Technology

Things I've realized while working with AI (Claude code):

• It's fantastic for very small macros and medium length scripts. Think dev ops stuff, pre-commit hooks, transforming data. Keep it small enough to manually review and something you can run without destroying anything important. This can massively boost your codebase QoL. [Double bonus for not wasting tokens to solve the same problem over and over]
• It's decent-to-good at debugging but not consistent with fixes. It can find some utf encoding edge case that might have taken you 1hr+ but suggest the dumbest bandaid fix you've ever seen. Also very good at spinning up unit test suites for basic edge cases.
• Due to obvious training bias, it's pretty good with common libraries and cloud platform infrastructure. It could probably help with writing a complex cron call, debugging regex or fixing an IaC config. On the flip side it won't bother to use the latest package version or know your niche/new library.
• It does better with greenfield because exploring your codebase introduces a ton of bias. It might try to fit in an ugly hack when a refactor to simplify everything is way easier.
• It's absolutely garbage with UI, just throws the most disorganized HTML together that isn't reactive or reusable. OK enough for ugly internal stuff but God help anyone relying on it for that.
• This is setting up to be the biggest rug pull in history. People that buy into it heavily just to save a couple bucks on engineer payroll are going to be fucked when they start ratcheting up the token price.

All in all it can be useful when used with care but will never be a magic bullet.