Comment by thevinter

I also had similar feelings recently. I think the article is good and captures many of the issues I have with the current state of AI development, but I feel like the conclusion/reaction is somewhat exaggerated.

Of course if someone wants to stop using AI completely that's a completely valid decision[0], but I somewhat feel like AI is just a tool that can be easily misused.

I constantly have to review giant PRs and I noticed that I'm handwaving them more and more often. We went from almost no commit messages to walls of text that no one reads. We're starting to become bottlenecked on reviews because code is coming out too fast.

But at the same time, these are mostly issues stemming from a lack of understanding of why some of the standards/processes existed in the first place. If a developer thinks the commits have to be written just to tick a checkbox, they won't care about making them readable.

And at the same time, I'm getting a lot of value from AI, in tasks that do not necessarily have such adverse effects:

- I can create quick tools to test something, or parse/process some data. In these instances code quality is not important and I don't really want to spend hours on developing it myself (just to feel accomplished?)

- I can research issues in our codebase by just providing a log file. It's not always gonna be accurate or correct but it often gives me a very good starting point, almost always quicker than I could've done it myself

- While I do not use AI to completely generate ticket descriptions, asking it to generate me a body containing the relevant code snippets and references allows me to focus on verifying that what I'm writing is correct and understandable.

Etc etc.

So I don't know if it's just the nature of my work, the fact that I have a different skillset, or different priorities. But it somehow feels weird to me wanting to completely abandon AI just because in some cases it can lead to frustrating consequences.

[0]: I too just started a new project where I'm forcing myself to use absolutely no AI!