Edition of the radar

 To the surprise of no one, generative AI and LLMs dominated our conversations for this edition of the Radar, including emerging patterns around their use by developers. Patterns inevitably lead to  contextualized situations developers should avoid. We see some  starting to appear in the hyperactive AI space, including the mistaken notion that humans can fully replace pair programming with AI as the companion, overreliance on coding assistance suggestions, code quality issues with generated code and faster growth rates of codebases. AI tends to solve problems via brute force rather than use abstractions, such as using dozens of stacked conditionals rather than the Strategy design pattern. The code quality issues in particular highlight an area of continued diligence by developers and architects to make sure they do drown in working but terrible code. Thus, team members should double down on good engineering practices  such as unit testing, architectural fitness functions and other