alt Hacker NewsIf you're saying AI has _never_ found a more elegant solution than your original idea, you're not using it right or you're only using the cheapo models.
(Before someone asks: "not using it right" could mean a lot of things, but intentionally constraining its search by telling it how to do everything is one example. Or by not giving it a way to hill-climb: no tests, no iteration on a solution, etc.)
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If you've given up on understanding your code base, AI will give you a better solution than you could come up with. Not because AI is better, but because you've become a low performer.
AI is reasonable at reviewing code, with only a 50-60% false-positive rate, and its persistence at broadening scope often finds things human reviewers would miss. It's still actually still pretty shitty at writing code, though, again, with enough ground truth and persistence, it'll often generate something that's a functional turd. It will sometimes come up with better suggestions if you prompt for it, but it needs a ton of hand-holding at the moment. And usually the suggestions are still overly complicated messes that you can trim down to 1/10th the size, while keeping the core idea.
A lot of devs are micromanagers who think they’re smarter than everyone else. You’ve probably at least met a couple if you’ve had a long career. They typically leave lots of nits on code that is mostly meaningless noise or personal preference.
These types of people will get the least out of AI as their ego prevents them from letting it outshine themselves.