Hello,
Thanks for your comments.
In short, I could have not developed this at all without the use of AI. So, in that sense, the increase in efficiency is infinite.
a) Complete swaths of the code which are not part of my core competence (websockets connection, custom meshes, generative processes for geometry, animations) would have been so hard for me to research using traditional methods that I would have not even started the project.
For a competent developer, I would guess that you can delegate the coding of simple functions to AI and focus more on the architecture (which you need to take care of in any case). I guess that nobody has full expertise on a language, let alone two as in this case, so I can see a clear case for AI in generative code development.
b) The code generally contains bugs, often due to the lack of context. Sometime the AI hallucinates and you need dozens of prompts to make it understand the problem. ChatGPT can be particularly stubborn and will at some point acknowledge the error but come up with the same code. Perplexity with Claude back end seems to be more relentless and will eventually fix the error by looking at external documentation, of which it provides references. In general, I didn’t get stuck on a concrete error and the debugging process is actually a great learning opportunity.
c) Yes, definitely. There are large parts of the code that I don’t understand. I don’t really care as long as the code fulfils my requirements. I haven’t encountered any situation where the code was so uncomprehensible to prevent me from modifying it, albeit with the help of AI. You can ask the AI to provide detailed explanations and comments of what the code is doing. As I said, I focused more on the architecture. A curious effect is that, when I coded by hand, I had a clear idea of the structure of the code but now I have the feeling that I coulnd’t explain what part of the code is doing what and this has complicated at times the cleaning-up and refactoring.
d) In my case, not only it was absolutely necessary to use AI but it was the enabler. I plan to ask my students to modify the code without worrying about learning the languages first, just jump straight into “AI based code editing”. It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes. I have certainly leaned a lot by looking at AI generated code and I’m working with a 12 years old boy who’s developing his own video games with babylon in the same way.
I’ll keep you posted.
Raul
