Comment by taosx
1 day ago
I will never believe the premise of 100x boost from AI, why are we still pushing this narative? Yes, AI is amazing in small, constrained, focused pieces of code but the code is nowhere fit for production and the last 10% needed to ship shows that the 90% that's already been done by AI is absolutely trash. Hacks on top of hacks.
Is no one trying to ship polished things to customers anymore, will each of us have a hacky, bugged version of the same thing with different quirks?
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My first ever software project even before I worked as a swe had less bugs and frictions than all recent projects where AI was used. Some people like mitchellh seem to know what they are doing (I have not taken a look at ghostty's codebase as it's in zig) so I sometimes get the feeling I'm holding it wrong but in the end everyone around me seems to have similar problems with shipping.
I think the trick is to learn exactly what things AI can give a 100x speed boost with, and use it for those tasks, and only those.
The tasks where there's little-to-no speed boost at all -- do those yourself. You'll feel better and happier.
The best thing is you'll have much more time to work on those things now, because AI is doing all the stupid/boring/dumb/mundane/I-hate-this-so-much/I-don't-ever-want-to-think-about-this tasks for you, the ones that normally make your brain dribble out your earholes.
Good points.
First use of AI code generation only recently - I think the key is to throw away code until you can one-shot the app. You wouldn't employ a dentist and tell them half-way through what they must do next.
That's just my first impression.
Interestingly, I started with Gemini and switched to ChatGPT using the initial creativity of Gemini as the starting point.
So like search results, why go to page 7 if you can just retry/rewrite repeatedly and never move passed page 1 because at one point, you'll find the right page at the top. As they say "too many cooks spoil the broth" so just get the menu selection right and the perfect meal will be delivered, and if it's not, don't send it back, throw it away and reorder! The cook won't care - it's a robot - no feelings.
If you can't one-shot it, or almost one-shot it - then you f##### up, not it.