Yes I code with AI, yes I am comfortable with that

If you have spent any time following developments in tech over the past 5 years, you can't have failed to notice the great AI debate. I say debate but in reality, not very much debate actually takes place. On the one hand you have the purists, the hardcore manual coders writing straight up machine code in text files, and on the other you have the so called vibe coders, using LLMs to create software without really understanding what they are doing. Between these two extremes lie the rest of us, the 99% of tech who recognise and use these new AI tools to make our coding lives easier, but are cautious and wary of giving these tools too much control over our codebase.

So why does there seem to be such a taboo over using AI to write our code? Putting aside the insane power and water requirements of the datacenters that do the heavy lifting (important issues for sure but not the focus of this post), why do we have such an aversion to handing over control of our code to an automation?

From a personal perspective, my first experience of the use of AI for coding was not a good one. I was working for a coding bootcamp at the time, and around 2023 first started noticing that students were using AI to do their homework exercises for them. The small but telltale detail that always gave it away was the comments in the code, written in clear flowery language peppered with emojis.

// Loop through the array

became

//🔄 Iterating through the collection with high-efficiency functional patterns!

There were even occasions where I was on Zoom calls with students reviewing the work they had done, where I would ask them to explain their work, and they would say 'I don't know what is happening here because ChatGPT wrote that function'.

And here lies the problem, if you are studying, learning to code, using AI can actually slow your progress - you need to struggle and get it wrong to get the fundamentals locked down. Otherwise you are not actually absorbing knowledge, and crucially when the AI gets it wrong, you will not be able to spot the bug and fix it. This is the pont where you spend hours prompting to - just fix it, no mistakes this time!

So at what point is it OK to start asking AI to do the work for you?

Personally I don't like to let AI write anything I couldn't understand or write for myself. I don't want to hand over control of the project, I only want to use it as a helper to make my life easier, to write code quickly that I can check and test without having to construct manually. I think we all have our own levels of comfort when it comes to AI, but I think the key rule of thumb is the human developer being the boss and the AI the assistant.

At this point I will point out that this website was created with a lot of assistance from Gemini, from installing Next in a folder to deploying to a docker container took a little over a long weekend - record time for me. I know Next, I know React, and I know how APIs work, so as long as I can see everything working I am happy. The only place AI took the lead was styling. Again I know Tailwind but I suck at design as many of my former students will confirm, I am not a fan of CSS, Tailwind, or stying in general, so if I can offload that task to AI, I am happy and my project is better for it.

At the time of writing I am watching the Artemis 2 flight about to re-enter the Earths atmosphere, and I have no doubt that AI played at least some part in the planning and execution of this mission, and I am pretty sure those astronauts who are about to go through the stress of re-entry will be happy that the calculations of re-entry that their lives depend on will have been led by NASA's brightest and best rather than blindly trusting a LLM. But that is a much more critical situation than is my div centred?

I'm going to sign off this blog now as Artemis is approx 30 mins from splashdown and wishing them a safe landing, but in summary, don't fear the AI, it is just another tool and there is no shame in using it.