It’s such an intoxicating copyright-abuse slot machine that a buddy who is building an ocaml+htmx tree editor told me “I always get stuck and end up going to the llm to generate code. Usually when I get to the html part.” I asked if he used a debugger before that, he said “that’s a good idea”.
If boilerplate was such a big issue, we should have worked on improving code generation. In fact, many tools and frameworks exist that did this already: * rails has fantastic code generation for CRUD use cases * intelliJ IDEs have been able to do many types of refactors and class generation that included some of the boilerplate
I haven't reached a conclusion on this train of thought yet, though.
In fact it will probably need to happen a few times PER org for the dust to settle. It will take several years.
Then don’t even bother looking at C work or below.
Also works with planning before any coding sessions. Gemini + Opus + GPT-xhigh works to get a lot of questions answered before coding starts.
1. AI is meant to make us go faster, reviews are slow, the AI is smart, let it go.
2. There are plenty of AI maximizers who only think we should be writing design docs and letting the AI go to town on it.
Maybe, this might be a great time to start a company. Maximize the benefits of AI while you can without someone who has never written a line of code telling you that your job is going to disappear in 12 months.
All the incentives are against someone who wants to use AI in a reasonable way, right now.
The harder problem is discovery: how do you build something entirely new, something that has no existing test suite to validate against?
Verification works because someone has already defined what "correct" looks like. There is possible a spec, or a reference implementation, or a set of expected behaviours. The system just has to match them.
But truly novel creation does not have ground truth to compare against and no predefined finish line. You are not just solving a problem. You are figuring out what the problem even is.
Someone needs to be held accountable when things go wrong. Someone needs to be able to explain to the CEO why this or that is impossible.
If you want to have AI generate all the code for your business critical software, fine, but you better make sure you understand it well. Sometimes the fastest path to deep understanding is just coding things out yourself - so be it.
This is why the truly critical software doesn’t get developed much faster when AI tools are introduced. The bottleneck isn’t how fast the code can be created, it’s how fast humans can construct their understanding before they put their careers on the line by deploying it.
Ofc… this doesn’t apply to prototypes, hackathons, POCs, etc. for those “low stakes” projects, vibe code away, if you wish.
It's pretty awesome but still does a lot of basic idiotic stuff. I was implementing a feature that required a global keyboard shortcut and asked opus to define it, taking into account not to clash with common shortcuts. He built a field where only one modifier key was required. After mentioning that this was not safe since users could just define CTRL+C for the shortcut and we need more safeguards and require at least two modifier keys I got the usual "you're absolutely right" and proceeded to require two modifier keys. But then it also created a huge list of common shortcuts into a blacklist like copy, cut, paste, print, select all, etc.. basically a bunch of single modifier key shortcuts. Once I mentioned that since we're already forcing two modifier keys that's useless it said I'm right again and fixed it.
The counter point of this idiocy is that it's very good overall at a lot of what is (in my mind) much more complicated stuff. It's a .NET app and stuff like creating models, viewmodels, usercontrols, setting up the entire hosting DI with pretty much all best practices for .net it does it pretty awesomely.
tl;dr is that training wheels are still mandatory imho
rademaker•1h ago