Human vs Machine: the Bug

A Rails developer who is skeptical of AI tools fixes a bug in an internal project tracking tool — a checkbox unsubscribe edge case — then repeats the exercise using Claude Code. The human approach involved tracing parameter differences between two form implementations and adopting SimpleForm's association helper. Claude correctly identified the root cause but initially wrote a TDD test that didn't actually fail before the fix, required correction, and produced a solution using collection_check_boxes that introduced a new pattern inconsistent with the codebase. Both solutions took under 30 minutes. The author concludes her solution was cleaner, more consistent with existing patterns, and that working with Claude felt more like supervising than creating — ultimately judging the environmental and experiential costs not worth the output.