Okay AI, lets code

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There are many articles how AI can help you code. But can AI help develop full app?

Is it:

• Great
• Useless
• Another useful tool

Why?

Currently Internet is full of information how AI can help code. Except simple cases, I couldn’t find full project completed only AI assisted. Something more complex to check AI capability in real coding scenario.

Something to show is it more then hype.

What?

I am backend developer, I know my way around frontend but my skills are very limited.

I’ve decided to build whole Angular App with only AI assisted. No StackOverflow or Google. There were only 3 source of information I could use:

• ChatGPT (most of time 3.5, but also 4)
• GitHub Copilot
• Official documentation of packages, once again no googling

The App

My application allow user to:

• Define piping network using interactive diagrams (assume water flow)
• Define boundary conditions using Angular forms
• Numerical solver is written as npm module which is installed as dependency
• Output of calculation is visible in app.

Working application demo (no CSS and beautifying)

The Good

Good news is that I managed to achieve all my objectives.

AI really helped

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To get idea if my solver is stable I had to analyze previous calculations if there is any fluctuations. Without going into details. I needed:

Short circular buffer, which captures last N items.

AI came up with this idea:

Circular buffer

If I was reviewing this code during Pull Request, there would be nothing to comment. It is clean and it well divided into functions.

AI also kept attention to edge cases — nice.

The Bad

Part of my solver code required to:

Verify if consecutive items are monotonic

This what Github Copilot came up with:

isMonotonic implementation

This code has a lot of if statements and tricky array indexing.

Direction?

This variable called direction, is just a hack.

Does it work? Yes

Is it maintainable? No

In the end

It is very, weird situation. AI is like very, very good junior developer:

• Always happy to help.
• Good at searching for information.
• Eager to solve any problem.
• But..
• Don’t have its own style.
• Is not consistent.
• Often provide solution which doesn’t work at all.

So in summary:

AI is great tool for those who, knows what they want to achieve.

AI is bad tool for those who, don’t know how to code and still needs to learn.

Happy coding!