That’s true in the short term. Longer term it’s questionable as using AI tools heavily means you don’t remember all the details creating a new form of technical debt.
yes, constantly. I also don't remember much contextual domain info of a given section of code about 2 weeks into delving into some other part of the same app.
So-called AI makes this worse.
Let me remind you of gyms, now that humans have been saved of much manual activity...
I think that needs actual testing. At what time distances is there an effect, and how big is it? Even if there is an effect, it could be small enough that a mild productivity boost from AI is more important.
The AI tooling is also really, really good at being able to piece together the code, the contextual domain, the documentation, the tests, the related issues/tickets, it could even take the change history into account, and be able to help refresh your memory of unfamiliar code in the context of bugs or new changes you are looking at making.
Whether or not you go to the gym, you are probably going to want to use an excavator if you are going to dig a basement.
Exactly. Claude code can explain code I've written to me better than I could. I feel like people who don't see AI as a transformative element to programming probably didn't experience what it can do today as opposed to 6 months or a year ago. It's night and day difference. And it still was useful back then
Yeah 6 months ago Claude could make me a rust function that wouldn't compile but got me pointed in the right direction. Now it will make it correct with comments and unit tests with idiomatic style just using chat. But we don't have to use chat. Even open models today like devstral when combined with an agent can run cargo check and clippy and self prompt (with rusts great error messages) to fix everything. Prompting it with some unit test cases lets it iterate until those pass too. Software development has fundamentally changed. I still would advise developers who care about performance to be able to read asm. But just like I wouldn't write asm anymore, because the llvm optimiser is really good, we are going to get to a point where designing the test cases will be the same as developing the software.
