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I felt kind of annoyed by the claim that "most" Supreme Court cases go 6-3 along ideological lines, although I guess the more defensible version would be that the controversial cases all go 6-3 along ideological lines. Be that as it may, I created a website this morning to help understand data from the most recent term. Spent more time than I intended on this so I'm hoping someone else finds it interesting: https://wbruntra.github.io/scotus/?tab=dashboard
This is fairly impressive. Did you make this with assistance of generative AI?
Personally, I'd like a greater breakdown into those controversial and high-impact (landmark) cases, but it's still interesting to know that almost half of all SCOTUS opinions are 9-0.
Oh, very much so. Github Copilot + Claude Sonnet 4, if you care to know. Technically I am a web developer but at this point I am basically all-in on using AI wherever possible. Nice to get done in a couple hours what would have taken me much, much longer, and much more frustration, using the old method of typing code by hand.
In same way I hate using AI (vibe coding), but this seems to be the exact case where AI coding is suitable: one off project and not business critical
Although I think using AI for a prolonged period will lower your overall ability to code as a developer, or maybe I am just too old school with basically little to no IDE in my frequently used tools
I really wish I could see in AI what other people do; I recently tried to use Cursor at the recommendation of a senior developer, and I found that it was actively trying to force me down the wrong path when I was coding (I had to write a one-off web page that was compatible with some very ancient technology, and it kept trying to suggest CSS rules and autofilling text that made no sense for the use case). This has been a very consistent experience for me whenever I try to use AI for literally anything.
It's possible that I'm just not very good at prompting it, but I find that every time I start relying on it for anything, it is subtly wrong in ways that are frustrating to track down and repair.
On the one hand, I'm sure you're right that it's not as good as a human developer. On the other hand, it's kind of like the web in general. Websites all kind of suck now because React gives developers the ability to be lazy and not worry about resource usage or anything else because everything's kind of "good enough." But the cost and speed advantage of using AI is so overwhelming that I don't think your concerns are going to hold up. Developers are just going to have to add more bad code on top of bad code until it works.
Full disclosure: I really think that a lot of concerns from sophisticated developers about how AI makes mistakes are just snobbery/posing. But that's what I, an unsophisticated developer, would think, right?
Like, I'm not saying I've never had an experience where AI is going down a path that I think is bad and needs to change course. But in those cases, I usually hit the stop button and say, "Hey, I think you need to do this in a totally different way," or I can just say, "Hey, your last change was terrible. Can you just revert it?" There are a few instances where I feel kind of dumb because I'm using three prompts to say like hey I need you to change the font size, when I probably could've done it more easily myself in that specific case. But overall, I'd rather be talking to my agent than looking at code.
What type of developer are you if you'd rather be talking than coding? /s
More seriously, the situations I find AI is really useful is when I need some information, but have enough knowledge to fine tune it after the fact. I've tried to use it to write code, and it always produces code that is kind of messy and bad. I asked it to produce some builder interfaces from a set of DTO interfaces, and it would do weird things like put in defaults that I didn't intend, or return the wrong field occasionally*. What worried me about it is that the junior developer I was working with at the time was copy-pasting them into the codebase as is, and didn't have any comprehension about why they wouldn't work.
*For reference, the type of implementation I was talking about would be something like:
interface IAddress { function line1() : string; function line2() : ?string; function city() : string; function province() : ?IProvince; function country() : ICountry; function zipCode() : IZipCode; }
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( ?string $line2 ) : static; // you get the picture }
It would give me something like:
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( string $line2 = '' ) : static; function setLCountry( ICountry $country ) : static; function setProvince( string $province ) : static; }
Which was just not very useful.
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