>At AIs absolute best (rarely) it builds software like a very competent 9-5er. It's fine, it works, it's largely inoffensive.

If only middle management and c-suite knew that

> It never does anything interesting or inspired.

I asked Sonnet to port an old game I wrote in college to HTML5.

It threw out the audio and graphics system, made it a single HTML file with no dependencies, no assets, everything dynamically generated, added new backgrounds, and new music.

I just asked it for a port, so I was like wtf, though some of the choices it made were better than the original ones.

Would be nice if that "initiative" could be turned on or off on demand though. I haven't tested that. (Some guy told me "if you want creativity, use Claude. To turn the behavior off, use a different model!")

> It's nowhere near the quality of hand-crafted expert human code

As of June 25th, 2026. Read your comment in four years, and tell me you believe what you've posted.

Maybe one year? Four months?

> Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't.

A lot of companies are creating AI assistants which take otherwise deterministic processes and makes them nondeterministic.

For example, I work in financial services and deal with a lot of data vendors. One of the big ones very recently added a chatbot to their UI, which on the second question I asked, provided entirely incorrect numerical but with confidence and 3-decimal place precision.

So the chatbot makes it "easier" to ask things, because you don't need to know which tab in the UI to use / or code to write in their scripting interface / or function to call in their Excel interface / or parameters to pass to get the correct answer.

Unfortunately the chatbot also may completely mistranslate your question, call the wrong function/pass wrong parameters and feed you back nonsense confidently.

Who is this helping?

Interesting thought. So maybe this answers the question of whether coding is art or science.

It’s time for people who understand how to use AI to stop trying to convince people who don’t. Let them churn their own butter, weave their own clothes, and type out their programs one character at a time. It’s what they want.

> ship around 3x to 5x faster

Web apps and CRUDs, if may I ask? Or is AI helping you with something that you couldn't ever do by yourself? I have mixed results across different technologies like frontend, backend, infra and hardware.