Comment by randusername
Comment by randusername 18 hours ago
No more AI thought pieces until you tell us what you build!
AI is a general-purpose tool, but that doesn't mean best-practices and wisdom are generalizable. Web dev is different than compilers which is different than embedded and all the differences of opinion in the comments never explain who does what.
That said, I would take this up a notch:
> If you ask AI to write a document for you, you might get 80% of the deep quality you’d get if you wrote it yourself for 5% of the effort. But, now you’ve also only done 5% of the thinking.
Writing _is_ the thinking. It's a critical input in developing good taste. I think we all ought to consider a maintenance dose. Write your own code without assistance on whatever interval makes sense to you, otherwise you'll atrophy those muscles. Best-practices are a moving train, not something that you learned once and you're done.
> No more AI thought pieces until you tell us what you build!
Absolutely agree with this, the ratio of talk to output is insane, especially when the talk is all about how much better output is. So far the only example I've seen is Claude Code which is mired in its own technical problems and is literally built by an AI company.
> Write your own code without assistance on whatever interval makes sense to you, otherwise you'll atrophy those muscles
This is the one thing that concerns me, for the same reason as "AI writes the code, humans review it" does. The fact of the matter is, most people will get lazy and complacent pretty quickly, and the depth of which they review the code/ the frequency they "go it alone" will get less and less until eventually it just stops happening. We all (most of us anyway) do it, its just part of being human, for the same reason that thousands of people start going to the gym in January and stop by March.
Arguably, AI coding was at its best when it was pretty bad, because you HAD to review it frequently and there were immediate incentives to just take the keyboard and do it yourself sometimes. Now, we still have some serious faults, they're just not as immediate, which will lead to complacency for a lot of people.
Maybe one day AI will be able to reliably write the 100% of the code without review. The worry is that we stop paying attention first, which all in all looks quite likely