alt Hacker NewsAs a Seattle SWE, I'd say most of my coworkers do hate all the time-wasting AI stuff being shoved down our throats. There are a few evangelical AI boosters I do work with, but I keep catching mistakes in their code that they didn't used to make. Large suites of elegant looking unit tests, but the unit tests include large amounts of code duplicating functionality of the test framework for no reason, and I've even seen unit tests that mock the actual function under test. New features that actually already exist with more sane APIs. Code that is a tangled web of spaghetti. These people largely think AI is improving their speed but then their code isn't making it past code review. I worry about teams with less stringent code review cultures, modifying or improving these systems is going to be a major pain.
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> and I've even seen unit tests > that mock the actual function > under test.
Yup. Ai is so fickle it’ll do anything to accomplish the task. But ai is just a tool it’s all about what you allow it to do. Can’t blame ai really.
I've interfaced with some AI generated code and after several examples of finding subtle and yet very wrong bugs I now find that I digest code that I suspect coming from AI (or an AI loving coworker) with much much more scrutiny than I used to. I've frankly lost trust in any kind of care for quality or due diligence from some coworkers.
I see how the use of AI is useful, but I feel that the practitioners of AI-as-coding-agent are running away from the real work. How can you tell me about the system you say you have created if you don't have the patience to make it or think about it deeply in the first place?
I see it like the hype of js/node and whatever module tech is glued to it when it was new from the perspective of someone who didn't code js. Sum of F's given is still zero.
-206dev
My hot take is that the evangelical people don't really like AI either they're just scared. I think you have to be outside of big tech to appreciate AI
As someone on a team with a less stringent code review culture, AI generated code creates more work when used indiscriminately. Good enough to get approved but full of non-obvious errors that cause expensive rework which only gets prioritized once the shortcomings become painfully obvious (usually) months after the original work was “completed” and once the original author has forgotten the details, or worse, left the team entirely. Not to say AI generated code is not occasionally valuable, just not for anything that is intended to be correct and maintainable indefinitely by other developers. The real challenge is people using AI generated code as a mechanism to avoid fully understanding the problem that needs to be solved.