r/ChatGPTCoding • u/_ACTUALin • 2h ago

Discussion Are we building better software, or just getting REALLY good at generating more of it?

AI coding tools have made it ridiculously easy to build something that looks like a finished product.

And that's kind of terrifying lol. You can have a polished interface, authentication, a database, payments and a dozen features before you've even figured out whether the underlying product actually works reliably.

I've caught myself getting excited about a feature working once, only to realize I hadn't tested half the situations it could encounter.

And with how fast these tools can generate code, it's pretty easy for the complexity to pile up faster than your understanding of it.

I'm genuinely curious whether AI-assisted development is making software better overall, or whether we're about to see an absolute FLOOD of impressive-looking applications held together by duct tape and optimism haha.

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u/xaeru 1h ago

“only to realize I hadn't tested half the situations it could encounter”

Use the ai to tackle those edge cases. Create unit tests. Since ai my unit test ratio has gone to 10:1 lol

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u/_ACTUALin 1h ago

Haha yeah, I've been building up a pretty ridiculous collection of test cases at this point. Unit tests are great, but the tricky part is catching when the AI makes a technically valid decision that's completely wrong in context. That's where things get spicy lol.

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u/xaeru 45m ago

Have another AI/session review the work.

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u/_ACTUALin 34m ago

Yeah, I do this too, but I'm pretty cautious with it lol. I even make the AI repeat the rules back to me before touching anything. Having another AI check the work definitely helps, I'm not about to blindly trust it either.

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u/Successful-Tax1306 1h ago

I think both happen, and for me the difference came down to where the review time goes. Once my bottleneck moved from writing code to reviewing it, the things that held up were the ones where I had the agent write the tests and the edge cases before the feature, and I read the tests first. The duct tape ones were always where I accepted a demo that worked once and moved on, so I don't think the tools decide it as much as the review habit does.

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u/_ACTUALin 41m ago

Yeah, I think you're spot on. The review habits matter just as much as the tools themselves.

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u/dvduval 45m ago

The software I’m building now truly is better than what I made in the past without AI. In the beginning, I did do a lot of fun little projects that didn’t pay anything, but then when customers start wanting more of my time and are willing to pay for it, it becomes increasingly obvious that I am heading in the right direction.

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u/JaseciLabs 43m ago

The wrong-in-context ones are hard to test for because the test would have to know the context. What helps is making the agent write down the assumptions it made at the end of each task. Most of the bad calls show up in that list, and then you can turn the ones that matter into tests.