AI is writing 90% of the code I was in charge of

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Armin Ronacher

A senior developer shares their experience building a 40,000-line infrastructure service where AI generated over 90% of the code. They detail their workflow using Claude and Codex, emphasizing the importance of maintaining architectural oversight, code quality standards, and system understanding while leveraging AI for implementation. The approach enabled rapid prototyping, constant refactoring, and exploration of new patterns, but required careful review and strong engineering judgment to avoid brittle systems.

Sounds like you leveraged it like a “smart typing assistant” and general codegen tool. Back when GPT3.5 dropped I said that AI could generate 100% of my code and not much of my job would change. I still feel that way. These tools have all but solved the boilerplate issue, and programmers have been on an ongoing track to write less and do more (it was jQuery’s slogan even) for decades and decades.
You only were able to use these tools to do this, and be successful, because you could have done it without them, in the first place. That’s the nuance that Dario conveniently leaves out.

I love the SQL bit so much! My mentor back then always said that most ORMs exist just because developers have no clue how SQL actually works. He said people should learn SQL really well and then ORMs would not be needed.
So the idea of actually sticking to raw SQL but then using LLMs to work on it is very intriguing!

Yep, if you’re in control then AI is a blessing.
If you don’t know what you are doing or don’t want to get hands dirty reading generated code line by line then you are in for a surprise 😄
And this AI f**ker tries so hard everytime to make things go the wrong way 😄
Let’s make exceptions silent for example - the article captured this right.
And those tests that test everything but the main functionality 😄