AI and Software Engineering

At this point, I’m highly convinced that AI writes better code than most software engineers out there, especially early and mid-level ones.

With that said, AI still makes blunders, especially if you don’t know how the architecture should be laid out for large codebases. And with the wrong architecture, your AI costs can absolutely skyrocket because it has to read a lot of files and make changes in a lot of places. If the architecture is just right, it can make small, focused changes without burning too many tokens.

The only way to stay competitive is to learn how large-scale software is built and then guide AI to build it, instead of worrying about typing every single line of code yourself.

Also, if writing code by hand used to be a source of joy for you, as it was for me, you don’t have to abandon it completely.

I have one day a week when I turn AI off completely and type everything by hand. This keeps my muscle memory sharp and helps me understand something novel when I’m learning it for the first time.