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by ljoshua 35 days ago
> tl;dr: AI writes features, not architecture.

This. I definitely agree with this statement at this point in AI-assisted development. This gets at the "taste" factor that is still intrinsically human, especially in software engineering. If you can construct and guide the overall architecture of an application or system, AI can conceivably fill in the smaller feature bits, and do so well. But it must have a strong architecture and opinionated field in which to play.

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My main takeaway, too. Been using Claude on my side project that I have singlehandledly been working on for three years. It works well initially, you catch all of AIs mistakes or unfavorable approaches because you know the architecture in and out. But as you stop thinking about the new features, stop losing touch with all the stuff AI throws at you, you fail to develop intuitive feeling on when and how to abstract and introduce architecture.

Another note was for me e2e tests; while AI can write them it never comes up with just basic organization or abstraction required to manage a large e2e test suite with hundreds of tests. It immediately starts to produce spaghetti code.