Refactoring AI code: The good, the bad, and the weird [Video]

For most developers, maintaining and refactoring legacy code is all in a day’s work. But what about when the code was written by AI?

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Generative AI is no longer a novelty in the software development world: it’s being increasingly used as an assistant (and sometimes a free agent) to write code running in real-world production. But every developer knows that writing new code from scratch is only a small part of their daily work. Much of a developer’s time is spent maintaining an existing codebase and refactoring code written by other hands.

What’s it like doing maintenance work when those hands aren’t human, or were generated by an AI copilot? Can AI tools like GitHub Copilot, Vercel’s v0, or Cursor IDE be used to lighten the load? I spoke to real-world practitioners to find out how this next phase of the AI revolution is playing out.

AI written code: Useful, sometimes weird

All the developers …