I do see the appeal, it’s easy to imagine that workflow working, and working well - but it’s hard to how it avoids this fate: https://youtu.be/QEzhxP-pdos

The “cleanup pass” never happens, though. It’ll just be new feature on top of new feature until it’s too large to refactor.

Thanks for writing this. In my refactoring process I also start with code profiling. Opus is good, at finding hand written code, which sometimes is a good starting point of understand the codebase in general.

I have also experimented with mutation testing. But the side effect of this approach is that it keeps public interfaces intact, and most of cases you don't want that.

My experience as well, I've been developing a native macos app using CC. As a web dev I didn't know much about the stack. Nothing too fancy a kind of folder gallery-player with tags embedded in filenames, a bit like TagSpaces.

Process was - produced a detailed feature spec - multiple iteration of "I want this and that", make it into coherent spec", "this this and that is not correct, change to that". Made it write architecture spec(which I didn't read because too unfamiliar) and split it into tasks. Then it was implementing tasks, after each I did a change/fix those ~10 things iteration and spec corrections.

It was good to a point, but then when I started to hit performance problems I had to step in look at the code, and very often fight with CC, confront its "this is the only way", force it to do web search for proper ways to deal with problems and even explain very simple things about proper DB usage.

At some point it asked me something like "is it ok for schema migration to just fail or we need to implement complicated handling?", I have answered "it just shouldn't leave app locked in schema failure", and guess what was CC solution? - it wrote an error handler which just drops DB and recreates fresh one on ANY schema failure. And if I didn't happen to peek at the code and ask wtf it is doing, that would've been an exiting UX.

I've spent about month's worth of $20 CC subscription tokens using Opus 4.8 on xhigh, AND about 70 hours of my time to get it to a point where it is good.

So "anyone can just code what they want now" is correct only to a point, MVP will work, but beyond that experience will be subpar, and it still needs lots and lots of iterations of explaining what you want. Then because normal user knows very little about how software works they won't be able to ask AI the right questions, confront it and rate of improvement vs token usage will hit rock bottom.

People keep making this analogy not understanding that trades folks will use the right tool for the job, not just whatever is newer / more advanced. Air nailers exist but hammers are still used. Drills can screw in screws but screwdrivers are still used. You wouldn’t use an electric drill for a lot of jobs. People will also try to equate it to an electric saw vs hand saw, but again time and place for both.