The AI Thing

I’ve pretty hesitant to write this. Everyone is already talking about the AI thing. Surely it’s been talked about enough, right?

I’ve been kicking the tires on these tools just like everyone else, and I’ve gotten into a stupid situation one time too many: I submitted code for review that I didn’t really understand all that well. It felt crappy, like I’d passed off someone else’s work as my own and I couldn’t even be bothered to read it before submitting it.

I don’t like that feeling and I’m determined not to repeat it.

I’ve settled on something that I think is working pretty well for me. I haven’t seen anyone talk about this kind of approach, so maybe someone should write about it:

I insist on writing the code myself.

Not all the code. Just all the important parts. My heuristic has been that it’s probably a good task for an AI if it’s so banal that you’d be doing an intern a disservice by having them do it. (they’re only with you for a few months and they’re hoping to learn something!)

This isn’t to say that I’m declining to use the tools. I’ve been using them quite a lot. Mostly, I have been using them as supercharged search engines that are also allowed to read my source code. I’ll ask the agents to review my code, speculate on the root causes of bugs, brainstorm possible approaches, and compare my code to other popular open source solutions.

I ask questions and use it to reason my way through problems so that I can write the code myself.

This has been pretty great!

I’m probably not generating slop as quickly as the machine can, but it helps me to go deeper and polish a patch into something that I can feel pretty good about. When I do submit it for review, I can assure the reviewer that nothing obvious is going to pop up if they just punt it off onto an LLM for analysis. All the easy stuff is taken care of.

I can ask for a little bit of a reviewer’s undivided attention with a clear conscience. I think that’s important too.

It’s also a little bit selfish in an important way: I want to go through the exercise of doing the interesting part so that I can learn something new and grow a little bit. For a long time, this has been the only way to do the job at all. For the first time, it is now kind of optional sometimes! I have been finding it to be very healthy to opt in.