Santiago

We're feeding AI our best work for free, and nobody is talking about what happens next. AI will scrape every blog and social media post you publish. AI will scrape every single open-source code you share. AI will scrape every tutorial you record. And then, they will sell this info back to you in the form of tokens and soon, ads. The economics of the future of content creation are broken. If we don't fix this, we will regret it.

"Good code" will never be the same for me. I used to be obsessed with the right abstractions, design patterns, elegance, cohesion, and a bunch of other metrics. These are still important. But they aren't the main thing I look for anymore. Good code solves a real problem, is easy for teammates to understand, and is ready to ship to real users. ← This is my current definition. By the way, there's an entire new generation of developers who don't (and probably never will) care about code purity as we did.

Software development has never been about writing code. This was obvious to many before, but now AI has made it crystal clear to everyone. Building software is 99% thinking, 1% writing code, and 1% fighting off-by-1 errors.

If we let AI scrape our writing, code, images, and videos, blend them all, and sell them back to us, how are we going to make a living? Who wants to keep feeding the AI for free? Who wants to write and publish a project if AI will scrape it and regurgitate every line without returning traffic or attribution? Despite AI's immense potential, there are many hard questions we need to answer.

I've seen worse code written by people than what I've seen from modern models. I'm not a fan of AI-generated code, but let's not pretend most humans write better code.

If your codebase is well-structured and tested, AI will help you move much faster. If your codebase is a mess, AI will help you create a bigger mess, also faster.

Reviewing AI-generated code is the new bottleneck. Writing code was slow before. Now, in a few minutes, you can generate virtually unlimited lines of code using AI. But developers are now spending 70% of their time checking that code. That's the new bottleneck. I've been using Cline, and they have a feature that actually helps with this: You can click a button and have Cline generate an inline explanation for every single line of AI-generated code. Take a look at the attached video. What it does: 1. You can read the code and the explanation together 2. You don't lose context while reviewing code 3. You understand the "why" behind each change And here is the best part: It works on any git diff. You can use it to review PRs, understand commits from other people, or catch up on a codebase you haven't touched in a while.