Comment by techpression
1 hour ago
I spent 30min with Opus 5 generating some CSS and components for my Phoenix LiveView template project (which I use for starting new projects). Then I spent around 5 hours parsing and cleaning up the output. I could of course not have done that, but since it's my spare time project I can care about the code and quality.
I did get wins for sure (and I did save time), and I'm sure most people wouldn't even spend five minutes cleaning up, but this is definitely one place where people talk about different things regarding whatever x speedup they get.
> but since it's my spare time project I can care about the code and quality.
I suppose it's yet to be seen, but I'm seeing a lot of spaghetti code being dump into the codebase I'm working on at the moment by other devs. I don't think it's wrong per se, but human code would have thought more about the right abstractions and trade-offs for future maintainability.
There is a gap right now between what an AI can and can't do, and I don't think it's just a time and cost limitation either. It seems like current AIs are very good at writing good code at a surface level, but very bad code when you zoom out a little.
We have a lot of non-technical people committing code these days to constrained microservices and from time to time things break and I'll take a look and I'm always just like wtf am I reading? You see code so bad that you'd immediately fire a human engineer had the wrote it. Thing like explicit hacks to bypass errors that it should not be bypassing or mock data to fake some API that it wasn't able to access. Stuff which literally no human coder I've ever worked with would be contemplate doing...
I think it remains to be seen if the 2-10x speed up some are claiming to have today will persist if the junk code continues to grow.