alt Hacker News> Any employee who cares about code quality will become a poor performer with a red luddite label because they dare to change what the AI has emitted for them.
I think that's true but it's a special case. AI is here to stay and with AI coding IS faster and quality is better than ever before. Ideally you want your luddite fired along with the slop generators and keep the ones who are using AI and taking their time to deliver a maintainable code.
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> ... with AI coding IS faster and quality is better than ever before.
Is this claim based on something?
I'm not against or "for" AI (whatever that means), I try to use it as effectively I can, but for me it's not at all obvious that quality is better than ever before.
Speed I can buy, especially in new projects and utilities, but quality? At least I haven't seen this in practice, if anything I'm just seeing more code, issues, PR's and pressure ==> more slop, more bugs, less quality.
You can always say "skill issue" and "process issue", but that's partly my point here, AI doesn't magically solve this.
I fully agree with this point about quality. I am doing so much more testing than I used to, because I have so much more time to do it, and it's so much easier to automate the more tedious kinds of validation.
Maybe it's true that lots of people aren't taking advantage of this and are shipping trash, but that's their own problem, and there have always been people who do the job poorly.
> AI is here to stay
That's true, but it doesn't have to stay in this form.
> with AI coding IS faster and quality is better than ever before.
Citation needed, because the last study I read about was painting a completely different picture about code quality. Also, just because the AI pulling and remixing code from a known repository with high quality doesn't mean your code will be at the same quality automatically. Passing tests is not enough.
> Ideally you want your luddite fired along with the slop generators.
The thing is it's not possible to see who generates slop and who generates code, and if you fire the only people who knows about the codebase intimately, you'll be on a very exciting, possibly fatal ride. I don't recommend this. AI doesn't know your history and trade-offs. These guys do, and can guide you to clear.
AI can't.
Believing that AI will create bug-free code from start is believing that Rust is the silver bullet.
There are no silver bullets.
Chances are high the luddite is the one with the deepest understanding about the product and the code base - the one who is actually passionate about the project and actually cares.
"Luddites" can just be the ones pointing out the Emperor's new clothes have a big hole in them. Removing them is just ensuring that whatever mistakes you're making get reinforced.