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I see how people think its more productive, but honestly I iterate on my code like 10-15 times before it goes into production, to make sure it logs the right things, it communicates intent clearly, the types are shared and defined where they should be. It’s stored in the right folder and so on.

Whilst the laziness to just pass it to CC is there I feel more productive writing it on my own, because I go in small iterations. Especially when I need to test stuff.

Let’s say I have to build an automated workflow and for step 1 alone I need to test error handling, max concurrency, set up idempotency, proper logging. Proper intent communication to my future self. Once I’m done I never have to worry about this specific code again (ok some error can be tricky to be fair), but often this function is just practically my thought and whenever i need it. This only works with good variable naming and also good spacing of a function. Nobody really talks about it, but if a very unimportant part takes a lot of space in a service it should be probably refactored into a smaller service.

The goal is to have a function that I probably never have to look again and if I have to do it answers me as fast as possible all the questions my future self would ask when he’s forgotten what decisions needed to be made or how the external parts are working. When it breaks I know what went wrong and when I run it in an orchestration I have the right amount of feedback.

As others I could go very long about that and I’m aware of the other side of the coin overengineering, but I just feel that having solid composable units is just actually enabling to later build features and functionality that might be moat.

Slow, flaky units aren’t less likely to become an asset..

And even if I let AI draft the initial flow, honestly the review will never be as good as the step by step stuff I built.

I have to say AI is great to improve you as a developer to double check you, to answer (broad questions), before it gets to detailed and you need to experiment or read docs. Helps to cover all the basics

Also, I have noticed, strangely, that Claude is noticeably less compliant than GPT. If you ask a question, it will answer and then try to immediately make changes (which may not be related). If you say something isn't working, it will challenge you and it was tested (it wasn't). For a company that is seems to focus so much on ethics, they have produced an LLM that displays a clear disregard for users (perhaps that isn't a surprise). Either way, it is a very bad model for "agent swarm" style coding. I have been through this extensively but it will write bad code that doesn't work in a subtle way, it will tell that it works and that the issues relate to the way you are using the program, and then it will do the same thing five minutes later.

The tooling in this area is very good. The problem is that the AI cannot be trusted to write complex code. Imo, the future is something like Cerbaras Code that offers a speed up for single-threaded work. In most cases, I am just being lazy...I know what I want to write, I don't need the AI to do it, and I am seeing that I am faster if I just single-thread it.

Only counterpoint to this is that swarms are good for long-running admin, housekeeping, etc. Nowhere near what has been promised but not terrible.