alt Hacker NewsTo me this still feels like it would be a net negative. I can scaffold most any project with a language/stack specific CLI command or even just checking out a repo.
And sure, AI could “scaffold” further into controllers and views and maybe even some models, and they probably work ok. It’s then when they don’t, or when I need something tweaked, that the worry becomes “do I really understand what’s going on under the hood? Is the time to understand that worth it? Am I going to run across a small thread that I end up pulling until my 80% done sweater is 95% loose yarn?”
To me the trade-off hasn’t proven worth it yet. Maybe for a personal pet project, and even then I don’t like the idea of letting something else undeterministically touch my system. “But use a VM!” they say, but that’s more overhead than I care for. Just researching the safest way to bootstrap this feels like more effort than value to me.
Lastly, I think that a big part of why I like programming is that I like the act of writing code, understanding how it works, and building something I _know_.
A lot of the benefit of scaffolding is building basic context which you can also build by feeding it the files produced by whatever CLI tool and talk about it forcing it to think for lack of a better word about your design. You can also force feed it design and api documentation. If you think that you have given it too much you are almost certainly wrong.
Doing nonsensical things with a library feed it the documentation still busted make it read the source