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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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