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Comment by mr_roboto | Hacker News Reader

You come across as someone who has never worked on a real software project. Humans create tons of bugs on a regular basis. AI is already better than most programmers.

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Better at writing one piece of code, maybe.

Better at writing code within a huge system, definitely not. Maybe in the future, but as of Astra, Fable 5.1, the answer is still no.

Disagree. I have 200k LOC now plus 100k in tests, and it is still performing like it was four months ago when I started to seriously use AI.

If anything, it works more reliably today with the smarter models.

I'm definitely not experienced enough to know but I read people are having it write somewhat elaborate documentation beforehand. Have it figure out which parts of the code may be touched, what other things will be affected and which uncertainties it has. Basically a full report before giving permission for any code to be written/modified. Again, I haven't seen it, don't know how common this is nor how effective. Though it sounded interesting.

I have worked my entire life as a professional software developer and I agree, even among senior developers I would guess [way] less then 10 % consistently produce high quality code. But if I have to decided whether I want to use an AI to help me write code, I does not matter if it can write better code then an unexperienced junior, it has to write better code than I would on my own.

I've found I can produce 10x more code than I could otherwise, of lower quality than I would otherwise, but the speedup is worth it. Extensive testing is what makes it work, with every bug becoming a red first test with a fix. High level compartmentalization keeps everything on track, you don't let it do the big picture architecture, but you let it do each component as decided on and work through the bugs later. I've seen much worse from teams of humans and I've accepted the drawbacks that are slowly going away with each new model.

> I've found I can produce 10x more code than I could otherwise, of lower quality than I would otherwise, but the speedup is worth it.

The speedup of slop production being “worth it” is what we, as a society, are having trouble evaluating at this point in time. In all likelihood it’s worth it only in the short term.

> I've found I can produce 10x more code than I could otherwise, of lower quality than I would otherwise, but the speedup is worth it.

That is never worth it. You're ruining the software you work on when you do this.

AI is the average of all programmers.

It's just that many (I guess that includes me? :D) assumed that they are better than the actually were.

A team of programmers is "worse" than their best member. Worse quality of code, worse thinking. You can usually get more done with a lot of mediocre hours of work than a few brilliant hours, though.

AI I've used isn't a better coder than I am - it's just got a lot more hours in an hour than I do.

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