenAI is fast so hitting the same code 25 times isn’t a dealbreaker.
Eventually the refactoring is targeted at smaller and smaller bits until the entire project is in excellent shape.
I’m still working on Sharpee, an interactive fiction authoring platform, but it’s fairly well-baked at this point and 99% coded by Claude and 100% managed by me.
Sharpee is a complex system and a lot of the inner-workings (stdlib) were like coats of paint. It didn’t shine until it was refactored at least a dozen times.
It has over a thousand unit tests, which I’ve read through and refactored by hand in some cases.
The results speak for themselves.
https://sharpee.net/ https://github.com/chicagodave/sharpee/
It’s still in beta, but not far from release status.
When using GenAI (and not), enforcing guardrails is critical. Documenting decisions is critical.
Sharpee’s success is rooted in this and its recorded:
https://github.com/ChicagoDave/sharpee/tree/main/docs/archit...