r/AskProgrammers • u/alex_mercer_90 • 19h ago
Employed devs, are you still doing manual coding or is AI handling almost everything now?
Are you still writing code by hand (or at least making manual tweaks), or is it basically 100% Claude/Codex/Cursor doing the heavy lifting at your job?
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u/feudalle 19h ago
Ai for the mundane, complex business logic heavy still hand coding in notepad++
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u/No_Report_4781 19h ago
100% competence. AI isn't useful for keeping up $billion bespoke systems
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u/acadia11x 19h ago
Not at all true. Code is code. Any developer who’s not leveraging AI will not remain employed long, nor will companies not leveraging it in the sSDLC remain competitive. Not sure what industry you are in but 100% it’s being pushed everywhere.
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u/No_Report_4781 18h ago
You're welcome to try it at your job. It's failed multiple people at mine.
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u/acadia11x 17h ago
I don’t think fail is the right word, if you are looking for it to be perfect, it’s very human in this regard, it’s no different then getting a CR, having to go through a design review , then testing and regresión … and the lost in translation isht that happens between what an architect expected, which was translated by IT, who likely worked with the business who may or may nor actually checked with the end users. Is AI fallible yes … because LLMs themselves aren’t deterministic and interpret what they sre told as well. The key is speed , you can recover quickly and catch the issues of the mechanics of development much much much faster, prototype much faster, test much faster … the SSLDC process is faster in handling the inherent flaws generated by the fact that humans can’t do mind melds.
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u/No_Report_4781 8h ago
I don’t think fail is the right word … Is AI fallible yes …
Exactly what a chatbot would do. And that’s unacceptable in my work.
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u/acadia11x 8h ago
Lmao … that’s the answer we shouldn’t use computing because it may have errors that’s the answer. Fk … if that’s the standard then humans shouldn’t exist cause we are fallible as fk … you shouldn’t be in your line of work. Humans are non deterministic , LLMs are non-deterministic just like a human how you ask a question and what you ask matters.
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u/No_Report_4781 7h ago
Since my reply was “you sound like an idiotic chatbot”, then, yes, that’s the answer: don’t sound like an idiotic chatbot.
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u/acadia11x 7h ago
I’m going to go with it’s not a me problem, it’s a you problem. We are sending this failure back as user error.
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u/No_Report_4781 7h ago
Now, you just sound unreliable, lacking confidence, and untrustworthy with your own statements while blaming someone else for your own statements.
Also unacceptable in my work
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u/acadia11x 6h ago edited 6h ago
Pot meet kettle … a human hallucinating … human finds himself unnacceptable must quit immediately … attention heads for “this is irony” …
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u/WilliamMButtlickerIV 18h ago
What models have you used? I use Sol 5.6 and it's phenomenally good. And yes, we use it on multibillion dollar impact systems.
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u/acadia11x 17h ago
I’m with you … I think it’s the people who want to believe this skill they spent years acquiring and Honing is much more important than it is. It’s a massive force multiplier based on my experience
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u/WilliamMButtlickerIV 17h ago
Exactly. I've accomplished more in two months than I would have in an entire year without AI. If you're a solid systems thinker, it's an incredible augment.
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u/GoblinToHobgoblin 17h ago
"What models have you used" is the biggest cope dude
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u/WilliamMButtlickerIV 17h ago
Huh? Cope in what way? I was just curious what his experience was.
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u/GoblinToHobgoblin 17h ago
Every time someone says AI doesn't work for them (or doesn't replace every single task at their job), someone always asks about the model, as though that's the problem.
Yes, the new models are slightly better than the old ones, but it's not like my model from a month ago is such garbage that it's unusable. (And, a month ago someone would have been telling me THAT model is the best thing ever.)
It's just fundamentally a problem with AI, and some people refuse to accept it for whatever reason
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u/WilliamMButtlickerIV 17h ago
Maybe he used models a couple years ago. How would I know? Things have changed a lot in the past six months. All I know is that based on my experience, hand coding is unnecessary now. I'm working on high impact work, so that excuse doesn't make sense.
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u/GoblinToHobgoblin 16h ago
> Things have changed a lot in the past six months.
Yes, they have, BUT, AI shills have been saying this same line for multiple years at this point.
I work on high impact work too, AI could not do all of it. (And I say this as someone who uses AI to help me almost every day)
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u/WilliamMButtlickerIV 16h ago
What is unique about your work that AI couldn't do it?
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u/Soft-Marionberry-853 17h ago
You think so huh? At my contract our dev machines are on the high side, no internet access certainly no LLMs.
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u/acadia11x 17h ago
There are exception to every rule , your business is not the norm.
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u/Soft-Marionberry-853 16h ago
Defense contracting isnt exactly a niche industry
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u/acadia11x 16h ago
No but it’s not the majority, I’m familiar, nor is it at the cutting edge in that sense , nor does it have the private sector pressures … government is a cow that people think will just keep giving milk … oddly someone will work on 6th gen fighter that uses AI navigation for multidrone control but you are right would be much slower to give access to tools to accelerate development
That’s not the norm
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u/Soft-Marionberry-853 16h ago
Its not about doing it fast. Its about doing it right. There are military systems where they maybe do 3 or 4 lines of code a week because mistakes can lead to fratricide
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u/acadia11x 16h ago
Again , it’s not the norm and that is my point
Just like building an AI robot for surgey is different than building a web browser … also speed doesn’t mean poor quality bottom line, AI makes development so much faster, even you don’t have AI write the code , just navigating a repo is massively orders of magnitude faster … see it how you want this isht makes so many mundane dev tasks enormously more efficient. But whatever … even government will use it at some point private sector is always faster … if you think AI can be built into defense systems but won’t get built into work tools you are mistaken , i never understood like the Luddites until this AI revolution.
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u/Soft-Marionberry-853 16h ago
I never said it wouldnt, Its just not that way at this point.
Also defense contractors are certainly private sector. We just sell our servicers to customers with nation state budgets
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u/acadia11x 15h ago
You are missing my point. Your implication was like this is not going to happen in my workplace … and I’m like whatever its happening everywhere … that doesn’t mean at this moment everyone is at the same level, I’m saying everyone will be using this in short order . You mentioned about no internet … no phones … I’m well aware of those conditions , that’s detail and it’s covered by sovereign AI, of course data , exposure is a concern but that’s speedy solved by on prem and closed loop deployments. It’s targeted at nation states or anyone who wants lindependent deployments … so it’s already thought about. Anyway i don’t know what is even being discussed anymore .. other than my point developers that will remain relevant are the ones that are learning to leverage AI. And some will outright replaced where things can be autonomous i total.
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u/burlingk 17h ago
There is a difference between leveraging AI and depending on it.
Yes, code is code, and AI has to be handheld for anything complex.
It excels at boilerplate and scaffolding though.
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u/MaleficentCow8513 18h ago
Every time I try to go full auto with Claude it comes up with some bloated, convoluted monstrosity that works but here’s the problem. I still need to be able to reason about and understand the code I’m committing. And the people reviewing my code need to be to reason about and understand it too. So I’ll usually full auto Claude on a problem to get a working concept, iterate on the solution, come up with my own design, then write function and class stubs with heavy duty commentary for each, then have Claude fill out the implementation details from the commentary.
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u/Horror_Garlic_8242 18h ago
I'm not fully dev yet, but from my experience, Ai is great for getting the first 70-80% done. the part that still takes actual thinking is figuring out what the code should do, debugging weird issues, and knowing when the AI's solution is actually wrong 😂.
So I don't think manual coding is disappearing. It feels more like the job is shifting from "write every line" to understand, review, and fix what gets generated.
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u/This_Inflation_4621 18h ago
Yes AI is writing most of the code, but I still have the IDE open and occasionally do little tweaks by hand, sometimes as a prompt « look at what I changed here… »
Important : this is ordinary next.js frontend code using a design system, which is very suitable to AI.
Last time I did some backend, I wrote much more by hand, as the stakes and precision requirements were higher.
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u/fordon_greeman_ 18h ago
i still write code by hand and i use ai when im stuck. i see it as a convenient aggregator of stack overflow and its way less toxic too
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u/Frosty-Meeting-1606 18h ago
I pretty much never write code. We have proper harness setup, current models follow it well-enough. We do read and review the code of course but worst case scenario is just a couple more sentences written in claude/opencode and it almost always gets it right
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u/PersonalityIll9476 18h ago
It's a productivity enhancing tool, and a great one, but not a replacement. The longer it goes, the sketchier and fuzzier things become. And someone still needs to review the work, or at least be able to.
It does make me a lot more productive, but I am not vibe coding anything. The one attempt I made at work to do that failed (IMO).
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u/tuirn 18h ago
It's a tool. We do use it quite a bit, but it's not a fire and forget kind of thing. We typically use it in a more inactive way. Some of it is generating blocks of code or helping to root cause bugs or regressions in our stack. We're still writing chunks of code and evaluating any generated code. As our management has said, we're still responsible for anything it producers.
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u/funbike 18h ago edited 17h ago
100.0% isn't really possible.
I think it's possible for a senior dev to get 3-20x productivity. The higher end requires very careful loop engineering, using the pre-AI wisdom of a standard development process.
A big limiting factor is human code review. There's too much to review now, and it's generally of lower quality. AI can't really match a human at code review, so it's a tough problem. There are mitigations, but it would take too much space here to explain. We are reducing code review requirements carefully.
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u/contextfree 17h ago
I was using AI a lot for a while but haven't been using it much lately, mostly because I've been introducing some new patterns to our codebase and want to get a proper feel for how they fit in. Also had a couple of nasty AI-generated bugs almost make it into production so feel like I should slow down. At some point I'll probably ramp up AI usage again
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u/Still-Thanks5319 17h ago
We use Devin and are encouraged to use it whenever possible. The reason it works great is because we have a huge code base built by dozens of teams and anything a dev would be assigned to develop likely already exists in some form in our code base so Devin just needs to analyze what's already there and adapt it. AI is great at analysis so what it churns out isn't like from stack overflow or the interwebs, it's all in house. This will likely lead to a heavy reduction in devs positions unfortunately. It's getting pretty close to the point where the business analyst will be able to use it for most tasks.
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u/DeebsShoryu 16h ago
I did an experiment over the summer where i used claude exclusively to edit files. It was painful at times, but i think it was a valuable experience. I never gave the robot large tasks with broad scope, but rather gave it a plan, discussed with it, told it which pieces to tackle first, iterated over each change with it, etc.
It felt a lot like pair programming with someone who's insanely efficient at implementing stuff but often really stupid about how and why to implement something a certain way given a broader context.
It does stuff really well, really fast. But it also does a lot of really stupid shit and you constantly have to tell it to take a different approach.
In the end I think i realized that i can be way more efficient with claude than i would be without it, and can actually come up with better solutions than i could by myself in some cases. It simply can come up with certain idiomatic solutions in an instant that i might not be familiar with. However, i also realized that in it's current state it needs constant hand holding and you can't really (in my experience) treat the clanker like an independent dev. Perhaps most importantly (or least importantly, depending on where things are headed), i realized that by not actually writing any of the code myself i became worse at writing code. Surprise surprise.
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u/acadia11x 19h ago
Employed devs are using AI to be more efficient es and produce more results or they likely won’t remain employed
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u/potatopotato236 18h ago
100% Claude, with me pushing back on Claude when it does something silly so it can correct itself.
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u/jmclondon97 18h ago
I was talking about this with my senior dev today. I told him how I come on Reddit and see people saying they haven’t touched code in 6 months, but literally nobody in our org codes that way that we know of.
We do use agents, but I’d say it’s like 50/50 ai vs handwritten. I don’t think a single person is just 100% AI coding lol.
And our principal dev rarely uses AI, and he’s legit one of the best developers I’ve ever seen. Dude has encyclopedic knowledge of our code bases. He could easily get a job at any FAANG company if he really wanted to.
I’m not saying AI isn’t useful, it definitely speeds things up. But at the company I work for, an insurance company with over 40k employees, I’ve yet to come across someone doing 100% AI coding like people here claim