Comment by overgard
5 days ago
Yeah I mean, there are definitely little scripts and stuff in my codebase that I'm happy to have an AI spit out and never look at because it's not important; but those are nice wins around the margins, not a justification of the "EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED!" insanity we've been seeing these past couple of years.
The thing is though, for that purpose, AI is just an incremental improvement. I mean, in the 80s and 90s people were quickly building crappy-but-useful things with basic or visual basic or spreadsheets and access databases, in the 2000s people built awful but functional websites in PHP, etc. I think AI is an improvement on those "scratch my itch quickly" things, but it's not a replacement for good practices.
I do think it’s a step function improvement, as someone that enjoys those crappy but infinitely-useful tools.
Those tools tend to suck in the sense that they were written for a single person, so the tool assumes that you wrote it and have the context of the author. Help text output often sucks, the UI often sucks or doesn’t exist, it might require 15 packages to be installed that no one has documented because it was never meant to be distributed.
I like it as an MVP thing to trial whether other people would use it and I need to write a “real” version of it, or if I’m the only one that will use it and I can just vibe-code the hell out of it permanently.
You used to have to decide that pretty early on, which meant a lot of talking to other people but also trying to prevent it spinning into a whole project with a PM that will never actually be done.
Dunno, ymmv, I like it a lot in the domain of “stuff that doesn’t have an oncall rotation”. I do find it super useful in that space. Still useful but much less so if the code is something I could be paged for.