If you have such a beast you have n problems. Not being able to apply AI to it is just (n+1)th.

It works great when dealing with microservices architecture that was all the rage recently. Of course it doesn't solve it's main issue that is that microservices talk to each other but it still lets you sprint through a lot of work.

It's just that if you engineered (or engineer) things well, you get immediate huge benefits from AI coders. But if all you did last decade was throw in more spaghetti into already a huge bowl of spaghetti you are out of luck. Serves you right. The sad thing is that most humans will get pushed out into doing this kind of "real development" so it's probably a good time to learn to love legacy, because you are legacy.

Let me give you an example of my workflow from tonight:

1. I had two text documents containing plain text to compare. One with minor edits (done by AI).

2. I wanted to see what AI changed in my text.

3. I tried the usual diff tools. They diffed line by line and result was terrible. I searched google for "text comparison tool but not line-based"

4. As second search result it found me https://www.diffchecker.com/

5. Initially it did equally bad job but I noticed it had a switch "Real-time diff" which did exactly what I wanted.

6. I got curious what is this algorithm. So I asked Gemini with "Deep Research" mode: "The website https://www.diffchecker.com/ uses a diff algorithm they call real-time diff. It works really good for reformatted and corrected text documents. I'd like to know what is this algorithm and if there's any other software, preferably open-source that uses it."

7. As a first suggestion it listed diff-match-patch from Google. It had Python package.

8. I started Antigravity in a new folder, ran uv init. Then I prompted the following:

"Write a commandline tool that uses https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/Language:-Py... to generate diff of two files and presents it as side by side comparison in generated html file."

[...]

"I installed the missing dependance for you. Please continue." - I noticed it doesn't use uv for installing dependencies so I interrupted and did it myself.

[...]

"This project uses uv. To run python code use

uv run python test_diff.py" - I noticed it still doesn't use uv for running the code so its testing fails.

[...]

"Semantic cleanup is important, please use it." - Things started to show up but it looked like linear diff. I noticed it had a call to semantic cleanup method commented out so I thought it might help if I push it in that direction.

[...]

"also display the complete, raw diff object below the table" - the display of the diff still didn't seem good so I got curious if it's the problem with the diffing code or the display code

[...]

"I don't see the contents of the object, just text {diffs}" - it made a silly mistake by outputting template variable instead of actual object.

[...]

"While comparing larger files 1.txt and 2.txt I notice that the diff is not very granular. Text changed just slightly but the diff looks like deleting nearly all the lines of the document, and inserting completely fresh ones. Can you force diff library to be more granular?

You seem to be doing the right thing https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/Line-or-Word... but the outcome is not good.

Maybe there's some better matching algoritm in the library?" - it seemed that while on small tests that Antigravity made itself it worked decently but on the texts that I actually wanted to compare was still terrible although I've seen glimpses of hope because some spots were diffed more granularly. I inspected the code and it seemed to be doing character level diffing as per diff-match-patch example. While it processed this prompt I was searching for solution myself by clicking around diff-match-patch repo and demos. I found a potential solution by adjusting cleanup, but it actually solved the problem by itself by ditching the character level diffing (which I'm not sure I would have come up with at this point). Diffed object looked great but as I compared the result to https://www.diffchecker.com/ output it seemed that they did one minor thing about formatting better.

[...]

"Could you use rowspan so that rows on one side that are equivalent to multiple rows on the other side would have same height as the rows on the other side they are equivalent to?" - I felt very clumsily trying to phrase it and I wasn't sure if Antigravity will understand. But it did and executed perfectly.

I didn't have to revert a single prompt and interrupted just two times at the beginning.

So I basically went from having two very similar text files and knowing very little about diffing to knowing a bit more and having my own local tool that let's me compare texts in satisfying manner, with beautiful highlighting and formatting, that I can extend or modify however I like, that mirrors interesting part of the functionality of the best tool I found online. And all of that in the time span shorter than it took me to write this comment (at least the coding part was, I followed few wrong paths during my search for a bit).

My experience tells me that even if I could replicate what I did today (keeping motivated is an issue for me), it would most likely be multi-day project full of frustration and hunting small errors and venturing into wrong paths. Python isn't even my strongest language. Instead it was a pleasant and fun evening with occasional jaw drops and feeling so blessed that I live in SciFi times I read about as a kid (and adult).

Oh, yeah, I didn't use auto-complete once, because it mostly sucks. ;-)

I'm a senior, mostly full-stack-web developer, but I also have done some desktop apps and dabbled in other platforms as well. I wrote code for over 20 years in many languages. I never had any aspiration for managing anything or anyone but I was freelancing a lot so I have a good, working understanding of every role in the software development process and I embodied each of those for a bit at one point or another. I never built a complete product out of my own volition, but I have a lot of ideas. However deeply understanding how much work would the implementation take, I was always discouraged. ADHD probably was also a factor.

I lead a team once and wasn't particularly fond of it. For me AI is godsend. It's like being a tech lead and product owner but without having to deal with people and multitude of their idiosyncrasies.

I can understand how AI can't work well for a developer whose work is limited to reading tickets in Jira and implementing them in 3-5 business days, because that's exactly whom AI replaces. I also did that during my career and I liked it but I can see that if all you do at work is swing a shovel you might find it hard to incorporate power digger into your daily work process. But if you can step out a bit it feels great. You can still keep you shovel and chisel nice corners or whatever in places where digger did less than stellar job. But the digger just saves so much work.

Try Antigravity from Google. Not for your daily work. Just to make some stupid side projects that come to your mind, you don't care about, or process some data, make a gui for something, literally whatever, it costs nothing. I hope you'll see what I see.