Blog » At work we recently started experimenting with generative AI for assistance with programming. We have a new Visual Studio Code plugin which we can ask questions in English, and it spits back code. It was a really interesting piece of, well, mandatory training. I've formed some opinions.

The main thing I dislike about AI coding assistance is that I have to very carefully review the AI's code to make sure that it does the right thing and none of the wrong things. And I, personally, find that reviewing code is more difficult than writing equivalent code myself.

I don't know if anybody else has this experience, but I understand code better when I interact with it directly by hand. Either by bringing code into existence, or by refactoring code which was already there to do something new, or to do the same thing more effectively. I need to take things apart and put them back together. I need to play with the code.

Passively reading someone else's code in the dead form of a git diff ...