What’s that old (and in my experience pretty accurate) adage? The last 10% of a software project takes 90% of the time?
In my experience, AI is helpful for that first 90% — when the codebase is pretty simple, and all of the weird business logic edge cases haven’t crept in. In the last 10%(as well as most “legacy” codebases), it seems to have a lot trouble understanding enough to generate helpful output at more than a basic level.
Furthermore, if you’re not deliberate with your AI usage, it really gets you into “this code is too complicated for the AI to be much help with” territory a lot faster.
I’d imagine this is part of why we’re not seeing an explosion of software productivity.
In my experience, AI is helpful for that first 90% — when the codebase is pretty simple, and all of the weird business logic edge cases haven’t crept in. In the last 10%(as well as most “legacy” codebases), it seems to have a lot trouble understanding enough to generate helpful output at more than a basic level.
Furthermore, if you’re not deliberate with your AI usage, it really gets you into “this code is too complicated for the AI to be much help with” territory a lot faster.
I’d imagine this is part of why we’re not seeing an explosion of software productivity.