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Maintenance

I've used the expression that I've learned much more from maintaining than building projects for quite some time now. It's definitely more true than ever but I wanted to make a note to myself regarding the use of artificial intelligence when building sites or doing pretty much anything else.

I'm partially writing this because of the news yesterday that Anthropic's new legal plugin sent a bunch of legal and financial service as software company stock into a nosedive1. I've got a lawyer buddy who I keep nudging to use AI, so I pointed it out. But I also need to point out some very serious drawbacks for the record.

I adopted CoPilot almost immediately out of the gate. It felt like a low wage assistant for some of the more tedious debugging tasks. As I've been more adept at using it, I've gotten somewhat lazier with my work and in doing so, I've made projects more difficult to maintain. I'm lucky I've caught this pattern early enough so that I don't dig myself a hole I can't get out of.

There are a lot of general misconceptions about code from the uninitiated. The less code the better - there is no more lines of code. This was one of the first tale tale signs that ole Space Karen doesn't have a clue. And code should be human readable with good notation. I've used all of the popular models in various cases. I switched to the Cursor editor to have my AI even futher embedded in my process. I've even given a go at 'vibe coding' in languages I know very little about.

But I can assure you this - if you don't actually know what you're doing or how it's being done, it's gonna make whatever you build obnoxiously difficult to maintain or modify. If that's your goal, AI is there to assist you.

Sustainability is so important. I remember reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was a kid and I really should read Maintenance Of Everything2 by Stewart Brand3.



Footnotes​

  1. AI Threatens a Wall Street Cash Cow: Financial and Legal Data - https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ai-threatens-a-wall-street-cash-cow-financial-and-legal-data-6782657e?mod=hp_lead_pos1 ↩

  2. Maintenance Of Everything - https://press.stripe.com/maintenance-part-one ↩

  3. Stewart Brand - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand ↩