Code Is Debt

The worst case with AI-generated code is worse than this. Instead of a company, I'll talk about smaller personal projects.

You can make a very real decision right now - spend a lot of time making 10,000 lines of good code that you know well, or spend VERY LITTLE time (maybe 1-2% as long) making 20,000 lines of bad code that does the same thing and that you don't know well at all.

Personally I'm continuing to find the middle ground, because if you want to continue to build past that, I think you've actually lost that time in the first case.

This, there is always middle ground.

Personally, I have only used AI to write actual code when it is for Bash and Python scripts that are self contained. In my case self contained means they are interfaced to via command line so their boundaries are very well defined.

I have never returned to look at any of the code.

I would never use it to generate domain code for my codebase because then I'd have to code review it anyways. I mean, if I have an agentic AI solving an issue and generating a PR, great, I can review that and give it feedback on how to change the code before its accepted.

Unless I can either throw the code away or review it for maintainability rather than correctness then I have no need for a tool that write my code for me.

Oh, unless the AI can be the product owner and understand the financial ramifications of not doing its job correctly but I would be worried that the solution is to not have a product by reducing the users to ash.

Every time I overreached with trusting AI to correctly implement large parts of code I've paid the price in lost productivity later. I imagine with fully vibecoded apps the skill you need most is "you know what maybe I didn't need that feature after all" because I can't imagine how frustrating it would be debugging spaghetti code where you have no idea what the hell it does.

> I think you've actually lost that time in the first case. And in the second case, as opposed to the middle ground.