Maybe AI is not so bad

Day 316 / 366

It’s day 316, which means there are just 50 days remaining in this year! I am not sure if that makes me happy or sad.

Regardless, this year has made me go a lot back and forth about AI and how it is going to change software development, a space quite important to me. There were times where I thought that it while it might not take away all of our jobs, it would definitely be a great tool to 10x your development skills. But then soon AI will frustrate me with its hallucinations and the inability to stick to the point and not go off exploring tangents.

Today I got a chance to have a call with a colleague of mine for a potential project. He showed me how his dev team uses AI heavily to streamline their coding process. While I use GitHub Copilot, which is a glorious autocomplete, they use the Cursor IDE, an AI-powered coding tool that has access to your entire codebase, and you can ask it to write, re-write or fix your code.

Not only that, they use an AI Agent to do iterative tasks, such as failing tests. The Agent would look at the test logs, make changes to the code, run the tests again to see if they are fixed, and then repeat the process.

And if that wasn’t enough, they have an AI tool to do their code reviews as well. Obviously these tools don’t get things 100% right. But the point is that even if they get to 80%, you can do the remaining 20 and still save a lot of time.

My next argument would have been that AI is costly, but I was extremely wrong. While on call, he demonstrated how the AI agent fixes 8 failing tests. It took around 10 minutes to do so, and it made multiple API calls during that. The total cost for that was around 25 Rupees. That would come up to around 150 Rs per hour, which is definitely cheaper than a junior developer. But the agent can do stuff fast, and it can work 24 hours a day!

I think there is definitely some potential here, and I am keen to work more on this project and explore how AI can be used to increase the productivity of dev teams.