21–30 of 94 posts
> The thing is that even if I was wrong (I'm not) and AI was somehow helpful for software engineering (it isn't), I still wouldn't want to use it.
So even if you were wrong on the facts (you are) you still wouldn't change your mind? In other words, you're unreasonable and know you're unreasonable and think that's totally fine?
Well, cool. Next time, lead with that.
"I will never use AI to code" (publicly) Not the hill I would die on.
And everyone having a calculator from grade 4 in school, hasn't made everyone an accountant.
But to be fair, no one has ever experience change as fast as our profession has.
AI discourse perfectly illustrates why you should just ignore people with view points on the extreme ends of the spectrum.
But yes this is a very extreme position.
We still know how to ride horses but we also drive cars, now. You want to be delivery service that takes 2 days instead of 30 minutes to bring you pizza so that you don't forget how to ride your horse..?
The final sentence says it all: > The thing is that even if I was wrong (I'm not) and AI was somehow helpful for software engineering (it isn't), I still wouldn't want to use it. So even if you were wrong on the facts (you are) you still wouldn't change your mind? In other words, you're unreasonable and know you're unreasonable and think that's totally fine? Well, cool. Next time, lead with that.
When doing agentic development, you need to be in control, at least for now. Every frontier model will still do incredibly stupid stuff, and if you let it cook unchallenged, you'll have a codebase that doesn't scale. Claude will happily keep piling turds upon your tower of turds, but at some point, even an LLM will have a hard time working in it.
When you are at the wheel, the engineering hasn't changed. You're still solving all the same problems, but you can iterate a lot faster. Code is now ~free, and the cost of having a bad idea is now much cheaper, because you can quite literally speak the solution out loud and fix it in a few minutes.
I was a hand tool woodworker, but the first time I had to rip 56 6 foot boards into 7 strips I immediately purchased a table saw. Now I use hand tools rarely because I find the speed and quality of my cuts are better. I still use hand tools for things that require certain standards, but electric tools almost always produce better quality results. It’s about the same for AI coding, I just get better results.
I was a hand tool woodworker, but the first time I had to rip 56 6 foot boards into 7 strips I immediately purchased a table saw. Now I use hand tools rarely because I find the speed and quality of my cuts are better. I still use hand tools for things that require certain standards, but electric tools almost always produce better quality results. It’s about the same for AI coding, I just get better results.
Another analog is using power tools to make jigs for hand tools. I’m constantly rigging up test or data wrangling harnesses to improve my ability to verify and refine solutions. It’s so ridiculously useful for improving outputs, even if it isn’t writing the code that makes it to production.
I love using AI to code, as it saves me a lot of boring and repetitive typing. I only commit code that is roughly the same as I would have written anyway. It feels as good for developer ergonomics as the move away from CRT monitors.
I think I’m lucky that I never enjoyed programming, I enjoyed thinking about problems. That makes AI coding great, because I’m good enough at programming that I can describe what I want easily to an LLM, and I can judge the results very well for myself. I read and understand each line so I know I’m not committing crap.
I want to be better month after month, I want to be able to discover new areas.
Using AI tools makes sense to me. It’s important that you don’t believe everything the hype men are telling on Twitter, but it would also be a mistake to believe there is nothing valuable in this technology.
I'm all in favor of talking about drawbacks of AI coding and potential future problems. No problem. But at this point just the blanket statement that you'll never use it is not reasonable. It's the equivalent of a master car mechanic seeing a robot that can pretty reliably rebuild a transmission in a few minutes saying "I'll never use that; I'll always do it myself." Okay, sure buddy. You keep taking 8 hours to do wh…