Finally Buying the AI Hype (Reluctantly)

I hadn’t spent much time with the newer AI coding tools, but my early experiments weren’t great. One of my first tries involved asking a tool to move and rename a file — it took five minutes, way too much hand-holding, and left me wondering why I didn’t just do it myself.

I finally got around to trying Junie from JetBrains in RubyMine — and yeah, I think I’m finally buying into the AI coding hype.

Using it felt a lot like working with a junior or intermediate developer. The code it wrote wasn’t necessarily wrong, it just wasn’t quite the way I would recommend writing it.

For example, as part of a user invite system, I asked Junie to add the ability to remove an invite. To do this, the specific invite ID was passed into the controller. But I had enough context to know we could just destroy all invites for that user — there’s only ever one. Fortunately, that was a simple additional instruction and we were off to the races.

I think for today that’s how I’ll be treating AI coding. It’s an extremely fast developer, but it needs a lot of direction and handholding.