At AIs absolute best (rarely) it builds software like a very competent 9-5er. It's fine, it works, it's largely inoffensive.
It never does anything interesting or inspired. It never gets halfway into building something and then questions the entire premise of your app. It's automated milquetoast.
I asked Sonnet to port an old game I wrote in college to HTML5.
It threw out the audio and graphics system, made it a single HTML file with no dependencies, no assets, everything dynamically generated, added new backgrounds, and new music.
I just asked it for a port, so I was like wtf, though some of the choices it made were better than the original ones.
Would be nice if that "initiative" could be turned on or off on demand though. I haven't tested that. (Some guy told me "if you want creativity, use Claude. To turn the behavior off, use a different model!")
Much like self-driving cars being better than drunk, incompetent, or texting human drivers, AI software is generally better than the garbage churned out by code monkeys who don't care or cheap lowest bidder outsourcers.
It's nowhere near the quality of hand-crafted expert human code, but that requires a hand-crafting expert human engineer and takes a long time.
I predict that the latter will be reserved for the highest value, longest lived, or special (high performance, high security) parts of systems.
Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't.
That doesn't give you good taste, but .. for yer basic line of business or enterprise app, expectations were already low, and most websites have user-hostile design written into the requirements, so the damage isn't too bad.
I do think we've yet to see what the worst case for government contractor software project + vibe coding is. The benchmark is the Canadian gun registry https://calleam.com/WTPF/?p=1949 "In what may be the worst budget overrun in history, the costs to implement a registry of firearms balloons from $2M to $860M". Now add token spend to that.
> Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't.
A lot of companies are creating AI assistants which take otherwise deterministic processes and makes them nondeterministic.
For example, I work in financial services and deal with a lot of data vendors. One of the big ones very recently added a chatbot to their UI, which on the second question I asked, provided entirely incorrect numerical but with confidence and 3-decimal place precision.
So the chatbot makes it "easier" to ask things, because you don't need to know which tab in the UI to use / or code to write in their scripting interface / or function to call in their Excel interface / or parameters to pass to get the correct answer.
Unfortunately the chatbot also may completely mistranslate your question, call the wrong function/pass wrong parameters and feed you back nonsense confidently.
Yeah, this is not a good use of AI and the customer service people are going to gradually work that out, especially once people start having the "you know this is a legally binding statement on behalf of your company, right" discussion.
You can't put an AI in a flow which requires reliable results. I don't think people who are used to determinism have coped with that.
> You can't put an AI in a flow which requires reliable results. I don't think people who are used to determinism have coped with that.
The problem is .. what flows don't need determinism?
Search results / recommendation engine / ad targeting ?
Arguably the majority of companies & corporate users are using these tools in cases they expect determinism. Email inbox summaries. Search summaries. What is the value of x queries. You'd be shocked.
My favorite Google AI summary bug/quirk that seems to persist (I just tested it again) - "are Lillies OK for cats".
The summary starts with "Yes, lilies are extremely toxic to cats. "
I first hit this with another plant (lavender) where the response was much longer and on an iPhone looked like this:
Yes, lavender (both the plant and its essential oils) [line break]
Ever since Claude Opus 4.7 it's been helping me greatly ship around 3x to 5x faster, and it's good code if I tell it to follow my existing code's structures. Otherwise you have to create .md guideline files and it works.
It’s time for people who understand how to use AI to stop trying to convince people who don’t. Let them churn their own butter, weave their own clothes, and type out their programs one character at a time. It’s what they want.
>It’s time for people who understand how to use AI to stop trying to convince people who don’t.
This reeks of self flattery. Using AI isn't "hard". Any experienced developer can simply pull in a skill into your harness and have it writing code at a similar level to others with the same harness.
Web apps and CRUDs, if may I ask? Or is AI helping you with something that you couldn't ever do by yourself? I have mixed results across different technologies like frontend, backend, infra and hardware.
I am a backend dev, and building a mobile app for the first time, It is a toy sized project right now and it works, would have indeed taken me 5x the time to get to that point on my own.
I know from experience that to make it a non-toy project I am probably going to need to spend some, if not most of that saved time cleaning up in the future due to technical debt.
For backend, it is mildly useful at best, helpful with boilerplate and when I know exactly what needs to be built. I have not yet firsthand experienced these 10x, 100x productivity gains.
Frontend, forms,tables and generic dashboards is pretty good, I am sure one could get it done faster and better over the long term with proper technique and methods, but I just hate css
AI is an extremely powerful weapon against a blank page.
It's much easier to take "well now I have an app, which after using for a bit I find it sucks in <quantifiable list of ways>" and then fix them, than it is to start from absolutely nothing.
Thats a big sometimes for me. I am unfamiliar with the app development process. For backend,I would rather design the whole thing from scratch rather than try to fix a broken architecture. For frontend, maybe that is true, but I haven't had the chance to build anything complex, just forms and tables.
Honestly it sucks at Web apps of any meaningful complexity too. On my huge complex app at work, nothing can coax it to do an even average quality job in one pass. It hates following my project conventions even after spelling it out in MDs
It never does anything interesting or inspired. It never gets halfway into building something and then questions the entire premise of your app. It's automated milquetoast.