Well, I’ve used AI professionally and personally. Professionally, I already know how the code works because I worked on this codebase prior to AI. However, there are always things I forget and areas I don’t know well. I’ve found AI really helps me understand the codebase because I can ask it how some piece works and it will answer very quickly without me spending a couple hours tracing code paths.

Personally, I’ve written apps without understanding the code at all. I don’t even open an IDE and look at the code since I don’t really need to. Instead, I look at the app I’m building and tell the AI what bugs I find or what features I want to add. For some aspects, it helps to have an engineering background when the AI asks your implementation preferences and asks you to decide between a few options that involve different trade offs. But, these are high-level decisions.

Professionally, our system is more complex than the apps I build personally and I also need to be really careful about not breaking backwards compatibility for any changes we make. In personal app development, I don’t have as many concerns like this.

I do suspect someday our professional systems will fully automate code changes and manage complex changes across systems on their own with concern for backwards compatibility.