AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse

Re:AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse by Kerrick on Friday January 09, 2026 @01:12PM (#46556997)

I feel like I've been incredibly productive with AI assisted programming over the past few weeks, but it's hard to know what folks' baselines are. So in the interest of transparency, I pushed it all up to sourcehut and added Co-Authored-By footers to the AI-assisted commits (almost all of them).

Everything is out there to inspect, including the facts that I:

- was going 12-18 hours per day

- stayed up way too late some nights

- churned a lot (+91,034 -39,257 lines)

- made a lot of code (30,637 code lines, 11,072 comment lines, plus 4,997 lines of markdown)

- ended up with (IMO) pretty good quality Ruby (and unknown quality Rust).

This is all just from the first commit to v0.8.0. https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/v0.8.0

What do you think: is this fast, or am I just as silly as the live-streamer?

P.S. - I had an edge here because it was a green-field project and it was not for my job, so I had complete latitude to make decisions.

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Re:AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse by qwery on Friday January 09, 2026 @01:27PM (#46557197)

I don't really know Ruby, so maybe I'm missing something major, but your commit messages seem extremely verbose yet messy (I can't make heads or tails of them) and I'm seeing language like "deprecated" and a stream of "releases" within a period of hours and it just looks a bit like nonsense.

Don't take "nonsense" negatively, please -- I mean it looks like you were having fun, which is certainly to be encouraged.

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Re:AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse by Kerrick on Friday January 09, 2026 @01:58PM (#46557637)

The commit messages with a Co-Authored-By footer were all generated. I recommend clicking the "tree" link to see the actual code. Specifically:

- README.md explains the basics https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/v0.8.0/item/REA...

- CHANGELOG.md is better than the commit messages, and filtered to only what app devs using the library likely care about: https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/v0.8.0/item/CHA...

- doc/ holds the Markdown documentation, which I heavily reviewed. https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/v0.8.0/item/doc

- lib/ holds the Ruby source code of the library, which I heavily designed and reviewed. https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/v0.8.0/item/lib

- examples/ holds the Ruby source code of some toy apps built with the library. https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/v0.8.0/item/exa...

- bin/ holds a few Ruby scripts & apps to automate some ops (check out announce) https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/v0.8.0/item/bin

- tasks/ holds some more Ruby scripts & apps to automate some ops (most I did not read, but I heavily designed and reviewed bump and terminal_preview) https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/v0.8.0/item/tas...

- ext/ holds the Rust source code of the library, which I did not read most of. https://git.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/tree/v0.8.0/item/ext

I was having a lot of fun, and part of the reason I took deprecations and releases seriously was because I hoped to encourage adoption. And that I did: https://todo.sr.ht/~kerrick/ratatui_ruby/4 and https://github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq/blob/main/bin/tui

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