My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

>>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
> Even the recently posted Cloudflare OAuth worker codebase took ~3 months to release (8 Mar - 20 May)

This is incorrect. The library was part of the MCP framework we launched on March 25 -- the same month development began:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/remote-model-context-protocol-se...

Indeed the speed with which we were able to turn this around was critical to us, as it allowed us to have our Remote MCP framework ready immediately when the spec was finalized, which led to quite a few companies building MCP servers on Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/mcp-demo-day/

I'm not an AI maximalist. I still write lots of code by hand, because there's a lot AI isn't good at. It's good at boilerplate and straightforward code, it's bad at refactoring deep systems. But AI assistance was undeniably a huge win for the OAuth project. There's no way I could have written that library by hand so quickly. (Maybe when I was 25 and had no responsibilities, but these days I have like 1 solid day a week to actually write code...)

>>kenton+UD
First commit: Feb 27th 2025

commit 3b2ae809e9256d292079bb15ea9fe49439a0779c Author: Kenton Varda <kenton@cloudflare.com> Date: Thu Feb 27 17:04:12 2025 -0600

    Have Claude write an OAuth provider implementation.

>>JackSl+NF5
Fine, sorry, apparently both of meander_water's dates were incorrect, and I actually started the work two days before March. It was still less than a month from there to release, though.

zlacker