You can also just use AI and keep the scale of your changes small rather than refactoring the whole app with a change? This isn't super-weird.
You can also just use AI and keep the scale of your changes small rather than refactoring the whole app with a change? This isn't super-weird.
"In the discrete world of computing, there is no meaningful metric in which "small" changes and "small" effects go hand in hand, and there never will be." - E.W.Dijkstra (EWD1036)
I believe grandparent meant "small enough changes that you can understand what the effects are likely to be"
Then it's probably small enough - where you don't need a help of AI, and should do it yourself.
My position is that AI could be useful to find the potential places for these changes, but it should be someone who's capable of thinking to implement them.
That might be true for you. For me, I can stay in flow state so long as I'm progressing, even if progressing doesn't involve writing every line by hand. Whereas I easily fall out of flow state as soon as I am frustrated by an inability to remember some particular bit of syntax, or a particular bit of architecture, or a particular code pattern.
For me, AI has been a godsend for productivity because it's great at what I'm bad at. I'm not spending 99% of my day grinding away at C++ code; I'm never writing enough for it to become a world class language expert. I'm jumping between SQL queries, CSS, Java, bezier curves, Python, and shell. If I need to write something in a language I touch infrequently (e.g. Go or Ruby) it's nice to have individual blocks of code generated for me, so that I'm not slowed down by my ignorance on a language's iterator syntax, or whatever.
As you know, the boundary ultimately depends on code quality. The problem is that AI generates code that looks high quality even outside my area of expertise, at least from my perspective. So now the boundary has to be redrawn. Refactoring usually ends up redefining those boundaries. At that point, the question becomes: do I rewrite my own code, or do I reject the AI code? Those are the two choices left.
In the end, an exceptionally skilled programmer might be able to keep their core domain intact, but I think the vast majority would find that very difficult. So it might be possible once you cross a certain threshold, but considering the sheer amount of code required to deliver a single modern program, it's hard to know which parts to focus on. However, my perspective might be different because I'm coming from the point of view of delivering a working program, not from the perspective of open source development