I don't have to debug anything.

Vaguely telling the agent what the issue is and what behavior I expect solves the issue with a fraction of the effort.

Some claim that the tech debt only keeps increasing and that the result will be unmaintainable. This is not my experience, and I don't think it is theirs either. These claims are often entirely speculative.

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RHSeeger 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I, and I think most experienced developers, can recognize the type of code that incurs a maintenance cost down the line; that will make adding new code take longer. And AI writes such code "relatively" frequently. I love having the AI to write code, but I find it extremely important to review it - to make sure that it's correct, understandable, and not going to be a problem later.

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user43928 4 days ago | parent [-]

I find it unnecessary for most non-critical code, such as client applications.

I doubt that any supposed future extra effort for the AI to add new code is remotely comparable to the upfront effort of you reviewing the code manually.

I know that this is the case today for native mobile apps, and I speak from hundreds of hours of experience over the last four months on such a project where I stopped reviewing the code.

We are already here today, and this balance is only going to further shift to the point where it is obvious that the hands-on approach is no longer competitive.

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RHSeeger 4 days ago | parent [-]

Everything about what you're said strikes me as sounding like "I don't bother wearing a seatbelt, because my experience is that I don't get in accidents" .. and also "I don't write automated tests, because I already hand tested my code and it works".

And neither one of those statements is very convincing to me.

	▲	user43928 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		And what you said strikes me as speculation not based on actual experience in using AI in this way, with a healthy dose of condescension added. Anyway, I think we shared our viewpoints, and neither of us is going to change their mind until either my project fails spectacularly, or you change your approach in the future to use AI more autonomously.

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roblabla 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've had bugs the agents can't fix or figure out. Sometimes those involve third-party, proprietary, broken code (read: Windows APIs). Sometimes they just involve complex deployment situation on the client code (I work on desktop apps) where the agent can't figure out what's wrong/makes wrong assumptions/goes nowhere. Sometimes the agent is just very dumb and tunnels vision on the wrong fix.

FWIW, I've also had bugs the agent fixed that I probably never would've figured out without LLMs - LLMs are definitely useful! But I need to keep understanding how the code works so I can take over the reigns when the LLM fails.