What AI coding costs you

Shocking that devs are forgetting that writing and testing code gives us a conceptual map of what the code does...

Almost like someone never ever learned what the core of code development is....

This is why I use zettelkatsen as my own coding AI....long term results are far better than using AI to pretend to code.

> Every developer I know uses AI for coding now.

Currently I am working on a code base that is rapidly evolving for customer fit and is hoped to be around for a while. Going over recent decisions about what abstractions to focus on and what to cut it really seems like LLM tools would have been a waste for any aspect of this work. This is not a situation where some existing process needs to be encoded, and every choice about naming and structure ends up making a big difference as changes trigger refactors.

And this piece focuses on the early adopter point of view. Sure there were problems at first, but then whatsit tool thing version whatever came out and now roses are growing out of the rocks. For a large fraction of what is done with coding that makes sense, but there should always be attention to the rough parts and the gap that forms where capabilities fall off. Even a small amount of modesty can go a long way, but the conversation keeps starting off from every developer, all development, the change is now or else, and I for one am not buying that, especially not with actual money which is what these services will be charging soon in order to pay their trillion dollar debt service.

It remains unclear to me why my ability to read and review code (the majority of my job for years now) will atrophy if I continue doing it while writing even less code than I was before.

If my ability to write code somehow atrophies because I stop doing it, does that matter if I continue with the architecture and strategy around coding?

The act of writing code by hand seems to be on a trajectory of irrelevance, so as long as I maintain my ability to reason about code (both by continuing to read it and instruct tools to write it), what’s the issue?

Edit to add: the vast majority of the code I’ve worked on in my career was not written by me. A significant portion of it was not written by someone still employed by my employer. I think that’s true for a lot of us, and we all made it work. And we made it work without modern coding assistants helping out. I think we’ll be fine.