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Works going full AI crazy. 10x the amount of projects, only half work (piefed.social)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) by to c/ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev
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So im having a "issue" that might not be an issue? Ill explain.

Most of work is going full AI. We have around 20 developers. Its about 3/4 that are using AI to do ALL the work with Claude. Earlier in the year, everyone got a ton of AI credits and the amount of "Finished" products have popped out in mass. The amount of projects we have had is skyrocketing.

Now for the problem. Half the projects have terrible bugs. Pages that go no where, bugs that are VERY hard to find in the code (because its filled with code smells). And sometimes the site/program/etc... will just stop working for no reason because they decided to use some old version of react instead of anything modern. Because AI.

Even the ones that work will often be very difficult to debug if its just something the AI did or something the user did.

So a LOT of AI projects are getting abandoned...for more AI remake projects. I cant even call it iterations because no one learned anything making the last project.

Now once in a while I do use AI. It was part of my research back almost 20 years ago. But its mostly for one offs like creating a command line argument in python or give the the reference page for xyz feature. But I dont have it write the entire codebase for me. Seems like a recipe for disaster. And ive seen it bork a couple of peoples machines before.

I dunno am I the old man yells at clouds now?

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[–] 8 points 1 day ago (1 child)

Honest question, in your opinion, how experienced was the development team prior to AI being introduced? What level of code quality could be expected? And what was the average velocity for development projects?

I have substantial development experience prior to AI and after. I also have spent the last eight years at of the the lagest technology companies advising a wide variety of our customers on implementation.

I can tell you that both my own experience and what I see at customers is that if you already produce low-quantity code and/or are not truly development minded, then the AI tools will largely reflect that. They are tools and require proper direction just like a human. If I give it a three paragraph prompt to create some app it will probably do it and it might even work, but it likely won't be reliable as you have experienced. However, if I put on my software architect hat and give it a detailed instruction file which coding standards, architectural patterns, frameworks, etc. It will usually produce a pretty good product.

As the age old computer adage goes: Garbage in, garbage out.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 1 day ago

    Honest question, in your opinion, how experienced was the development team prior to AI being introduced?

    At work you have to have a college degree and at least 5 years of experience. Generally thats the case. I think at most we have one person 20ish years of experience. all the way to two years straight out of college.

    What level of code quality could be expected?

    Well we had CI/CD, testing,etc... in prior projects. Now its just a toss up what does what. Its better now actually haha. Because docker and other containerization tools mostly rather than AI.

    And what was the average velocity for development projects? No idea. I can say we accelerated like mad after beginning of this year. So 10x projects at least.

    I get that giving it a VERY specific detailed prompt can get better responses...but at that point, I can just prompt myself and call it good. I am the AI/worker at that point.

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