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coldteayesterday at 11:43 PM2 repliesview on HN

>Might as well just write the code yourself at that point

"We have this thing that can speed your code writing 10x"

"If it isn't 1000x and it doesn't give me a turnkey end to end product might as well write the whole thing myself"

People have forgotten balance. Which is funny, because the inability of the AI to just do the whole thing end to end correctly is what stands between 10 developers having a job versus 1 developer having a job telling 10 or 20 agents what to do end to end and collecting the full results in a few hours.

And if you do it the way I describe you get to both use AI, AND have "a much better understanding of the codebase (and way better code)".


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dieortintoday at 9:20 AM

Writing the code is usually not the bottleneck, so you don’t gain that much speeding it up. And as I said, you lose a lot of knowledge about the code when you don’t write it yourself.

Unless coding is most of your job, which is rare, you’re giving up really knowing what your software does in order to achieve a very minor speed up. Just to end up having to spend way more time later trying to understand the AI generated code when inevitably something breaks.

> And if you do it the way I describe you get to both use AI, AND have "a much better understanding of the codebase (and way better code)".

Using AI is not a goal in itself, so I don’t care about “getting to use AI”. I care about doing my job as efficiently as possible, considering all parts of my job, not just coding.

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Aurornistoday at 12:36 AM

The goalposts move every month. We’re at the stage where handing an entire specification to a mid-tier AI and walking away while it does all the work and then being disappointed that it wasn’t perfect means it’s useless.

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