AI-powered coding assistants have become increasingly popular, promising to boost developer productivity and streamline the coding process. Tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor offer impressive capabilities, generating code snippets, suggesting completions, and even creating entire functions based on prompts. However, alongside these benefits come potential pitfalls that developers need to be aware of, as highlighted in recent discussions on the Cursor forum.

The Allure of AI Assistance:

The appeal of AI coding assistants is undeniable. They can:

It can be tough to try to reverse engineer an existing project that has never used terraform. Terraformer can look at an existing project and generate the corresponding terraform code for you.  I tried it out on an existing legacy project which used Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery and various service accounts. The setup was a little tricky so I put together a script to simply things. The script assumes you have gcloud setup or a service account key/impersonation and you may need to adjust the –resources parameter.

I’ve always hated the phrase “technical debt” as it can lead to items being banished to a backlog that are never addressed. For example, Knight Capital recently blamed a “technology issue” for a $440 million trading loss. 

Nanex speculate that this may have been due to someone inadvertently testing in production. 

Technical debt is really just debt that will be repaid in one way or another.