On our Golden Kitties Slack channel, our CEO (Rajiv Ayyangar), CTO (Mike Kerzhner) and staff engineer (Matt Carroll) briefly debated whether 2024 was the year of the AI developer tool. We found their discussion fascinating, and feature an edited excerpt of it below.
Rajiv: Was 2024 the year of AI dev tools? E.g. Supabase, Cursor, Replit…
Mike K: It has been the year of “All knowing, sloppy engineer at your fingertips.”
Rajiv: As a non-developer, I’m envious of how much AI seems to have accelerated coding. I don’t feel AI has changed my life that much. Maybe this coming year it will. cough cough, I’m looking at you Siri.
Matt: More of a meta discussion, but I’ve found it hard to really leverage AI unless I know what is happening and I’m quickly able to audit / fix up.
Mike K: We no longer program. We just give feedback to an eager, fast, and loose intern
Matt: Yes, exactly. I recently learned a new language that was pretty unfamiliar and letting the AI “run free” was rough. It would inherently break something and keep digging itself deeper to resolve the problem. Without understanding myself I couldn’t really fix it either.
The flow I wound up using was: Use AI for help with very narrow scope feature, test and integrate it correctly myself (making sure I understand), iterate.
Basically there is this equation: The greater I understand a language the more slack I can grant the AI to do work, because I’ll be able to quickly fix its mistakes.
Mike K: Yup. 2024 has been the year of “developer autocomplete.” We went from autocompleting words to autocompleting functions, classes, features and codebases. But autocomplete only works if you are a good human editor and curator. And it’s hard to become a good editor unless you are a skilled writer.
That’s why I am really curious to see what happens to programmers in 2025 and beyond. Folks who don’t know how to ride a bike are given F1 cars. But it’s hard to drive an F1 car if you have no idea how things in motion behave.
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