zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
I suspect a large proportion of claims made for productivity increases are skewed by the fact that the speed at which code is produced by AI makes you _feel_ productive, but these gains are largely replaced by the effort to understand, refactor, review and clean up the code. The high that you get when something "works" tends to stick more in your memory than the time when you had to spend a day cleaning up dead code, refactoring 2k line modules into a more readable project structure etc.

I'm not saying that AI can't make you productive, it's just that these claims are really hard to verify. Even the recently posted Cloudflare OAuth worker codebase took ~3 months to release (8 Mar - 20 May), producing a single file with >2k lines. Is that going to be harder to maintain than a codebase with a proper project structure that's easily parseable by a human?

>>meande+my
Ok sorry to get abstract but to me what you are talking about is differentiating between understanding and correctness. We as humans, for now, need to understand the code and that's not easily transmitted from the output of some AI. In fact, that's a hard problem. But I don't think it's impossible for AI to assist humans with that. The AI could help walk humans through the code to understand quickly what's going on. Maybe ultimately the issue here is trust. Do we trust the AI to write code. Maybe we spend more time trying to verify it for now. I think that shows we place a lot of trust in humans to write code. Maybe that changes.