Show me actual studies that clearly demonstrate that not only does using an LLM code assistant help make code faster in the short term, it doesn't waste all that extra benefit by being that much harder to maintain in the long term.
Clearly AI is much faster and good enough to create new one-off bits of code.
Like I tend to create small helper scripts for all kinds of things both at work and home all the time. Typically these would take me 2-4 hours and aside from a few tweaks early on, they receive no maintenance as they just do some one simple thing.
Now with AI coding these take me just a few minutes, done.
But I believe this is the optimal productivity sweet spot for AI coding, as no maintenance is needed.
I've also been running a couple experiments vibe-coding larger apps over the span of months and while initial ramp-up is very fast, productivity starts to drop off after a few weeks as the code becomes more complex and ever more full of special case exceptions that a human wouldn't have done that way. So I spend more and more time correcting behavior and writing test cases to root out insanity in the code.
How will this go for code bases which need to continuously evolve and mature over many years and decades? I guess we'll see.
If AI just generates piles of unmaintainable code, this isn't going to be any worse than most of the professionally-written (by humans) code I've had to work with over my career. In my experience, readable and maintainable code is unfortunately rather uncommon.
1. Open this line of debate similar to you (i.e. the way you ask, the tone you use)
2. Were not interested in actual debate
3. Moved the goalposts repeatedly
Based on past experience entertaining inquisitors, I will not be this time.
There are a whole range of interesting questions here that it’s possible to have a nuanced discussion about, without falling into AI hype and while maintaining a skeptical attitude. But you have to do it from a place of curiosity rather than starting with hatred of the technology and wishing for it to be somehow proved useless and fade away. Because that’s not going to happen now, even if the current investment bubble pops.
If anything, I see this moment as one where we can unshackle ourselves from the oligarchs and corporate overlords. The two technologies are AI and ATProto, I work on both now to give sovereignty back to we the people
