AI Assistance and the Illusion of Good Code

Audience: anyone deciding whether to install or contribute to a Coffee Pub module.

The suite's disclosure about how it is built. This is the canonical copy: every module's README.md should carry the same text verbatim between its global:ai-assistance markers, and tools/check-docs-structure.mjs fails if a copy drifts from this file and reports how many modules carry it at all. Edit it here, nowhere else.

AI Assistance and the Illusion of Good Code

I started writing Foundry modules for use at my own table back in 2020. There were already a ton of amazing modules out there, but they either didn't quite do what I wanted or didn't deliver the kind of user experience I was looking for.

I've been a design leader for more than 20 years, but I spent the first half of my career as a developer, so building my own modules seemed like a fun way to kill some time. I'm a pretty good designer. I'm a decent developer. But, over time, my hand-written code and hacks got a little messy (and memory-leaky, and a little buggy. Feels good to say it out loud.).

Today, the Coffee Pub suite of modules is developed with AI assistance, primarily Claude and Cursor, for documentation, refactoring, debugging, and other development work. Every change is reviewed and committed by me, and nothing reaches a release that I haven't crawled and run at my own table. I can't seem to give up my IDE. The UX design, architecture, and ideas still come from my own fever dreams and chronic lack of sleep.

Testing and verifying a change means running it in Foundry so I can watch the console, break things, fix them, and hone the experience. The repositories carry a set of tools for testing the things that are difficult to catch through review and manual testing alone. They help ensure styles don't conflict, shared coding and documentation standards stay consistent, and the suite of modules continues to work well as a system without silently breaking.

Those checks are there because AI-assisted development can move very quickly, and without oversight, engagement, and planning, it can also go confidently off the rails and deliver the illusion of good code. The AI helps me build faster. It doesn't decide what gets built, its architecture, or how it should work. You can blame this human for that.

If the idea of AI-assisted development keeps you up at night or just isn't your jam, no worries at all. I get it. You do you.