My experience with AI is that it's workable for "approximate" things, but it's frustratingly difficult to use as a precision tool.
It works great for the trivial demos, where you say "here's an API, build a client" without significant constraints, because that use case is a pretty wide, vague goal. I wasn't going to hold it accountable for matching existing corporate branding, code style, or how to use storage efficiently, so it can work fine.
But most of the real work is in the "precision tool" space. You aren't building that many blank-slate API clients, many of the actual tickets are "flip bit 29 of data structure XQ33 when it's a married taxpayer filing singly and huckleberries are in season". The actual change is 3 lines of code, and the effort is in thinking and understanding the problem (and the hundreds of lines of misdocumented code surrounding the problem).
I've had Claude decide it wanted to refactor a bunch of unrelated code after asking for a minor, specific change. Or the classic "here's 2000 lines of code that solve the problem in a highly Enterprise way, when the real developer would look at the problem and spit up 150 lines of actual functionality". You can either spend 30 minutes writing the prompt to do the specific precision thing you want and only that, or you can just write the fix directly.
My experience with AI is that it's workable for "approximate" things, but it's frustratingly difficult to use as a precision tool.
It works great for the trivial demos, where you say "here's an API, build a client" without significant constraints, because that use case is a pretty wide, vague goal. I wasn't going to hold it accountable for matching existing corporate branding, code style, or how to use storage efficiently, so it can work fine.
But most of the real work is in the "precision tool" space. You aren't building that many blank-slate API clients, many of the actual tickets are "flip bit 29 of data structure XQ33 when it's a married taxpayer filing singly and huckleberries are in season". The actual change is 3 lines of code, and the effort is in thinking and understanding the problem (and the hundreds of lines of misdocumented code surrounding the problem).
I've had Claude decide it wanted to refactor a bunch of unrelated code after asking for a minor, specific change. Or the classic "here's 2000 lines of code that solve the problem in a highly Enterprise way, when the real developer would look at the problem and spit up 150 lines of actual functionality". You can either spend 30 minutes writing the prompt to do the specific precision thing you want and only that, or you can just write the fix directly.