The AI Mistake That Taught Me More Than Any Programming Course
It was close to midnight on a Thursday, and I had a feature due by 9 a.m. the next morning.
The feature itself wasn't complicated ā a discount calculation system for an e-commerce client, applying tiered pricing rules based on order quantity and customer membership level. I'd built things like this before. But the specific combination of rules this client needed was intricate enough that I was still working through the logic well after dinner.
That's when I turned to my AI coding assistant. I described the problem clearly, included the business rules as the client had specified them, and got back a clean, well-commented function that seemed to handle every case. It was exactly what I would have written if I'd had another hour and hadn't been tired. Maybe better.