alt Hacker News> If there is one good thing that the generative AI tools have shown beyond any doubt it's that the classic "good programming" practices are still useful and effective
If you apply those practice, then quickly you find yourself using the agent as merely a writing boost. And there’s an inflexion point when coding is no longer a bottleneck. Instead, you spend more time on thinking about design. You can see it in open source projects where most PRs are just a few line diffs. The bottleneck is knowledge and problem solving talent.
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Yeah and that design and insight is the tiring part and while fun a bit less satisfying in the way that writing a nice bit of boiler plate or populating the struct members for your data type can be. One thing is you can work on design and insight while taking a good walk around the block, which is nice.
If you apply those practice, then quickly you find yourself using the agent as merely a writing boost.
I don't know what that means but I have seen no evidence so far that if you don't apply those practices then your code will be anything other than unmanageable spaghetti if you leave AI to maintain it for long.
Coding has never been the bottleneck for good developers. Part of the reason for that is that good developers know how to isolate different aspects of a system and so keep each individual aspect relatively simple and self-contained. Another part is that good developers were already standardising and automating a lot of the grunt work. These traits are also advantageous for keeping generative AI on the right track and keeping its proposed changes manageable.