The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

And the value of AI as pushed to us by these companies is in doing larger units of work.

But... reviewing code is harder than writing code. Expressing how I want something to be done in natural language is incredibly hard.

So over time I'm spending a lot of energy in those things, and only getting it 80% right.

Not to mention I'm constantly in this highly suspicious mode, trying to pierce through the veil of my own prompt and the code generated, because it's the edge cases that make work hard.

The end result is exhaustion. There is no recharge. Plans are front-loaded, and then you switch to auditing mode.

Whereas with code you front-load a good amount of design, but you can make changes as you go, and since you know your own code the effort to make those are much lower.

> But... reviewing code is harder than writing code.

For me it's very clearly the opposite. I wonder if it's a professional background, or personality or neurotype issue or something, but when I'm faced with a problem I often get somewhat paralyzed, spending a long time thinking about a good approach, but when I delegate to someone or ask an AI to tackle it, even if I get back something half-shitty, it removes my paralysis and then reviewing and improving what they did is significantly easier (or at least more motivating) for me than doing it from scratch. And even if they ended up giving me something that's entirely in the wrong direction, and I need to throw out all of it, I still usually feel that it removes that paralysis and gives me a better understanding of the problem space.

I wonder if this difference between people accounts for a significant different between those who benefit from AI and those who don't.