[QuantumNoodle]

It really depends on th SDLC of the codebase. I've sat in the park with a pad and pen and wrote down ideas for a small-ish utility that had both a DB and some low level systems interaction. I designed all the interfaces, control flow, and user facing ui. A decade ago I was designing class diagrams with public and private methods, then coding it up. Today I can articulate it with loose words and have it come to life.

The secrete ingredient here is... Im an experienced programmer, I know what to ask and what to look out for. I know sockets and how devices work under the hood and which knobs are available for me to turn. Juniors just don't have enough experience. The question should really be "what do inspiring programmers do?"

[thewhitetulip]

People loke you're the minority. Most people use the brilliant strategy if "prompt and pray"

Because of AI speed is valued over everything else

[QuantumNoodle]

Some of the code bases I have at work are legacy spaghetti -- hard to reason about. I too employ the prompt and pray strategy and then see if CI fails. I can only be surgical where I already have a grasp on the codebase, or if I was involved from the beginning.

Morally, I dislike what AI is doing to the profession. Rigor is suffering.

[psunavy03]

It's also possible to point the AI at legacy spaghetti and say "document this in detail" as a starting point for unspaghettifying it.

[thewhitetulip]

But won't it take a lot of time and resources to make it non legacy? Sometimes we don't get the luxury or option to work on stuff like this