I think I agree. Fast iteration in many cases > long thought out ideas going the wrong direction. The issue is purely a mentality one where AI makes it really easy to push features fast without spending as much time thinking through them.

That said, iteration is much more difficult on established codebases, especially with production workflows where you need to be more than extra careful your migration is backwards compatible, doesn't mess up feature x,y,z,d across 5 different projects relying on some field or logical property.

Unless you go through the code with a tooth comb, you're not even aware of what trade-offs the AI has made for you.

We've all just seen the Claude Code source code. 4k class files. Weird try/catches. Weird trade-offs. Basic bugs people have been begging to fix left untouched.

Yes, there's a revolution happening. Yes, it makes you more productive.

But stop huffing the kool-aid and be realistic. If you think you're still deciding about the trade-offs, I can tell you with sincerity that you should go try and refactor some of the code you're producing and see what trade-offs the AI is ACTUALLY making.

Until you actually work with the code again, it's ridiculously easy to miss the trade-offs the AI is making while it's churning out it's code.

I know this because we've got some AI heavy users on our team who often just throwing the AI code straight into the repo with properly checking it. And worse, on a code review, it looks right, but then when something goes wrong, you go "why did they make that decision?". And then you notice there's a very AI looking comment next to the code. And it clicks.

They didn't make that decision, they didn't choose between the trade-offs, the AI did.

I've seen weird timezone decisions, sorting, insane error catching theatre, changing parts of the code it shouldn't have even looked at, let alone changed. In the FE sphere it's got no clue how to use UseEffect or UseMemoization, it litters every div with tons of unnecessary CSS, it can't split up code for shit, in the backend world it's insanely bad at following prior art on things like what's the primary key field, what's the usual sorting priority, how it's supposed to use existing user contexts, etc.

And the amount of times it uses archaic code, from versions of the language 5-10 years ago is really frustrating. At least with Typescript + C#. With C# if you see anything that doesn't use the simpler namespacing or doesn't use primary constructors it's a dead give-away that it was written with AI.