No. You can absolutely build things with AI small or large and understand it. If you don’t understand it. Then you’re not caring about the output to begin with and not guiding it to build the solution you want.
The word "understand" seems to mean something different to you.
If I understand something, I could write it in assembly if I wanted to. It might take a long time, but I know every level of the stack under my code down to bare metal.
Maybe an AI level of "understand" i.e the same understanding a Senior has of a Junior's code based on daily check-ins is enough for 95% of "boring" programming. But for some tasks you need to either fully understand the code or just tolerate bugs.
At the level of complexity I work at, it's (often) faster to just code it myself than to expect AI to converge on a result I like and then hand check it.
Look, goals can differ. If you don't need to understand and predict every part of the code the AI is generating and you just need it to meet a "sketch" of what you want - by all means use AI. I do use AI in that situation for related or unimportant code.
But if you need full understanding, in my experience the only way to get that is to program it yourself. Unless what the AI is generating is so trivial you already understand it and it's grunt work, you will learn the detail by doing it yourself. Controlling the approach here is important.
However often the best way to handle grunt work is to write better abstractions, something AI sucks at.
It's the programming equivalent of many PG essays. https://www.paulgraham.com/useful.html for instance. There was one on how PG refined their thoughts via writing. It's in there somewhere.
> At the level of complexity I work at, it's (often) faster to just code it myself than to expect AI to converge on a result I like and then hand check it.
Would love an example because no one has ever been able to give a coding example that AI isn’t helpful for. I had one person on linked in try claim their undocumented audio hardware won’t work with ai but when we got ai to probe it and build docs it ended up solving a bunch of complex bugs they couldn’t fix.
Impressive, also horrifying. I love what I do and if AI can do it better than that sucks.
Anyway the use case for me is to realize a new visual style through graphics programming. It's a lot less measurable for an interative AI agent than "Meet this hardware specification from a device with a discoverable API"
I have no doubt AI could create a LOT of variations on "a new visual style" but it's less controllable than just doing it yourself.
Btw, did you "understand" the sound driver after the AI coded it? Could you modify it without further help?
