Development Use Cases for AI

Mar 7, 2025

I've recently been thinking about AI a lot more (who hasn't?), but I struggle to find relevant use cases for it while developing software. What are the real world applications for AI in this space? I can only think of a few low-hanging fruit:

  • Writing inline documentation (e.g., method docstrings)
  • Writing unit tests (if you do that sort of thing; I don't)
  • Explaining legacy code that may be hard to parse
  • Developing one-off scripts in infrequently used areas; for example, writing a Bash script (or Windows batch file) to complete a one-time action

What other areas am I missing? If you write software, and you're currently using AI to assist you, in what ways are you putting it to use? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

2 Comments

Gary

2:04 PM on Mar 8, 2025
  • I imagine a LLM could provide really intelligent completion suggestions but it's going to have to be really fast to be useful.
  • I recently asked for a short Python script to be translated to a Bash script. The result looked correct but didn't work properly.
  • It generated some correct code for a non-linear optimization function in Javascript but I didn't use it.
  • I could imagine it helping find bugs. I think I saw a post on how Meta is using it for finding bugs and getting good results.
  • I saw that 95% of the code used in recent YC startups was automatically generated.
  • I also saw a post about including undetectable backdoors in generated code. Pretty scary.
  • I would truly hate having to debug a giant codebase that was machine generated.

Jonah

8:32 PM on Mar 8, 2025

Interesting points!

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