I've been coding for 22 years, 14 years professionally, so I appreciate AI coding.

It was annoying before when I had a very clear idea of what I wanted and yet it still took a whole week to implement.

Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled.

Everything it's generating looks almost exactly like what I would have written, just written faster.

Personally, I feel avenged by AI because I had been saying for years that you don't really need static typing once you reach a certain level, getting types right isn't the most difficult problem and isn't a significant source of bugs. Everyone was gaslighting me about this... Yet now everyone can verify themselves because AI has reached this level I was speaking of.

Now anyone who coded with a frontier model on both TypeScript and JavaScript can see that it makes no difference at all. I can't remember ever seeing Claude mistake the type of a variable with either language... And TBH, I find Vanilla JavaScript from AI to be more succinct, not over-engineered like Typescript. Which is a point I'd been trying to make for years about incentives and actual patterns of usage (as opposed to theoretical benefits).

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zahlman a day ago | parent [-]

If you have a blog post on the topic I'd be interested. My experience with AI coding isn't really the same, but my experience with typing discipline definitely is, and I've thought about writing about it myself but don't really know where to start.

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timacles 3 hours ago | parent [-]

hard to believe anyone who writes something this overwhelmingly positive.

I use a ton of AI, it writes a shit load of code for me, and I eventually get good results.

Its also goes off on ridiculous tangents, implements things i dont want, over engineers almost everything. Makes large code bases convoluted and unreadable. Yes humans also do that, LLMs do it a lot faster.

> Now, with AI coding, I can implement any decent sized feature, exactly how I want, in a few hours and it's all polished and ready, all edge cases handled.

No way a human wrote that, sounds like a late night TV advertisement.

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jongjong 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You obviously haven't worked on a good codebase. I've worked on both so I know the difference.

Same feature on a good codebase vs bad codebase is like 1k lines of code vs 20k lines of code and is worse in the latter case. Not an exaggeration.

Clean code is real, it's just not what's been peddled to us.

If your code is full of bugs and you ask Claude or Codex to build more features, it will take 10x to 20x the effort because of workarounds and hacks which keep compounding.

If your code has very few to no bugs and no hacks/workarounds, it will also implement hacks/workarounds and no bugs. The difference is pretty insane actually.

You can try it yourself; create a really low quality codebase, full of hacks and try to build features with AI based on its recommedations.

	▲	zahlman an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Clean code is real, it's just not what's been peddled to us. My read is: the people who "peddled" it had mostly the right ideas, they were just bad at implementing them, and bad at writing code in general, and also the contemporaneous popularity of Java caused some serious issues.