Up to 90% of my code is now generated by AI

I have lot of software engineering experience and I’m working on something for which I decided to use Rails where I had zero prior experience in either Ruby or Rails. I’ve been using Claude for help.

Here’s what my personal experience: it’s been great at helping me understand things and converting stuff, which is both helping with learning about Rails as well as making progress would have been hard otherwise. It did much better at explaining than Rails documentation which I found lacking.

For example, I gave it large Go structs and it generated Rails generate commands to generate schema and XML serialization code. There was a little back and forth regarding foreign key relationships but “we” were able to figure it out.

I was even able to ask it for opinion on some table design, asked it to play the role of an experienced DBA, and it did great.

In short, it’s great if you know what you want to do at granular level, especially for new stuff. But, if I didn’t know what I know, I don’t think it would have worked.

Think of it like a calculator, can calculate what I tell it to calculate faster than me, but that’s it. But that in itself is huge.

Damn that’s a horrifying vision. Code by a bot that has no consistency in library preferences or the absence thereof. Peek under the hood and it’s made dozens and dozens of helper libraries that all do the same thing and get used one time. All with enormous volumes of mostly working tests.

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I don't understand the influx of these kinds of posts. I use ChatGPT and Claude daily, but I wouldn't say 90, 80, or even 50%. Not because I don't want it to be, but because it just can't.

LLMs are perfect for those who are at the beginner-level with some language, or with rather simple code that is not very business-specific, or solving/implementing tidbits that are isolated from the larger surface area of a product, or writing utility functions that do something that is well and simply defined, or the boilerplate of almost anything.

However, most of the time spent in programming is never spent on these stuff. They might constitute the largest percentage of the lines of codes written, but 90% of the time is spent on those other 10% of lines.

Give it a CSS problem like centering an object within a bit of a complex hierarchy, and it will go the rounds suggesting almost every solution that can be tried, only to loop back with the same exact confidence. I'd say, in certain cases, LLMs could be a time drain if you don't push the brakes.

Do we have any court cases or any other such thing out there that's decided whether or not it's safe for developers to trust general / common output coming from LLMs? I would probably be more efficient using various AI systems to write my code; but I'm afraid of a lawsuit around licensing.

Microsoft and Jetbrains are both introducing this tooling into their IDEs with Copilot and AI Assistant, but I still worry (I'm a naturally over-cautious person).

edit: to be clear, I'll ask it questions, just like everyone and their dog; but any sort of direct line / code completion; or "write me a method in Java that will do X, Y and Z" and then copy-pasting that 10+ line thing directly is not something I do.