People who have never coded anything complex with AI just don't get development, and they always react defensively to the topic by calling it "slop."
Yeah, you can throw together some slop in three hours with the latest models.
But you can also do more demanding stuff with it, and then it really turns into work.
Not necessarily the kind of work where you are slaving away writing code all the time like a programming drone, but you are constantly thinking about other things.
- Is my app usable, like the user experience?
- Does my architecture make sense? Am I reusing certain helpers and components consistently?
- If you are having it code a new Nostr app: What is the relay load? Am I channeling and caching queried data properly? And not sending the same queries to the relays over and over?
- How about security? Do a full security audit. How and where are sensitive data stored? What are the risks? How can you make it safer?
- How about performance? The whole app has gotten slower somehow. Where are the bottlenecks?
- How about encapsulation? AIs still handle this sloppily, and you have to keep disciplining them on it.
- How do I get a consistent UI? Things like design patterns, atomic design, BEM naming schemes, mobile first principles, and so on.
- Find code duplications, spot what can be modularized better. Refactor, refactor, refactor, and then test everything again for the hundredth time.
And a lot more. If you leave all these things completely to the AI, real crap comes out, and you notice it yourself pretty quickly that development starts dragging along and more errors pop up.
And then there are still tons of problems along the way that you have to solve yourself, because the AI with its narrow view just can't find a solution. That's when the human has to step in and think differently, get creative.
And now tell me that every developer out there who still codes the old fashioned way by hand is also thinking about all these aspects of development and mastering them. They exist, no doubt, but even without AI, a whole bunch of slop gets developed out there. Especially in companies where you have deadlines. You have no idea, how much BS they create under pressure. Accumulating technical debt for decades.
Coding is just one part of development that AI takes off your plate today and speeds up. For a bigger app, a lot more aspects come in where you just can't rely on the AI agent. Your role shifts from developer in a team to a technical project manager of a team full of autistic junior coders.
AI agents are like wild Arabian horses where you have to hold the reins tight and keep disciplining the animal. If you let it run free, it goes great for three hours and then throws you off its back.
