Comment by greenchair
8 hours ago
AI assisted coding makes you dumber full stop. It's obvious as soon as you try it for the first time. Need a regex? No need to engage your brain. AI will do that for you. Is what it produced correct? Well who knows? I didn't actually think about it. As current gen seniors brains atrophy over the next few years the scarier thing is that juniors won't even be learning the fundamentals because it is too easy to let AI handle it.
Strongly disagree. If the complexity of your work it the software development itself, then it means that your work is not very complex to begin with.
It has always been extremely annoying to fight with people who mistake the ability of building or engaging with complicated systems (like your regex) with competency.
I work in building AI for a very complex application, and I used to be in the top 0.1% of Python programmers (by one metric) at my previous FAANG job, and Claude has completely removed any barriers I have between thinking and achieving. I have achieved internal SOTA for my company, alone, in 1 week, doing something that previously would have taken me months of work. Did I have to check that the AI did everything correctly? Sure. But I did that after saving months of implementation time so it was very worth it.
We're now in the age of being ideas-bound instead of implementation-bound.
What was the metric?
I agree. In the beginning when I was starting, I let the AI do all of the work and merely verified that it does what I want, but then I started running into token limits. In the first two weeks I honestly was just looking forward for the limit to refresh. The low effort made it feel like I would be wasting my time writing code without the agent.
Starting with week three the overall structure of the code base is done, but the actual implementation is lacking. Whenever I run out of tokens I just started programming by hand again. As you keep doing this, the code base becomes ever more familiar to you until you're at a point where you tear down the AI scaffolding in the places where it is lacking and keep it where it makes no difference.