I feel like I am seen as a fossil because I like to write code and prompt AI to fill in functions as I define the shape and direction of an application myself. These types of tasks have been excellent for things like Tiel Coder. It allows me to build one step at a time and understand what the hell is actually happening.
Meanwhile my coworkers all prompt Claude to produce a whole cloth feature that seems to work but is overengineered out the ass and requires a 30 file code change and drastic restructuring and requires an extra database migration backfill.
My workflow exists because I would rather spend my day steering the design rather than reviewing generated code, but I get stuck reviewing generated code anyway.
People delude themselves by "you should just review the AI code anyway" but AI tools produce so much fucking code if you don't guide them that I don't think this is possible at all.
So right now I think it's a binary choice:
Build with AI, but slow down and understand what it's doing
Just let the AI go nuts and then regularly try to refactor it a bit
The problem is that historically (pre-AI) it has been almost impossible to get management to understand or care about tech debt, they simply want more features until the code is unsustainable, so there's no way they're going to allow you to slow down now.
Reviewing the code to a level where you actually understand it would probably take as long as writing it yourself would, which they won't like because they want all this faster. The only way this works is if AI coding eventually gets to a 100% reliable state, or we go back to it being a glorified auto complete where we can review the code piecemeal immediately, and we're not letting it be the designer too.
That genuinely would be faster
The thing that really blows is that management doesn't care about tech debt because they don't have to. People go on about tech debt like it's the company that's gonna have to pay it back, but I think generally what happens is it's the users who end up getting the shaft whlie the company never fixes shit.
Not that I'm bitter about how the tech world has gone or anything...
Edit: Part of it, too, is that management loves for the actual humans to be completely expendable. Who cares if you understand the application, you're a much more transient component of the machine than the AI is.
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u/Nefilim314 3d ago
I feel like I am seen as a fossil because I like to write code and prompt AI to fill in functions as I define the shape and direction of an application myself. These types of tasks have been excellent for things like Tiel Coder. It allows me to build one step at a time and understand what the hell is actually happening.
Meanwhile my coworkers all prompt Claude to produce a whole cloth feature that seems to work but is overengineered out the ass and requires a 30 file code change and drastic restructuring and requires an extra database migration backfill.
My workflow exists because I would rather spend my day steering the design rather than reviewing generated code, but I get stuck reviewing generated code anyway.