My company has an ill-advised “try to do it with AI first” rule in place.
For senior devs, that means rejecting the first twenty AI-generated code suggestions as they’re bollocks, and then having to fix it up by hand anyway. Takes 10x as long as it should do.
For junior devs, who don’t know enough to reject the ‘bollocks first suggestion’, it means raising pull requests that take 10x as long for the seniors to review, since they have to untangle the original intention and then explain why all the code is terrible and why they need to go and fix it.
I’m in exactly the same boat as you, and it’s driving me insane. I asked Cursor to generate a simple JavaScript function the other day, and it gave back a 200-line mess of garbage. I ended up just writing the function myself, and was able to do the same thing in 20 lines… and it’s not like I was using some “clever” techniques that no future maintainer will ever understand, it was all just basic code.
AI is definitely generating 10x the amount of code… but not 10x the quality or productively.
My company has an ill-advised “try to do it with AI first” rule in place.
For senior devs, that means rejecting the first twenty AI-generated code suggestions as they’re bollocks, and then having to fix it up by hand anyway. Takes 10x as long as it should do.
For junior devs, who don’t know enough to reject the ‘bollocks first suggestion’, it means raising pull requests that take 10x as long for the seniors to review, since they have to untangle the original intention and then explain why all the code is terrible and why they need to go and fix it.
We have truly embraced 10x programming.
I’m in exactly the same boat as you, and it’s driving me insane. I asked Cursor to generate a simple JavaScript function the other day, and it gave back a 200-line mess of garbage. I ended up just writing the function myself, and was able to do the same thing in 20 lines… and it’s not like I was using some “clever” techniques that no future maintainer will ever understand, it was all just basic code.
AI is definitely generating 10x the amount of code… but not 10x the quality or productively.
Elegance is doing the same thing in fewer lines without sacrificing interpretability