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bsimpsonyesterday at 6:45 PM0 repliesview on HN

I recently saw an interview with Anders Hejlsberg of TypeScript (and a long pedigree before that). The interviewer asked him about the role of AI in his work. I believe the context was porting TypeScript's tooling to Go.

His trick is to use AI to build the tools that do the work, not to ask it to do the work itself. If you say "hey Mr. AI, please port this code to Go," it'll give you back a big bag of code that you have no insight into. If it hallucinated something, you wouldn't know without auditing the whole massive codebase.

If instead you let AI build a small tool to aid the work, your audit surface is much smaller - you just need to make sure the helper tool is correct. It can then operate deterministically over the much larger codebase.