I've been having a lot of thoughts about AI lately. These thoughts on how we are using AI revolve around a singular point. Sure, developers are losing their precision, creativity, autonomy, but most severely, coding is not fun.
There was a branching point at which using AI to help code stopped being fun. This was around the time that developers started trading Copilot's basic line completion for more cursor-style vibe coding IDEs.
I notice that as LLMs take bigger and bigger steps, the quality of their output declines. Sure, they might do fantastically on benchmarks, but their benchmarks do not match my real-world use case. So I can't rely on their APIs for a stable workflow. I'm not saying we should stop using AI for development. But we should stop relying on it. I don't want AI tools that write all the code. I want tools to write the code the way I want to write it.
REQUIREMENTS
As a developer...
- I want a pair programmer who helps me improve my coding skills, so that I can learn better practices and techniques through our collaboration.
- I want a pair programmer who reviews and validates my code without writing it for me, so that I can catch errors and improve code quality.
- I want to work with immediate feedback, so that I can validate code quickly and avoid wasting time moving slowly in big, imprecise steps.
- I want to achieve a flow state so that I can be maximally productive and engaged with my work.
- I want to refine my code line-by-line in real time, so that I can catch issues immediately rather than dealing with large, error-prone walls of code.
- I want to understand my codebase and how it functions, so that I can maintain full ownership and knowledge of my system.
- I want to maintain full control over system architecture and design decisions, so that the overall structure reflects my vision and requirements.
As far as I can tell in my research, no one else is implementing AI to meet these requirements. The direction we are collectively heading has become so painful that I find myself in desperate need to try something different.
The goal is to make programming fun again, and who knows, maybe it will give me an advantage in reducing the amount of slop I need to clean up. Maybe there is a reason everyone is going in the same direction. However, it's not working for me.