this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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As an experienced software dev I'm convinced my software quality has improved by using AI. More time for thinking and less time for execution means I can make more iterations of the design and don't have to skip as many nice-to-haves or unit tests on account of limited time. It's not like I don't go through every code line multiple times anyway, I don't just blindly accept code. As a bonus I can ask the AI to review the code and produce documentation. By the time I'm done there's little left of what was originally generated.
If a bot can develop your software better than you then you're a shit software dev
That's not what is happening. The bot writes code and then I tell it what to change until it's close enough, then I make the final touches myself. It's like having a junior programmer do the grunt work for you.
Then your software quality was extreme shit before. It's still shit, but an improvement. So, yay "AI", I guess?
That seems like just wishful thinking on your part, or maybe you haven't learned how to use these tools properly.
Na, the tools suck. I'm not using a rubber hammer to get woodscrews into concrete and I'm not using "AI" for something that requires a brain. I've looked at "AI" suggestions for coding and it was >95% garbage. If "AI" makes someone a better coder it tells more about that someone than "AI".
Then try writing the code yourself and ask ChatGPT's o3-mini-high to critique your code (be sure to explain the context).
Or ask it to produce unit tests - even if they're not perfect from the get go I promise you will save time by having a starting skeleton.
Another thing I often use it for is ad hoc transformations. For example I wanted to generate constants for all the SQLSTATE codes in the PostgreSQL documentation. I just pasted the table directly from the documentation and got symbolic constants with the appropriate values and with documentation comments.
As an experienced software dev, I know better than to waste my time writing boilerplate that can be vomited up by an LLM, since somebody else has already written it and I should just use that instead.