From an app user’s point of view, the real issue is the lack of code review behind many of these AI-built apps.
You can trust a coder using AI, but can you trust a AI generated code ?
There is a tendency for AI to produce larger amounts of code with subtle errors that go under the radar of human perception. We are used to spot the mistakes of fellow programmers, but not used at all to see what’s wrong with AI code.
It’s a bit like if a normal 5 year old produced a 200 pages book with an academic level language. If you had to review and disprove it, you would spend an equal amount of time as you would to review a book written by a trusted peer.
It is going to be impossible to find qualified programmers willing to spend that time for free, on AI generated slop.
We have three tiers at least to distinguish :
- Human logic, AI used for code completion, documentation, analysis → not really AI at all, the code is reviewed continuously.
- AI used for code planing and generation, but supervised and reviewed by a programmer → acceptable, although it the programmer takes responsibility it is difficult to believe he was able to review everything, considering the amount of code produced, it may be useful to tell the user.
- AI used for code planing and generation, human cannot review because of lack of knowledge or time → the user should be notified that the code is fully untested