It will generate bad tests, so you will have lots of tests blocking your work, but won’t actually test the important properties.
Mass refactoring.
That’s an amount of trust in the LLM capacity to not create hidden corner cases and your capacity to review large-scale changes that… I find your complete faith disturbing.
As always, the specific situation matters. Some refactors are mostly formulaic, and AI does great at that. For example, “add/change this database field, update the form, then update the api, update the admin page, update the ui, etc.” is perfectly reasonable to send an AI off to do, and can save plenty of programmer time.
It will generate bad tests, so you will have lots of tests blocking your work, but won’t actually test the important properties.
That’s an amount of trust in the LLM capacity to not create hidden corner cases and your capacity to review large-scale changes that… I find your complete faith disturbing.
I mean, it’s not like it ships it to production. You can read code it writes and modify it if you don’t like it, or choose not to use it.
If you can read the code it writes and modify it, a project manager can remove that time from you and take the AI slop direct to production.
As always, the specific situation matters. Some refactors are mostly formulaic, and AI does great at that. For example, “add/change this database field, update the form, then update the api, update the admin page, update the ui, etc.” is perfectly reasonable to send an AI off to do, and can save plenty of programmer time.
Until you don’t properly check the diff, a +/- or </=/>/<=/>= was reversed, and you now have an RCE in test, soon to be in prod.
What kind of moron doesn’t check the diff? Plus, modern AI coding tools explicitly show the diff and ask you to confirm each edit directly.
I wouldn’t let a human muck about in my code unchecked, much less an AI. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless.