alertchecker

Think we're pretty close to the point where we'll no longer need to prompt AI to refactor or review the refactoring if it's done within tight constraints i.e. absolutely no change to functionality. But when functionality changes may be acceptable as part of it, it's less clear - in my experience AI isn't at a point yet where it can always be trusted to "understand" what the requirements are (including to what extent they can be allowed to evolve), what is or isn't acceptable in terms of user experience etc. That's where human review is still useful and in many cases, essential.

It can't be AI-generated - AI doesn't swear

Agreed, think the first user rule I ever put into Cursor was "Don't write code comments unless absolutely necessary to explain something that couldn't just be inferred"

My personal experience is the larger the task you ask it to do, the less attention it pays to the details - for a very large task it seems more prone to missing test coverage, writing duplicate code, not refactoring where it should etc. So I try to split into smaller tasks where possible (also makes it easier to review).

I've been coding professionally for almost 30 years and it's only really in the last few months I've started to "trust" AI to do a better job than I can within given time constraints - but with a big caveat - as the article points out, the AI needs to be kept on track and questioned about its approach, told about inconsistencies etc. To aid with that it helps to have a lot of Cursor rules that guide the approach - built up over time, mostly based on seeing what AI didn't get right.

Well that's at work - but I've actually taken a different approach for my own personal project and generally now allow AI to do things in its own way - I put my effort into checking the functionality rather than the code itself. This does result in some fairly sprawling code and some bits that are practically now only really maintainable/"understandable" by AI. Functionality is still fine though, which is what really matters there when there's no other team members and understanding every part of the code isn't critical. Guess in future it may just self-refactor it without even being prompted.