[sdiy] AI code generation

[Eric Honour]

It's done a great job of shifting where one spends time.

It used to be the case that development of anything nontrivial was
iterative - at best, you either build a janky MVP and improve it
continually, or spend a year analyzing and designing.

A metric I think about often is "new project starts".  My day job has me
working on a solution with ~20 sub-projects, 12 of which existed when I
started working here about a decade ago.  Meaning that, on average, a team
of ~10 developers was starting one new project a year.  That's one
project-start per person-decade.

Now, with AI coding tools, I can spin up a proof-of-concept in less than a
day.  If someone requests changes at 9am, I can often have an
implementation shippable by 5pm.  That implementation may not be *correct* -
but if it's not, that generally gets caught before noon the following day.
That cycle used to take roughly a week (with an additional few weeks of
delay for additional verification before code went live).

And that's at a client who has to worry about security and compliance.  On
personal projects where there aren't regulatory pressures, I can basically
create one janky app a day, or one polished app in a week.  And I can do
that, for better or for worse, without expending real brainpower.

But that style of development doesn't take care of marketing, or community
management, or any of the other things that a "real" company does.  It's
like having a Wozniak with no Jobs.

My interest in synth-diy is amateur rather than professional, so that's
"fine".  But I do worry about what it spells for corporate innovation in
the longer term (as well as the pipeline problem, as basically nobody seems
to be hiring entry-level software developers anymore.)

On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 8:48 AM Steve via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org>
wrote:

>
> With the sometimes usable seeming results, the speed certainly seems
> appealing.
>
> On youtube, there is a German(1) language video called something like "AI
> burnout ist real", where a computery guy talks about audience e-mails about
> the topic.
> How many programmers these days are compelled by managers to use AI, and
> their jobs devolved into babysitting and fixing "AI slop", which, after
> some time, gets so mentally taxing that the rate of finding problems gets
> severely diminished and things are just waved through, and supposedly the
> overall quality of the code base takes a dive.
>
> (1) I guess auto translate works reasonably well by now, for anyone who
> cares
>
> - Steve
>
> On 23.04.2026 11:14, Brother Theo via Synth-diy wrote:
>
> Hey everyone,
>
> Touchy subject that I need to talk about. I just had Claude AI generate a
> CSound program for a complex effect. Not only did it hit all the points I
> gave it, but it even included some stuff I forgot, like a sound source, but
> also gave me a few ideas on how to operate it. And it took less than 15
> minutes to do.
>
> I know a lot of you will rebel against the idea of AI. I was one of you.
> But this experience has opened my eyes to the possibilities. This piece of
> code would have taken me hours to develop. Claude did it in a fraction of
> the time.
>
> My buddy got me into this by telling me his experience. He took a code
> base for a 2007 synth and had Claude make changes and add features. Claude
> even found bugs and fixed them without prompting. The new code is working
> and is being tested.
>
> It is a brave new world. Should we feel sorry for the coders?
>
> --
> Timothy Ressel
> 909-423-5962
> FutureRetro Synthesizers
>
>
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