Thread · HN Continuity

In this moment there are a million ways to do things wrong. But there are also some ways, maybe less than a million, to do things right.

Here's an anecdote about a way to do this wrong.

I have found with AI coding methods that there's a line where it becomes a hail-mary (in the American Football sense).

A hail-mary is when you throw the ball to the end zone and just pray someone catches it. This is almost always at the end of the game.

This moment with AI code is indicative that you can't put together a coherent plan so you just tell the agent to "make it good". It used to be that the results here would suck, but now the agents are really competent, so the results might be good.

But at that moment, that's your cue to back up. Because as soon as you take a solution that's so far detached from your understanding, you're underwater. The hail mary is not part of a larger game plan. It's the last play of the game. There's nothing after.

So as soon as you reach that moment in your coding, you're signaling that you're done understanding not just the code, but even the way it works at a high level. If you're still going to work with this code after, then back up and work with the AI to get more understanding of the problem.