There's a quote in there that goes to the heart of one of my biggest fears about AI use by programmers:

The code grows beyond my usual comprehension

The idea of people building applications they don't understand both horrifies and terrifies me.

@devilgate Yeah, what I like about this post (and coining the term) is that it tries to separate the random fun hacks from the real projects where programmers need to understand every line of code. It's dangerous to ship code you can't explain.

I see Willison goes on to insist he won't do that:

We also need to read the code. My golden rule for production-quality AI-assisted programming is that I won’t commit any code to my repository if I couldn’t explain exactly what it does to somebody else.

But not everyone is going to be so careful.

@devilgate It's unfortunately true. Maybe similar to how there is going to be even more junk content cluttering up the web. I hope the good apps and content can rise to the top.

Dangerous but common to ship code you don't understand - but not a new problem (though AI may be encouraging). I came into multiple projects over the years where the original devs were all gone and no one understood core code - some in quite large companies.

@ffmike For sure, don't touch the code and hopefully it will keep working. 🙂 People also copy/paste code from Stack Overflow that they don't understand.

In my experience, the other thing that made for hard-to-maintain code was the 90's fetish for "self-documenting code." Very little code is self-documenting five years after it's written. Comments are important.