I want to believe, and I promise I'm not trying to be a luddite here. Has anyone with decent (5+ years) experience built a non-trivial new feature in a production codebase quicker by letting AI write it?
Agents are great at familiarizing me with a new codebase. They're great at debugging because even when they're wrong, they get me thinking about the problem differently so I ultimately get the right solution quicker. I love using it like a super-powered search tool and writing single functions or SQL queries about the size of a unit test. However, reviewing a junior's code ALWAYS takes more time than writing it myself, and I feel like AI quality is typically at the junior level. When it comes to authorship, either I'm prompting it wrong, or the emperor just isn't wearing clothes. How can I become a believer?
Agents are great at familiarizing me with a new codebase. They're great at debugging because even when they're wrong, they get me thinking about the problem differently so I ultimately get the right solution quicker. I love using it like a super-powered search tool and writing single functions or SQL queries about the size of a unit test. However, reviewing a junior's code ALWAYS takes more time than writing it myself, and I feel like AI quality is typically at the junior level. When it comes to authorship, either I'm prompting it wrong, or the emperor just isn't wearing clothes. How can I become a believer?