How One Developer Used AI to Build Code Generators and Cut Maintenance Time
A developer at a software company spent nearly a month trying to get existing open-source code generators to handle their full API specification, only to find that every available tool fell short in some way. Experimenting with a coding agent instead, they built a working generator in just one hour, prompting a rethink of where AI is most effective. The team then converted the majority of their codebase to generated code, using AI-built generators driven by specifications rather than hand-written implementations. Because generators contain less code than the output they produce, changes can be made in one place and propagated across the entire codebase automatically. The author argues this specification-first, generator-centric approach is more maintainable than either fully manual coding or open-ended AI-assisted development.
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