AI usage in Solaris Software

We know AI is used almost everywhere, all the time. We encourage our developers NOT to use it. We've tried it, and we think the risk and the time lost aren't worth it. Here's why:

• Solaris Software is a university project. People join to learn, not to have a machine write code they don't understand — if that's all you want, you can already do that alone at home, no need to join the project. Asking an AI to solve your problem for you is shortcutting your own learning. Searching online, comparing sources, trying different approaches, that's a good exercise for your mind, even if it takes you twenty times longer. Your brain needs that time to actually process the information. We never rush our developers to ship features as fast as possible. We want them to understand the problem and come up with their own solution. If we needed speed, the more experienced people on the team would just do it themselves.

• Using AI gives you brain fog, literally. You get bombarded with changes you don't understand and endless permission prompts to run random commands on your machine, all to do the job you were supposed to do yourself. What's the point of that? Some students, or people who want to join the team just to pad their CV before chasing the carrot on the job market, tend to miss something: you cannot shortcut knowledge. It's just as easy to tell when someone used AI to do the work as it is to tell when someone lied on their CV. Save yourself the headache and do it yourself. Fighting a problem and coming out the other side with a solution you actually built is a genuinely good feeling.

• You are responsible for what you do. If you commit lines of code that an AI wrote, you are still responsible for those lines. If AI is a black box whose behaviour you don't understand, then so is the code it hands you, unless you review it entirely. And even then, it probably would have been better to just write it yourself in the first place.

We will keep encouraging our developers not to use AI for software development, and we will always ask them to explain any code we suspect they don't fully understand. AI should be a tool: something you reach for on the repetitive, mechanical tasks that just eat your time, never something you let think through a problem for you. Develop accordingly.