Comment Re:Appeal to authority fallacy (Score 1) 121
A 5 digit ID is not evidence of competence.
Definitely not. You need 4 digits for that.
But what is the quality of that code? How easy is it to understand for the next human dev brought onto the project?
I’ve watched a coworker do as you describe. Use the AI not only for developing new code but to debug and update that code as bugs manifest. It was a bit of a mess. The AI routinely broke formerly working code. If lost the context on why it had written the code that way in the first place, and when fixing a bug in that area it failed to consider a special case it no longer was away off. Introducing a new bug. I watched fixing one bug generate many iterations of one step forward one step back. The code suffered greatly as a result.
When I assisted him on a couple of occasions I was constantly spotting things both he and the AI missed. AI needs rigorous oversight for non-boilerplate code. Its a useful tool, but it can easily be misused. Often through overuse.
But that's the thing: All of that applies equally to human generated code, too. I've seen plenty of humans do all of those things even without AI assistance.
Where AI today consistently beats a human is on speed. No human can generate code as fast as an AI can. But speed of generation isn't everything. Right now (competent) humans have the edge when it comes to seeing the big picture, anticipating the code evolution over time as requirements change, and stuff like that. But it's hubris to think that human code is always better than AI code. Yes, I've generated a lot of AI code now that wasn't that great, where the AI code wasn't handling some condition that it needed to or wasn't anticipating some future change, but if I'm being honest, I've also frequently experienced the opposite, where I asked it to generate code and it handled some condition that I would have forgotten about if I had written it manually. The AI isn't perfect, but people aren't perfect, either.
AI code generation is here to stay. A competent human, working with an AI, can easily outperform a human operating alone, much like two humans using techniques like pair programming can outperform a single human when it comes to producing reliable code. Working with Claude Code feels a lot like working in a pair with a partner that is ridiculously fast.
If open source projects reject this outfight, it seems foolish to me.