Comment Yes. (Score 2) 38
Use a paid subscription to a frontier model. Make sure it knows how to run your build and run your tests.
If you're worried, have it write tests. Look at the tests; see if they look like the right tests.
Tell it to ask you questions if it needs to resolve something ambiguous. Have it explain what it thinks it should do to the code. Ask it probing questions if you aren't sure it understands. Ask it about design tradeoffs.
I have yet to find a problem where AI generated code doesn't get me at least 90% of the way there. Multi-domain, multi-language, multi-platform. That includes stuff I was doing a year ago. It's gotten dramatically better in 2026.
If someone has an example of a software engineering problem that AI actually did really badly on, I would like to know the model and see the prompts. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm saying I haven't seen it yet, and I'm really curious.
I've done software development professionally since the 1990s. I started coding on the Apple ][ in 5th grade. I've had AI do the wrong thing, or misunderstand something, or miss something that seemed obvious to me. But on all of those same criteria; I've had human software engineers do far worse, far more often.