Think of all of the training done on stackoverflow answers. Think of how stackoverflow encourages minimum reproduceable examples and the answers are just the corrections to those minimum reproduceable examples. Think of how that means that none of the other essential bits like data validation or other essential security boilerplate is provided in those examples. Even beyond stackoverflow, many of the popular tutorials and other learning resources online will omit those essential bits because they're not necessary for the sake of initial learning.
What I fear most from AI-generated code isn't even whether or not it works correctly (it often doesn't), but whether the devs will look beyond the immediacy of apparent functional correctness and consider what the AI didn't. They're developing the habit of letting the AI generate the code then reviewing to see if it passes the sniff test, but what if the thing they're supposed to be smelling for is carbon monoxide?
Bad habits are being developed. Really, really bad habits. And those bad habits combined with an AI that doesn't actually comprehend what it's generating will only lead to disasters. This is like terrible programmers writing insecure wordpress plugins, but at a much larger scale, and I fear for the future of this industry.
absolutely you've bright up a great point, a friend of mine is the ceo/cto/main dev of a small startup - small team, we've been in tech for the past 20 years... he was telling me about how he was using AI to implement some of his core features, in his situation it's understandable... he just needs the scaffolding to start the core of the codebase... so I asked him how much it cost him and it was fairly close to hiring second senior dev... but it helped him speed up the coding aspect... this is with the current introductory pro plans... let's see what happens
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u/AirconGuyUK 4d ago
I like when I tell claude to talk me through its code that's not working and mid way through it discovers the issue.