One thing that I'm certain of, is that there are always costs to writing more lines than what is necessary to solve a specific problem.
I've experienced this before AI, and I've experienced this, magnified, with AI.
For a well-designed project written by hand, you will work faster writing the code for new features by hand than the same project written with AI from scratch, using AI to write the new features.
But... If you have a well designed, human-written codebase, you will be faster if you generate the code for new features using AI than if you do it by hand... And you can maintain that speed for long periods of time if you use fine-grained prompts. What matters most is the quality of the codebase.
You can achieve the same degree of maintainability using AI from the beginning but you would have to make fine-grained prompts.
The gap is about making good engineering decisions. It just so happens that the value of good decisions compounds over time.
I've experienced this before AI, and I've experienced this, magnified, with AI.
For a well-designed project written by hand, you will work faster writing the code for new features by hand than the same project written with AI from scratch, using AI to write the new features.
But... If you have a well designed, human-written codebase, you will be faster if you generate the code for new features using AI than if you do it by hand... And you can maintain that speed for long periods of time if you use fine-grained prompts. What matters most is the quality of the codebase.
You can achieve the same degree of maintainability using AI from the beginning but you would have to make fine-grained prompts.
The gap is about making good engineering decisions. It just so happens that the value of good decisions compounds over time.