AI-written code is still your code

tyleo

I keep getting downvoted for saying this but I still review all of my AI generated code. I feel like I’m sufficiently sped up. Of course you can go faster if you don’t read the code at all, that’s always been true. But it seems like the ability to emit large quantities of text is already a huge leap in productivity. I don’t think these tools are good enough yet to offload all or our thinking into them.

eterm

Yes I'm more than okay. AI has enabled a scale of personal ambition I could only previously have dreamed of. I've never been the kind of coder who could easily sit down and get their thoughts out from mind to written lines. I've seen that happen in a few gifted individuals, and AI might be frustrating them, because for them, coding was never the bottleneck, but for me, I would always get stuck in analysis paralysis, and just writing the first line of a project was a daunting prospect. With AI I'm able to construct an entire ecosystem of programs I've always wanted. The code isn't perfect, but I understand enough to fix architectural mistakes and to guide the AI to a good enough solution.

luxuryballs

it's the best keyboard extension I've ever used

altern8

I'm not OK with it, but I have no choice besides maybe quitting my job. I've also tried to understand the code that AI writes, but it's often insane and untangling it would slow me down so much that it would nullify the gains in speed that AI brings. To me, either companies realize they're spending a lot more money to ship crappier code and AI becomes a niche, or we'll just stop looking at code. I don't think there's any other option because I don't see AI getting better at it. It seems to actually be getting worse and more annoying to use.

trvz

For most people employed as programmers, inheriting code from previous people has been a thing. Also relevant: including libraries written by others in your own software. As always it comes down to finding a healthy balance.

nullbio

I'm fine with it. I'm just as liable or likely to write bugs in my own handwritten code as I am in generating code via AI, if not more likely.

josefritzishere

That's not OK. It's so convoluted I don't want my name on it.

croes

My code if you mean responsibility, not my code if you mean authorship.

Retr0id

> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory. > I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI. I agree, and I've been thinking similarly. But I don't think there's anything "new" about what understandable and well-factored code should look like. It's the same principles as ever. A lot of agent-written code looks like what you'd get if you gave an enthusiastic human slightly too many stimulants and asked them to take the shortest path to reach the goal. Plausibly this is just a result of the LLMs not being "smart enough" to do any better, but I think there's also an incentives problem. How do you reward human-understandability in benchmarks and unsupervised training?

prometheus1992

I find it incredibly difficult to contribute to code files that were initiated by LLMs. Need to dig deeper to understand why but I just don't like it. I end up prompting my way out of any issues I see, sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn't.

delijati

we will go full circle "what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans" maybe we invent a pseudo programming language so we get deterministic results ;)

phoghed

> when you build software, you own it No, I specifically don’t. My company owns it, and that bastard will lay me off without a second thought.

lerp-io

And since AI is trained on your code and my code. Your code is now my code and my code is now your code :)

Verdex

I don't believe that AI is the 'higher level of abstraction[1]' that it is often claimed to be. However I wonder if it's possible to work with a codebase when other developers are treating AI as a higher level of abstraction. Analogously, people can write in assembly, but can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler? [1] - Do higher levels of abstractions even exist? By my way of thinking that's called not an abstraction. C isn't a higher level of abstraction; it's a different abstraction implemented by assembly. There are more powerful abstractions and more ergonomic abstractions, but that doesn't make them 'higher level'.

rob

Absolutely! I haven't had this much fun since I was coding MySpace layout glitter graphic websites in 2006 with PHP, MySQL, and CodeIgniter. I'm getting older, I have lots of ideas, and now I have tools that can help bring them together faster instead of spending two weeks obsessing about how I want to set up Ubuntu and have nothing to show for it. Helps replace the all-nighters that I used to be able to do. I still think having decades of experience in everything from domains, DNS, FreeBSD/Linux servers, databases, all sorts of programming languages, and full stack dev helps get more out of these tools compared to somebody that has no idea what they're doing. Especially around the deployment side right now. People keep saying that's changing though.

andincl

This is why I don't use AI to write code directly but instead will use it to generate code snippets or ideas or critique, or even just use it as documentation I can talk to. By doing this I can still get the benefits of the technology including - and this is crucial - as a learning aid to improve my own skills, while not entirely outsourcing my own thinking to the machine.

a2ff6eeb0

> I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI. Why? Humans can't keep up. We can't keep up with writing the code, we can't keep up with debugging, and I think we're approaching a 'claude code' moment where we won't be able to keep up with system architecture.

slackfan

You are responsible for your (robot's) output.

petcat

> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory. > keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI. I'm not sure this is going to be a worthwhile goal for much longer. Rarely is anyone caring about the complexity and comprehensibility of the ASM that GCC or LLVM generates from higher-level C code. I think the code-generation abstraction is just moving even higher now into "prompts". The architecture and engineering process of developing software systems is the important human component. The source code itself is not super valuable. What remains valuable is the input, direction, scrutiny, and "battle testing" of the solution.