So im having a “issue” that might not be an issue? Ill explain.
Most of work is going full AI. We have around 20 developers. Its about 3/4 that are using AI to do ALL the work with Claude. Earlier in the year, everyone got a ton of AI credits and the amount of “Finished” products have popped out in mass. The amount of projects we have had is skyrocketing.
Now for the problem. Half the projects have terrible bugs. Pages that go no where, bugs that are VERY hard to find in the code (because its filled with code smells). And sometimes the site/program/etc… will just stop working for no reason because they decided to use some old version of react instead of anything modern. Because AI.
Even the ones that work will often be very difficult to debug if its just something the AI did or something the user did.
So a LOT of AI projects are getting abandoned…for more AI remake projects. I cant even call it iterations because no one learned anything making the last project.
Now once in a while I do use AI. It was part of my research back almost 20 years ago. But its mostly for one offs like creating a command line argument in python or give the the reference page for xyz feature. But I dont have it write the entire codebase for me. Seems like a recipe for disaster. And ive seen it bork a couple of peoples machines before.
I dunno am I the old man yells at clouds now?
This might help, but tell Claude to do Test Driven Development [TDD] which will require each feature/function/etc.to have a test case and a pass before it can exit the worktree before a PR.
Also look into graphify which does a bit of “explain what this does” and makes things very easy to describe the code in a systematic way. AST is here again.
I’m having success with an agentic orchestration model that doesn’t move on unless they pass the tests. And if they fail they hand off to a smarter model. I have to guide it and sometimes ask basic questions about why we’re trying to load docker locally when I have guthub actions to do it, but if you know that much you can just poke it with a stick occasionally. The graph is updated and I have records for design decisions and reports on failure as well as tests to pass.
This is definitely a different approach and I can easily see how some people don’t get it; and it’s probably tied to doing things the hard earned way. Less developer and more TPM in terms of mindset.
I think throughput [lines of code, commits, PRs, beans, etc] is a worthless metric, velocity means speed + direction. A poorly guided version is just scattered all over, make it work and that’s it, until the next round of changes.
But it’s definitely a different game now.
Define what you want, have the tests written, lock the tests and then have the code written.