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sodafountantoday at 5:06 AM1 replyview on HN

Yes, I don't have anything important to say other than I 100% agree with this comment. AI in its current state is akin to Stack Overflow and Google on steroids, but from my experience, it doesn't do well building out full-scale applications other than perhaps some initial scaffolding.

If I were to use it against a legacy, rather poorly written codebase, where the code may be hard to understand without some in-depth analysis. I could certainly ask an AI agent to read the code (How does application X do Y, for example), but I wouldn't have it start hammering out features or have it do any type of refactoring. That would cause far too many commits and confusion amongst the development team, leading to even more slop than whatever we'd already be dealing with.

Just leaving this comment here so I can come back to your comment. I've been getting a bit discouraged by AI lately, but this sums up my experience with it well enough.


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latentseatoday at 5:20 AM

> Yes, I don't have anything important to say other than I 100% agree with this comment. AI in its current state is akin to Stack Overflow and Google on steroids, but from my experience, it doesn't do well building out full-scale applications other than perhaps some initial scaffolding.

We're currently using it to build out a full-scale application. It does as well as you care to coax into doing tbh. You have to invest heavily in harness engineering, and at least my experience has been that as you do that, the results improve.

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