Ask HN: Do you feel comfortable admitting that you use AI?

In my work, there are people everywhere in the 'AI adoption' spectrum. On one hand, a certain Senior engineer spent a month having an AI write him thousands of lines of code for a feature. The AI wrote a million tests, tools to visualize data, everything. But he still has not delivered the code to the main repository since he knows nobody will ever review the mess the AI wrote, and he can't even properly understand it to defend it in review. We have human reviews as part of our process, the coworker is 100% stuck on it. I, on the other hand, don't ask AI to write code for me, but I have AI explain me concepts, track down bugs, review my patches, etc. Sometimes it shows me patch format, but I prefer it doesn't touch my filesystem. I treat it as a senior employee whose task is to be there and help me. It's been going great. I am definitely more productive, I am coding faster, and the future is sustainable for me. Having it write shit for me would definitely be faster, but I want to use AI as a tool to _teach me_ what to do, not do it for me. There are also employees who are still working on the pre-AI model. Whenever AI is mentioned, they automatically assume it could be hallucinating and whatnot. To these, I never mention AI, because it simply derails the conversation to a useless point.

After 2+ years of using LLM agents to write code for me, I had to reclaim my engineering skills. It was so easy to create 50+ project with a sleek ui, but i could not explain any of them. It was easier to start a new project from scratch than was to dive in the code to understand what is going on. The worst part is whenever my tokens ran out, my productivity was zero. I was even an engineer anymore just a glorified prompter. Lately i have changed how i work, i still use it but like a fancy autocomplete, a debugger, I make it draft stuff for me, then i interrogate it, i make it justify every line of code that it writes, until i understand the code myself that i can write it if i wanted to. Guys listen to me oneshot an entire feature may seem like you're 10x productivity but once the code it generate becomes complex even the agent can't deal with the complexity it itself created. Big LLM companies market the product as coding is over, just become a prompter and buy our subsbscription fees. We used to get paid to write code, now we pay to write code.

IMO, it's like asking: do you feel comfortable admitting you used a calculator instead of doing mental math?

No, it's not like that at all. A calculator uses known deterministic algorithms to compute an answer. As long as you stay within the precision bounds, you'll get reliable and correct answers 100% of the time. An AI is the result of randomness put through a simulated evolution, each one is different. We tend to expect them all to be the same, but that would be like redoing the big-bang until present, and expecting the dominant beings to be human, live in the same countries, speak the same languages, and believe all same cultural norms. Nobody really groks how alien AI truly is.

Pretty much all the code I produce nowadays is generated with AI help, to some extent. No problem admitting it. The value is not writing the code anymore, but deciding what to create and keeping the code maintainable and understandable.

For work tasks? No. My team is super anti-AI. But I tell them about all the stuff I've built with it for personal stuff.