An Experienced C Programmer Tries AI Agents

I think this is the most sensible way to use AI for coding. You stay mentally engaged, you maintain a grip on the codebase, and you still reap the productivity boost.

I imagine some folks would still say that the code itself doesn't matter, so you're wasting time even thinking about it, and you could ship faster if you didn't look at the code. I imagine this is true, and if your goal (or your manager's goal) is as much code as quickly as possible, then perhaps that's the path you have to go. I personally do not feel comfortable shipping code that I have not reviewed and understood, much less not even looked at.

I'm not entirely convinced that the legal questions can be so easily swept away, but I suppose we will find out more in time. If there are legitimate legal problems, they will be found out, I trust.

I also remain concerned about the proprietary SaaS nature of all of this. I am surprised that, given how much programming culture has historically valued having free / open source tools that could be completely controlled by the users, that handing over so much of the software development process to closed-source cloud computing is so agreeable. Hopefully local (and open source) models will progress enough that this ceases to be an issue, but I suspect that the proprietary industry leaders may remain the more popular choice. We'll see.

I think the best thing to do there is, don't forget how to do it yourself. If you want to benefit from the convenience, then wonderful, but should that convenience ever get shut off, you don't want to be stuck having no idea at all what you're doing. Which, leveraging AI coding tools the way this article recommends, you should stay in a good place there.