[prontos91]

I had recently needed to build a dashboard builder. Simple one. Copilot created it within minutes. A working even though simple looking one. Several more inputs later i had a working usable one. Came back to it later but my tokens are finished :(. So i had to manually review the code and make changes. Code was around 3k lines in one single file and another 500 of css code. Took me a long time to understand the code and make changes. A few days i had to make another change which changes the way it supposed to work But now without tokens it was very difficult since need to make changes in several areas which kept on breaking. Finally i re-wrote it to my understanding.

This was a small part of a large code base. I am afraid what a fully agent coding would look like. How are other developers handling large code bases with ai. Just accept what its providing?

I can now understand the valuation of AI companies. Once you go in ai its difficult to go back. You need to spend more tokens just to make it work. Ai companies could train to make their code more obtuse, making users very hard to change manually!

[danielbln]

You handle large code base by enforcing best practices that should have always been enforced. Proper up to date documentation, strict adherence to conventions and coding guidelines, cross review of deliverables, TDD, and so on. Just whispering "make me a dashboard" into the machine's ear is not how you drive agents to create maintainable and understandable code.

[prontos91]

So you are saying Ai is a smart/fast auto complete and the actual intelligence is driven by humans? Reality aside it took me a lot of time to just having the version i wanted. But i find increasing frustrating is that solution chose by the ai is not optional, not production grade. Which require even more use if tokens and more time waste. Its good for management but for us difficult to maintain.