How DO YOU feel about AI Coding Assistants?

I'm going to throw that question back at you first, because I want you to think about it for a minute. Have you thought about it already? Are you a practitioner of it? Do you hate it with all your being and think it's wrong on a fundamental level? Is it stealing?

OK. Give it a minute. Let those thoughts percolate and settle...

And Now, My Turn

I write software for a living and have for [unintelligible mumbling] years. The vast majority of software dev is repetition. Create a configuration file. Create a reader for a configuration file. Create a UI. Tweak a UI. Write a function to do some database work. Reading, Parsing, Writing, Routing, and so on.

Most of these examples have a bunch of frameworks built to do exactly these tasks to save you from having to rewrite a hashmap algorithm for the billionth time. Programming has become a task of assembling frameworks and putting them to use. Often to do the thing we used to have to do by hand. It's evolved, but it's still repetitive, and dare I say it, kinda boring.

When I started thinking about making a Static Site Generator, I knew what parts I needed, and I knew what features it should have, so I spent some time writing plans and iterating with my agent.

I wanted to try Claude, so I bought a pro license and put it to work. I developed a methodology for interacting with it, a pipeline of planning and research to generate a document that I could then feed to the agent for implementation and iterate on that.

It worked remarkably well.

Could I have built this thing myself? Absolutely. Would it have taken more time? Probably. But it still took time to build and refine and iterate. I still had to review everything to make sure I wasn't coding myself into a hole I couldn't dig myself out of.

The process is more like a collaboration with a partner than a brainless genius that just creates your dreams out of whole cloth. You have to give it good inputs. And, like all programming before it, you get out what you put into it.

GIGO.

So, how do I feel about AI Coding? I'm kind of into it, but I recognize that this is a massive shift to the way we've developed software in the past. The old way is probably gone. People who don't adapt to this new way of doing are going to feel increasingly left behind.

The cost of developing a feature is now dropping to the point of negligibility, or at least a few tokens...

aside: This is currently changing as the AI companies try to figure out a pricing model that lets them make a profit and they're pretty far away from that right now.

It's become easy to create multiple versions of the same thing in the time it would take to make just one, allowing developers and product designers to quickly try things out where before they'd have to spend a lot of time making sure they got it right the first time, and years later, you're still stuck with those same decisions because it's too expensive to change it.

Yeah, I'm into it, but I'm still kind of sad about it. That thing I loved to do for all those years is forever changed. I'm trying to be optimistic about it. I've been fortunate enough to see software development fundamentally change multiple times over my career, and this is the latest major disruption.

Will it continue? I think it will, though maybe not in its current configuration. The massive push for more compute in the cloud, data centers running on gas powered generators, and huge volumes of water for cooling feels unsustainable. People are calling it a bubble and I think there's some truth to that. I just don't think this genie gets put back in the bottle. We've had a taste of this convenience and aren't likely to give it up.