[sanitycheck]

Not sure I agree with 3.

I can have Claude write stuff that does basically the right thing and actually works but, as so many people say, it's like working with a junior dev. The only way I'm going to get code I'd want to present as my own is by sitting looking over their shoulder and telling them what to do constantly, and with a junior dev and with Claude (etc) that takes longer than just writing it myself.

AI-coded/assisted work should be flagged as such so everyone knows that it needs extra scrutiny. If we decided to let a horde of junior devs loose on a codebase we'd naturally pay more attention to PRs from new intern Jimmy than revered greybeard Bob and we shouldn't let Claude hide behind Bob's username.

[fcpguru]

sounds like bad 1 and then bad execution of 2. If you do 1 and 2 well you get a PR for 3 that is NOT like working with a junior dev.

[sanitycheck]

1 Is easy enough for trivial tasks but in a complex (typically horrible) production codebase nearly all the work is investigation and debugging. However good the initial prompt is, soon the context becomes flooded with log output and code and the LLM goes off the rails quite quickly.

Doing 2 well is the AI babysitting mentioned in the article. Of course you can stop it every minute and tell it to do something else, then watch it like a hawk to make sure it does it right, then clear context when it ignores you and makes the mistake you told it not to make. But that is often then slower than just doing the work yourself to begin with, probably leading to the findings we've all seen that LLM use is actually reducing productivity.

I think living with crappy AI code is the price we currently have to pay for getting development done quicker. Maybe in a year it'll have improved enough that we can ask it to clean up all the mess it made.

(Possibly I just have higher standards than most, other humans can be quite bad too.)