Comment by ianjbutler

Some misc advice. Your first task with ai is to use it to build constraints and guard rails for the ai.

That probably means a test suite that is at least twice the size of your code base. If you started there, great, but increase it to integration and benchies if you’re mostly holding units. It actually helps a bit if you can use a different language for this too but it depends on project, ymmv.

After that you have to either let go of certain style/idiom things or enforce ruthlessly with deterministic hooks everywhere.. no middle ground there and prompts will never work.

You also need to deliberately channel chain of thought with workflows rather than hoping for the best.. most of the generated product here shouldn’t be committed or preserved at all.. non-public doc flows and ticketing systems help.

Like people, an ai can easily create code that it cant actually maintain. It’s a matter of discipline now, same as before. Always using the smartest model is wrong, but double wrong on “wide” changes like a big refactor.. it leaves you no good options if you get into trouble.