by jerf | 2025-08-21 20:00:08+00:00
I've been struggling to apply AI on any large scale at work. I was beginning to wonder if it was me.

But then my wife sort of handed me a project that previously I would have just said no to, a particular Android app for the family. I have instances of all the various Android technologies under my belt, that is, I've used GUI toolkits, I've used general purpose programming languages, I've used databases, etc, but with the possible exception of SQLite (which even that is accessed through an ORM), I don't know any of the specific technologies involved with Android now. I have never used Kotlin; I've got enough experience that I can pretty much piece it together when I'm reading it but I can't write it. Never used the Android UI toolkit, services, permissions, media APIs, ORMs, build system, etc.

I know from many previous experiences that A: I could definitely learn how to do this but B: it would be a many-week project and in the end I wouldn't really be able to leverage any of the Android knowledge I would get for much else.

So I figured this was a good chance to take this stuff for a spin in a really hard way.

I'm about eight hours in and nearly done enough for the family; I need about another 2 hours to hit that mark, maybe 4 to really polish it. Probably another 8-12 hours and I'd have it brushed up to a rough commercial product level for a simple, single-purpose app. It's really impressive.

And I'm now convinced it's not just that I'm too old a fogey to pick it up, which is, you know, a bit of a relief.

It's just that it works really well in some domains, and not so much in others. My current work project is working through decades of organically-grown cruft owned by 5 different teams, most of which don't even have a person on them that understands the cruft in question, and trying to pull it all together into one system where it belongs. I've been able to use AI here and there for some stuff that is still pretty impressive, like translating some stuff into psuedocode for my reference, and AI-powered autocomplete is definitely impressive when it correctly guesses the next 10 lines I was going to type effectively letter-for-letter. But I haven't gotten that large-scale win where I just type a tiny prompt in and see the outsized results from it.

I think that's because I'm working in a domain where the code I'm writing is already roughly the size of the prompt I'd have to give, at least in terms of the "payload" of the work I'm trying to do, because of the level of detail and maturity of the code base. There's no single sentence I can type that an AI can essentially decompress into 250 lines of code, pulling in the correct 4 new libraries, and adding it all to the build system the way that Gemini in Android Studio could decompress "I would like to store user settings with a UI to set the user's name, and then display it on the home page".

I think I recommend this approach to anyone who wants to give this approach a fair shake - try it in a language and environment you know nothing about and so aren't tempted to keep taking the wheel. The AI is almost the only tool I have in that environment, certainly the only one for writing code, so I'm forced to really exercise the AI.