And really the problem isn’t that it can’t make working code, the problem is that it’ll never get the kind of context that is in your brain.

I started working today on a project I hadn’t touched in a while but I now needed to as it was involved in an incident where I needed to address some shortcomings. I knew the fix I needed to do but I went about my usual AI assisted workflow because of course I’m lazy the last thing I want to do is interrupt my normal work to fix this stupid problem.

The AI doesn’t know anything about the full scope of all the things in my head about my company’s environment and the information I need to convey to it. I can give it a lot of instructions but it’s impossible to write out everything in my head across multiple systems.

The AI did write working code, but despite writing the code way faster than me, it made small but critical mistakes that I wouldn’t have made on my first draft.

For example, it just added in a command flag that I knew that it didn’t need, and it actually probably should have known it, too. Basically it changed a line of code that it didn’t need to touch.

It also didn’t realize that the curled URL was going to redirect so we needed an -L flag. Maybe it should have but my brain knew it already.

It also misinterpreted some changes in direction that a human never would have. It confused my local repository for the remote one because I originally thought I was going to set a mirror, but I changed plans and used a manual package upload to curl from. So it out the remote URL in some places where the local one should have been.

Finally, it seems to have just created some strange text gore while editing the readme where it deleted existing content for seemingly no reason other than some kind of readline snafu.

So yes it produced very fast great code that would have taken me way longer to do, but I had to go back and consume a very similar amount of time to fix so many things that I might as well have just done it manually.

But hey I’m glad my company is paying $XX/month for my lazy workday machine.