Am I the only one who is still wary of using AI as a developer? I know AI is technically another new tech tool to helps us work smart not harder…but in the same breath, I truly believe relying on AI will eventually create a human race that is a tad dumb. I don’t mean this horribly, but if you think about it, it is true.

Lets talk about it

This past month I was down to the wire deadline wise. I had two weeks to add a new feature. This feature including some framework i had not had any experience with yet. Now usually, we as developers, would look up the documentation. Maybe look for some examples of its use & sit working on that logic for a week. Then another week or two trying to iron out those kinks & googling for help to stop us tearing out our hair. Then once we finally get everything working, we going to restyle it and make it all pretty.

Now I get it, that is a lot of work, I personally didn’t have this time. So, I did what to me is the unthinkable. I asked AI to help me build it. In all honesty, AI built 99% of this feature…it only took 3 days to fully add this feature & style it out. This has shook me up. Not only is this a wonderful way of not wasting my time, but I didn’t have the exhaustion, fatigue & stress that I would normally…but this comes at a heavy price…

I didn’t write that logic, if I were to leave it there as is, I wouldn’t really know what’s going on and in a while when its up to me to use this framework again, I haven’t a clue because AI had the experience with it, not me. This is where the horrendous guilt comes in for me. I feel ashamed that there is a chunk of code that wasn’t truly written by me. Sure did I fix the one issue AI got stuck on, yes. Did I style it & sort out the migration part for CloudKit, yes, did AI do the rest, yes.

Now thankfully, I am not the kind to allow AI to do my job. I spent some time, reading exactly what I had written, going through line by line & indeed extracting this code into a practice app to unpack it. Take it apart and re-engineer it so to speak. This way I have had experience with this particular framework. This I believe is the best way to use AI.

Use the tool we now have, but don’t rely on it.

Sadly I am aware that out of the entire human race, this way of using AI is probably in the minority. I scares me the next generation of developers especially, whom are going to rely on AI to build their apps. Then one day, when they need to actually do the work themselves, they are dumbfounded, they won’t know how to as they haven’t had the experience.

What is your opinion, do you feel the AI guilt? Drop a comment below, let me know.