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?
And medium chunks. Medium chunks require a good agentic framework, but they can handle sizable chunks of code.
It can also help you brainstorm/debug, as long as you recognize the sycophantic tendency.
And yes. If you can’t understand what it’s written (or mathematically prove the module functions correctly), that’s a problem.
I guess I’m saying LLMs are bad at “architecting” big projects. They aren’t intelligent, they are ephemeral constructs akin to weather prediction models that don’t have a mind, nor any memory, nor any adaptiveness. They simply do not understand things like a person does, and they cannot grasp some things, so it’s up to the person to provide the framework and point them at monotonous tasks to automate.
Ah! No, I never suspected LLMs would work for architecture.
This thread got me to sign up for the free version of Claude, which promptly hosed a very simple Powershell script I had on hand. BUT, it did give me ideas on speeding it up, things I hadn’t thought of. I’ll take another pass without so many beers in my blood.
TBH I would recommend some of the competing APIs over free Claude.
Xiaomi’s token plan, in particular. It’s dirt cheap (a couple of bucks for a whole year), Mimo 2.6 is great, but they’re a “dark horse” in the LLM race now. They aren’t widely known like Deepseek/GLM, and their models are under-hyped, hence they aren’t popular and are pricing things accordingly.