Working With AI: A concrete example

The author describes investigating and fixing a parsing bug in Hyperscript, an experimental web scripting language, where the "as" keyword was incorrectly binding to type conversion expressions rather than serving as a fetch command modifier. While Claude AI effectively helped identify the root cause—an overly aggressive refactor that expanded the fetch command's grammar—the author found AI's proposed solutions were weak hacks that demonstrated the "Sorcerer's Apprentice problem," where developers risk becoming over-reliant on AI assistance without fully understanding their systems. The article illustrates both AI's strengths in debugging and its limitations in providing proper solutions, emphasizing the dangers of developer dependency on AI-generated code.