this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.
Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.
I've worked as a freelancer (specifically as a Contractor) in Software Development for over a decade and more often than not I ended up having to work with some existing code base, having to deal with the design choices, coding style and bugs of somebody else, often multiple somebody elses.
There's nothing quite as "entertaining" as having to deal with 3+ different code and design styles in the same code base because all previous developer thought their own way of doing things was the superior way so just added one more layer of their style (not just coding but, worse, software design) on top of what was already there increasing the mess, rather than work within the existing structure and style and doing some refactoring.
Anyway, in my experience having to read, understand and work with existing code that you yourself did not made is way more time costly and less pleasant than actually doing your stuff from scratch.