[brabel]

> Seeing opposite here too, they are like eager juniors 'oh the issue is here and here's a 5 page report why', and it's wrong... then you add more info and it goes to a different spot... repeat until you get tired and solve it yourseld, it is useful as a rubber ducky i guess.

It's really amazing how different people have completely different experiences. I work on a massive code base and I thought AI would not be able to fix anything in at least a few years since the application is very complex and does not use well known frameworks. I was very wrong. In my experience, it fixes bugs better than I could, at least given a short time budget (which is always the case, if we spend too much time on each bug we just fix bugs slower than they get reported and we'd enter a death spiral).

I have worked on this code base for more than 10 years, touched every part of it, and I wrote large chunks of most systems, despite around 20 people working on it right now. Still, when I need to figure out something, now, I often ask AI as it is absolutely wonderful in understanding and explaining code, no matter how big the code base is. My team consists of 20 very senior developers, and I am their technical lead, so I think I know what I am talking about.

A junior would require at least 6 months of guidance to become productive in our code base, unfortunately, just because it's so big and it integrates with all sorts of external services, databases etc. I do understand that saying this is not really a flex, I would've actually preferred that my code base was so good even a junior developer could be immediately productive in it, but that's sadly just not the case. But perhaps, with the help of a AI tutor, that's actually possible now?!

If you think AI is at the level of a junior developer right now, I'm afraid you're kidding yourself.

In case you're wondering: we use Claude Code.

[mittensc]

> given a short time budget (which is always the case, if we spend too much time on each bug we just fix bugs slower than they get reported and we'd enter a death spiral).

This is something I don't understand.

- If you have a bug, you need to fix it well as well as proper root cause.

- That way the bug never surfaces again and safeguards are added for that class of bugs.

- if done well over time it builds discipline and bugs only surface from new features or integrations.

I've never had an experience of a 'death spiral' that you mention.

> Still, when I need to figure out something, now, I often ask AI as it is absolutely wonderful in understanding and explaining code, no matter how big the code base is.

Sure, but you still dig into the code afterwards I assume, you don't blindly trust what the AI summarization tells you.

> If you think AI is at the level of a junior developer right now, I'm afraid you're kidding yourself.

It depends, small projects with well defined scope, yeah, it knocks them out of the park, what I'm working on, it's a bit disappointing, not for lack of trying.

Still, one other thing I'm noticing now... if my account were not anonymous I would likely need to think of possible repercussions for my 'lack of faith' and would probably post comments very similar to yours or not at all.

So I'll stop here.

[brabel]

> If you have a bug, you need to fix it well as well as proper root cause.

Can you spend 3 months fixing a bug and doing nothing else? You always have a time budget, whether you know it or not, even for your hobby projects. Do you not have users reporting bugs regularly? Any large product will have bugs, I see the biggest companies with the best engineers maintaining open source repositories with thousands of bugs, and the list just keeps growing. Internal products are even worse. All you need for your bug list to keep growing is one bug taking longer to fix than the rate at which bugs are reported.

> if done well over time it builds discipline and bugs only surface from new features or integrations.

Yes, and we have a whole lot of features coming out every release. We have a very large product. That's why we keep adding "bugs"! Not because we're fixing bugs that had already been badly fixed previously, if that's what you're thinking.

You've never seen a bug spiral? I must assume you're new to this industry. Bug spirals have killed many companies. It's very common to have code that's so bad no one can touch it without introducing lots of bugs. Fix one bug, 2 new bugs are introduced.

Luckily, where I work we have a lot of tests so it's rare that we have regressions, so the main cause of bugs is the new features, especially big ones as it's humanly impossible to properly review thoroughly enough that there's no bugs. That's where I think AI will help a lot - but we're still trying to figure out exactly how. Simply letting the AI review everything is not enough. And as I said before, humans just can't spot bugs to save their lives, me included.

> if my account were not anonymous I would likely need to think of possible repercussions for my 'lack of faith'

That's weird to hear, HN is about 50% AI enthusiasts, 50% AI skeptics, at least that's my impression.

I was a skeptical until recently, but in the last few months of using Claude Code (and Copilot, but Copilot consistently performs worse), the LLM has become better than most humans IMO. I still write a bit of code by hand, though, simply because I can't help it and sometimes I know I can do things very fast anyway so why burn LLM tokens on the thing. But sometimes I try to "correct" AI code just to learn later the AI was right (normally tests pick that up - we instruct the AI to write comprehensive tests, and it does it well... I normally review mostly the test code and less so the implementation). I am almost at a level where I believe not using LLMs to write code professionally is akin to not using static type systems: you're refusing to let the computer help you for no reason. It's not about faith, it's about using the tools that make our jobs easier and our output better. I know not everyone is there yet, but I definitely feel like I am.

[mittensc]

> Can you spend 3 months fixing a bug and doing nothing else?

In what world would that be needed or accepted.

It generally takes 1-2 days to fix harder issues lile race conditions/memory corruptions. Regular bugs are much faster. All fixed correctly without AI.

AI just goes on a random path every time and in general fails to find the root cause unless you tell it explicitly what it is...

> I was a skeptical until recently, but in the last few months of using Claude Code (and Copilot, but Copilot consistently performs worse), the LLM has become better than most humans IMO

great that it's working on your end