Comment by zzzeek

> When I was a child, I remember my parents saying be careful with the bad guys who offer candies at the school gate, those are not candies, those are drugs.

I remember my parents saying "be careful with the bad guys who mow your lawn, fix your appliances, and drive all you kids to school. those are not people who are helping your family get things done more efficiently, those are drugs"

seriously what are we doing with this "AI is a drug" metaphor? Drugs aren't reading logs for me and writing unit tests?

> Once you start using AI coding agents, things spiral out of control very quickly.

no? maybe AI is not for you?

> Except you don’t write the code anymore, you just ask AI to do it, and half of the purpose of TDD (not biasing the tests by how you’ve implemented the code) is gone. But you feel you go so fast that you start not caring.

do you use code review tools? Did someone tell you to stop using them? Review your LLM's code, leave comments, tell your LLM to address the comments. Have you ever worked in management /architecture? Tech managers do this all day long before we had LLMs, it's not new. Except your workers are the smartest junior programmers you've ever had (and that is where AI is a problem, for sure - I worry for junior programmers today).

> It would not be so bad if things had stopped there, but that’s not how most human brains work. If you like something and you can have 2x, you’ll have it. I started pasting the whole Jira description of a ticket, and let AI implement it for me. Yay!! So powerful!!

totally! Have you not already implemented 10000 issues on your own and it's not boring yet? time for issue 10001 then? Whatever floats your boat...

> Control is an illusion. Other folks I’ve discussed this with agree that they don’t know 100% of what the code they are pushing to production actually does. I bet we not even 20%. Fucking scary.

sure have you ever accepted PRs from other people? ones that took a lot of work to read and understand? How is that different? except their code would actually break all the time if you didnt read it and now it's your bug to deal with because they're gone.

> Because if it was just about approving PRs that are perfectly written, it would be good. But for each PR I had to look at the code, the tests, the style, give feedback, switch to something else, go back again, push, see if I have any PR comments,

How do you think large projects get built? all by just one person so nobody has to review anyone else's code? (and even if you are - you still should be putting your own code up for review, reviewing it, and giving yourself comments)

> if CI passed, wait, now the linter complains.

why isn't the linting part of your CI ?

> The description is for others. Because there has to be a description, right? AI is so fucking good as sounding professional, that you relax and let it be. It’s not that I actually thought the code was good, but you get convinced over time, you get lazy, you become complacent. You stop questioning, and start accepting as good some code you would have never accepted, just because you cannot tell why it’s bad. You have lost control.

Just seems like a lot of issues here, so sure, dont use AI it's clearly not your thing. i do not let one line of code I dont think is "good" get committed, period

> Most AI developers will deny it, but deep inside, they know it’s true. Just don’t want to face it.

but dont assign my feelings. speak for yourself. I'm doing this shit for 40 years and you might find it gets a little tedious and repetitive after awhile

> Say no to drugs. Kind of a metaphor, but not quite.

it's a 100% totally wrong metaphor and it needs to die