My work is requiring me to start using AI so I did an exploration this weekend.
I was blown away by how quickly I was able to get a working app. Full social media clone complete with persistence, video and audio playback, auth, realtime updates, and image uploads in about half an hour. I was then horrified by the quality of the code and how little I understood what the code was doing. I 10x’ed my speed, but in return debugging and editing was 100x harder and more time consuming.
I was also attempting to learn React Native and took note of how little debugging using the AI helped me actually learn the platform I was working with. I ended up abandoning the AI in favor of just learning directly.
Ime it can be incredibly useful, but you really have to double check everything, try hard to enforce consistently, and not lose track of what’s actually happening in your codebase, otherwise bad things are going to happen — especially if you’re working on anything that is in any way novel