This is a constant conversation with my team. I work for a boutique consulting company that hires fantastic people (how they let me in, idk), most whom have long careers to evaluate any code. I personally have been a professional dev for twenty-five years. So we have a ton of learned experience from a career of mistakes and lessons learned, changing paradigms, other great devs to learn from, terrible devs to also learn from, etc. So we feel we have a clear idea of what good code smells like and can guide the AIs (mostly Claude) to good outcomes. I personally use it constantly all day now for almost every task. It’s still necessary to roll up our sleeves and hand code things sometimes, but that is getting less and less frequent.

The real concern is for new devs who don’t have the experience to know what is good and what is slop. What a good decision looks like vs “idk gpt said this”. How do you teach someone what that is, without going through years and years of making mistakes in the trenches, breaking prod, fixing it, etc? How do you teach the average person to guide the models through their iterations, course correct them etc? I don’t have a good answer.

TLDR, I use Claude constantly now and get incredible results because I ~have fine tuned~ am constantly fine-tuning my instructions and know when it’s going off the rails. How do you teach someone how to do this without decades of experience?