AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job
weeraman.com

I think these are defensive mechanisms, a kind of lullaby for the Gen AI era.

Why is this discourse endlessly reproduced? In my view, it's because the industry is still searching for a new methodology to control the waterfall of Gen AI code. The cognitive dissonance that results is being resolved by relying on vague personal virtues like 'craftsmanship,' 'fundamentals of computer science,' and 'human judgment.'

If the goal is to review Gen AI code in its entirety, the way an engineer would review a PR, then honestly, I don't see the point of using Gen AI in the first place.

Yes, models lack judgment and only do pattern matching. But lately, I've noticed that in closed systems, Gen AI often produces more logically coherent code than humans do. If that's the case, maybe programmers should shift toward designing closed systems where algebraic data types ensure the program works correctly.

Because using Gen AI means you're committing to codebases that go beyond individual cognitive limits. Once you start using Gen AI code, there's a subtle mismatch with human written code, a fundamental impedance mismatch, like the one between ORM and SQL.

In that sense, I honestly don't know.

The arguments that have been repeated for nearly a year all sound basically the same. But when I look closer, this isn't Gen AI era coding. It's just old era methodology with 'human' swapped out for 'AI.' If the subject changes, the methodology should change too.

Looking at the countless repetitive posts on HN, it shows what HN programmers are afraid of. They're afraid of the destruction of their overall meta-methodology.

All the arguments being made now are about how to become a good senior engineer in the old days.

But is that analogy really appropriate for the volume of code AI is generating?

The amount of code being generated is exploding. The amount of complexity is exploding. Responsibility is becoming unclear. These aren't issues of individual skill. Saying that drivers just need to be more careful when traffic increases is bad road policy. The core is that the roads and signaling systems need to change.

A new subject requires a new methodology.

In that sense, I think the recent post from Jane Street is more like a new solution. Of course, ADT doesn't guarantee that modeling always holds either.

So honestly, I don't know. When I look at HN, it seems like all I see is what social signals people are most anxious about.

- Review the codebase is it production ready? I'm selling it for $1million dollars can it meet that standard.

Then cry as the ai reveals that it didn't actually do anything close to what it said it did. I call this my million dollar prompt, as in it teaches you just how much you are being fooled.