You mention two very specific aspects of AI producing code:

- "It hyper-focuses on the current task and couldn't care less if its changes break other parts of the system." - "Long context = instant brain damage"

This is why I quickly discovered that I had to turn AI into a knowledgable, patient tutor rather than let it code for me. I am thoroughly at the helm for all decisions big and small - I don't let AI touch the code anymore.

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coffeefirst 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Anthropic did a study where people who worked like this understood their systems a lot better than and were basically as fast as AI maximalists.

Plus it’s so much cheaper… that has to matter.

	▲	softwaredoug 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The study looks at junior developers unfamiliar with what they're implementing. Post-hoc they broke down the AI group and grouped some into tutoring->hand coding. Another group was AI maximalist. We should keep in mind the comparison of these groups is very low n. Tutoring + hand coding seemed to have the best speed + understanding. This was all conducted in Jan 2026. Where I'd push back drawing too many conclusions from this study: arguably most successful AI usage is senior developers that know the programming environment they're working in. Know how far to trust the AI. And carefully review / understand outputs. Nevertheless, the study's still interesting, and I wish they'd replicate with a much higher n per group. Junior developers (undergrads?) are a more abundant group and not particularly specialized yet. They've also spent years hand-coding at University, but probably could adapt to AI tooling pretty easily. The study: https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...
	▲	sollawen 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Wait, hold on. So you're telling me that Anthropic is out there hyping their newest, most powerful LLM like crazy... but really it's just a token-selling scheme?

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softwaredoug 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can also do this better using just ChatGPT because it forces you to ask better questions independent of your code

And it is a lot cheaper in the end :)

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sollawen 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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