I'm extremely cautious about complexity, yet have adopted a claude-based dev flow. It comes down to watching and guiding it, and not letting it run autonomously. At a certain point your codebase will tip over into the patterns you've defined and claude will recognize and follow them. Just treat Claude as a vim editor mode and you will see a big difference, and your relationship to the tool will change.

The only solution that I've found to work, somewhat, is to plan with it to design the APIs exactly how you want it, atleast the public facing ones. It still does all kinds of mess in the functions but those are easier to cleanup on the next iteration cycle. If you let it design everything, it'll definitely go overboard.

I agree, it just sucks at understanding style and simplicity.

It's good at code generation, feature wise, it can scaffold and cobble together shit, but when it comes down to code structure, architecture, you essentially have to argue with it over what is better, and it just doesn't seem to get it, at which point it's better to just take the reins and do it yourself. If there's any code smells in your code already, it will just repeat them. Sometimes it will just output shit that's overtly confusing for no reason.

That's an interesting question ... how should a less experienced developer use AI productively, and learn while developing? Certainly using it as a magic genie and vibe coding something you are in no position to evaluate is not the way to go, nor is that a good way for anyone to use AI if you care about the quality or specifics of the end result!

There's always going to be some overlap, wanting to use a new skill/library in a production system, but maybe in general it's best to think of learning and writing/generating production code as two separate things. AI is great for learning and exploration, but you don't want to be submitting your experiments as PRs!

A good rule of thumb might be can you explain any AI-generated design and code as well as if you had written it yourself? If you don't fully understand it, then you are not in a good position to own it and take responsibility for it (bugs, performance, edge case behavior, ease of debugging, flexibility for future enhancement, etc).