My younger sister graduated with a CompSci degree a few years ago. I've been behind her, motivating her and demystifying the world of programming from the very beginning. There was a piece of advice I repeated everyday, trying to make her understand how to operate. The problem was, she was trying to read and understand every line of code in a function before using it. I thought it was non-sense. Someone, much smarter than us has created that function, it's part of a vetted library, it has been tested already. All you have to do is use it. "After all, you don't need to understand how an internal combustion engine works, yet you feel safe driving your car, don't you?"
Now, I find myself right at that inflection point. When I use an LLM to generate code, whether it is to define a single function or to create a long running job, I find this need to understand it. I cannot commit code that I don't understand.
I posted about how I spent 10 hours reworking what the AI had created in 12 minutes. I didn't do so because I didn't like the style of the code, or the naming convention. I did it because the code didn't work. As simple as that. Every time I generate code and trust it to be working, it fails. When I use the same generator to fix the issue, it may or may not work. Now I have two problems.
Yet, the world is using Claude, Codex, and what not to write code. They are trusting it like we trust an internal combustion engine, while I'm trying to understand every piece of it before I use it. My need for understanding the code is slowing down any gains from the speed of code generation.
That means, I cannot become a 10x engineer with this tool. I cannot call it like a function that has been vetted by another developer because the code hasn't been written before I call it. I don't know if it is copying Jon Skeet's answer from Stackoverflow, or if it is copying my own low quality post that was deleted by consensus.
I don't know if I should update my metaphor, or if I should just trust the engineering behind it.