Simon Willison’s Weblog

It took me a few days to build the library [cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider] with AI.

I estimate it would have taken a few weeks, maybe months to write by hand.

That said, this is a pretty ideal use case: implementing a well-known standard on a well-known platform with a clear API spec.

In my attempts to make changes to the Workers Runtime itself using AI, I've generally not felt like it saved much time. Though, people who don't know the codebase as well as I do have reported it helped them a lot.

I have found AI incredibly useful when I jump into other people's complex codebases, that I'm not familiar with. I now feel like I'm comfortable doing that, since AI can help me find my way around very quickly, whereas previously I generally shied away from jumping in and would instead try to get someone on the team to make whatever change I needed.

— Kenton Varda, in a Hacker News comment