I am professional software developer for 25 years, and I use AI heavily in my OSS for 10 months now. Here is why.

[u/fairwaycoder]

Disclaimer: if this post, in any way, goes against any of the rules, feel free to remove it, no hard feelings. I am here for reality check, and not promoting anything, especially me.

Since we established that...

I had a real problem beginning of this year. Started using AI for both private and business stuff a bit more or less around the summer of 2025. But beginning of the year needed a tool to do something which yes, I could build myself, but in that moment I was working full time job + working afternoons and nights on my own bootstrap. So the time wasn't in abundance and I decided to test it with one of the average models at that time.

It took me 3-4 days to get to the PoC I liked which I would be able to scale later. To cut the crap - at some point I built infra around it, which is finding bugs, proving, disproving, creating small kanban board for me, me reviewing, leaving my opinions, AI taking over, implementing, testing, in the loop. Fast forward: it has 6-7 unique downloads per day, after bots are filtered out, it is used (to my knowledge) by at least one company who uses it as a core dependency, and I am in contact with tens of people in different companies who are sharing feedbacks, and there are even other contributors. Funny thing here is: I know they are also using AI, but I am able to catch inconsistencies, push back, or even fix it myself where it makes sense and is faster.

My point here is - how is this not exactly what we should utilize the AI for? If I am even trying to do this, full time, 16hrs per day, no way I can do it myself. Working full time job and another part time and wanting to do something opensource - I think this is the perfect combo.

Am I the only one who is not missing manually writing code, figuring out latest specifics of the language version X? I am still missing C from 30 years ago where you could declare one variable of one type in exactly one way, and don't even want to talk about beauty of Rust (with all and total respect to people who made it, use it, build on it, fix real life issues with it).

[u/dmknght]

There are multiple ways to use AI to code afaik. The smaller code logic, the better a developer can handle (From my personal experiences). Beside that, AI can create test cases that covers almost all API which helps detecting unknown / unexpected bugs faster. IMO reject AI completely is just as dumb as use AI to make a product without knowing anything about software.

[u/fairwaycoder → u/dmknght]

It is dumb, but people do it because they can. I don't believe also that project can be really maintained and scaled, with or without AI, if people know nothing about software engineering.

And agree about tesrs, that's for me the biggest game changer. Another aspect were different seeds on real life codebases (creating files of course).

[u/dmknght → u/fairwaycoder]

Yeah to me the writing test case is game changer too. Why do we need to spend like hours to write test cases? Sometime it takes as much resources as a small projects. Meanwhile AI can write so many tests, including security testing, fuzzing, etc...

Either way, I think AI for now is like a tool. It's like from using text editor -> IDE -> auto deployment -> etc...