Good Article Roundup: AI Coding
I often can’t find good articles I’ve read. Therefore, I’m for once write a blog post that is just a stash of good links.
Yes, this post is just a list of articles. The articles talk about AI coding but mostly apply to other tools too.
Your coding agent is under-specified: When hand-coding, if you ask something, the programming language and compiler will resist. LLMs will just fill in the blanks! As Mario Zechner says: AI will fill in the blanks with garbage it found on the internet.
You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs: Remember that maintenance costs dominate the total cost of software! So if AI generates a lot of code but can’t maintain it well, maintenance costs will be really high.
I don’t think AI will make your processes go faster AI can write code quickly. But writing code is often not the bottleneck.
The Tacit Dimension: Why Your Best Engineers Can’t Tell You What They Know: People can’t explain everything they know. So if they can’t write down what they know, AI won’t know it either!
The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It’s Forgetting How to Code: Similar article: People have knowledge in their heads, and if they don’t use that knowledge, they have to relearn it.
Using AI to write better code more slowly: The AI story is often about "faster, faster." But with AI you can also write better code more slowly.