this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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It depends. AI can help writing good code. Or it can write bad code. It depends on the developer's goals.
I'll give you a hypothetical: a company is to hire someone for coding. They can either hire someone who writes clean code for $20/h, or someone who writes dirty but functioning code using AI for $10/h. What will many companies do?
Many companies chose cheap coders over good coders, even without AI. Companies I heard of have pretty bad code bases, and they don't use AI for software development. Even my company preferred cheap coders and fast development, and the code base from that time is terrible, because our management didn't know what good code is and why it's important. For such companies, AI can make development even faster, and I doubt code quality will suffer.
My goal is to write bad code
LLMs can be great for translating pseudo code into real code or creating boiler plate or automating tedious stuff, but ChatGPT is terrible at actual software engineering.
Honestly I just use it for the boilerplate crap.
Fill in that yaml config, write those lua bindings that are just a sequence of lua_pushinteger(L, 1), write the params of my do string kind of stuff.
Saves me a ton of time to think about the actual structure.