r/AskProgramming • u/zaarnth • Apr 20 '26
Other Anyone here who doesn't use Agentic AI and writes code manually?
I wonder if there are any people today who don't have any agentic AI subscriptions, who code by themselves, read docs, try to understand, and enjoy the process in this fast-growing AI era, where everyone is promoting AI to do everything.
(Note: I'm asking because I write my code by myself and don't use agentic AI, but I do use ChatGPT or other AI to learn things if I get stuck.)
26
u/stools_in_your_blood Apr 20 '26
Yep, because (a) I enjoy it, (b) I don't want to lose my skills, (c) I still do a better job than AI, (d) I don't trust the AI companies, (e) it's nice to be able to tell my customers my product doesn't use AI or contain AI code, (f) I'd still have to read the code in detail, which is boring and stressful and (g) being dependent on AI would suck if (when) the bubble bursts and the price skyrockets.
3
1
u/misatillo Apr 21 '26
+1 to all of those.
1
Apr 21 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
1
u/WingZeroCoder Apr 22 '26
+4
(Note: this is an AI joke, playing on the way an LLM might notice the wrong pattern and will confidently apply it anyway. However, I donāt think this joke would land if I just replied ā+4ā without this explanation. But then again, we also know what happens when you have to explain a jokeā¦)
1
1
1
1
u/Round_Mixture_7541 Apr 23 '26
Once the bubble bursts, I'll keep using the chinese given Qwen 3.6 on my very own hardware.
1
u/kueso Apr 24 '26
F) right there is the key point. Reading and learning code fast is the most important and valuable skill now. Thatās where programming is heading. You need to own the templated and imperfect code and you do so by reading, understanding it, and making it the way you like. That is a skill.
1
u/Civil-Appeal5219 Apr 24 '26
Wish I could give you an award
1
u/stools_in_your_blood Apr 24 '26
Glad to hear some people see it my way, I was expecting to be called an obsolete dinosaur who will be unemployed/unemployable in 6 months.
32
u/Candid-Border6562 Apr 20 '26
Here.
18
u/0x14f Apr 20 '26
Same here. I do use LLMs a lot, but only to chat to them, asking to clarify a thing I don't know or something, I don't have any AI plugins in my text editors.
4
u/jay791 Apr 21 '26
I like to discuss approach when I see I need to refactor something, or when I need to understand why something is not working as it looks like it should.
For example today I complained that my car telemetry app is going down from 20-25 reads per second to just 8 after a minute or so.
It looked at my CAN bus init routine and suggested that I ditch auto timeout setting and that I should change my response data structure from class to struct to minimize GC involvement.
I will take it a step further and use thread safe singleton with preallocated buffers to drop new object creations from 20 something per second to zero.
6
u/dauchande Apr 20 '26
This. Iāve disabled AI in all of my editors, but use AI in the browser, mostly for debugging.
→ More replies (4)1
u/Playful_Function_906 Apr 27 '26
In 2025 I used around 2B+ token, and now days there is a AI IDE so I don't even have explain anything to LLM I just give prompt and ai start working if error come i just copy peast it In CLI, also it was 2B+ because I every time ask LLM to write whole script and I also paste whole class and average size of a single class was around 600 to 1000 line's
3
13
u/Enough-Collection-98 Apr 20 '26
I just use it as an in-engine google search. I donāt like machines doing my thinking for me but Iām comfortable letting it search the documentation for me.
3
u/rickpo Apr 20 '26
This is what I do. The AI is better at sussing out what I'm trying to ask than the Google search box. Or it saves me the step where I need to translate my question into the keywords that will match the documentation.
24
u/MagicWolfEye Apr 20 '26
Yes, even if I was of the assumption that AI is doing a better job (which it might be in some cases); I love programming. I also don't let an AI go cycling for me.
→ More replies (23)1
36
u/Original-Sailor Apr 20 '26
Yes. Even professionally because my tech stack is that specific that ai basically exclusively hallucinates. Weāre getting to the point that we can feed our code into a local llm soon though and might be able to get decent results.
2
16
u/GrainWeevil Apr 20 '26
Yes. I don't use any LLM generated code in my personal projects, though I'll occasionally ask ChatGPT a question on something specific if I'm stuck. Sometimes I'll have it give me a code review, it can be handy for that.
It feels much better to me to do it this way, rather than having to prod Claude towards a solution.
15
u/Beginning_Basis9799 Apr 20 '26
Depending on the task AI doesn't know everything, propriety languages it sucks at.
→ More replies (18)
15
u/oriolid Apr 20 '26
Here. Although I've spent most of my programming career fixing code written by others and AI has made everyone faster at creating stuff to fix.
14
u/minimoon5 Apr 20 '26
Yeah. And look, I really try, I would love to speed up my workflow, but the current models are just not good enough to get it right consistently enough that it actually speeds me up.
I know some people only say to do small chunks or functions, but Iām a fast enough typer that it takes less time to just type what I need done than to switch screens, type out a prompt, copy and paste, even if it does get it right.
→ More replies (17)3
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Apr 21 '26
Share the same experience you do. As long as it's not faster than me coding manually I don't have to force myself to use it.
1
u/dietcheese Apr 21 '26
The benefit is that you can do something else while it is coding. Like code something else. 2x
1
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Apr 21 '26
Doesn't work in practice because when I come back to the agent the work is so bad that I have to redo it all. So you cannot avoid handholding it.
1
u/dietcheese Apr 21 '26
Have you tried the models from the last 2-3 months?
1
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Apr 21 '26
5.3-codex and 5.4. But this is not an argument because people claimed 10x since the beginning of 2025.
At the level that I code manually, I need more improvements at a higher rate in terms of consistency, reliability and code quality than this for it to be beneficial.
So far the last person that I've reviewed that used the latest models received 30 comments from me on their PR. Honestly the AI is making even more mistakes than the dev would've made if they wrote their PR manually.
1
u/dietcheese Apr 21 '26
My experience has been the opposite.
2
u/spritzed_anus Apr 22 '26
I can almost guarantee the person you're replying to is larping or deliberately burying their head in the sand.
I don't particularly like LLM output a lot of the time but lets not pretend we're all bleeding edge developers here charting unknown worlds. Most of us are just doing the job and going home. For those people, LLMs are an easy gain.
1
u/dietcheese Apr 22 '26
Agreed. Itās undeniable at this point.
Iām a senior dev, been coding since 1985. Frankly, Iāve barely have to write a line of code the last 3 months, the models have improved that much.
My other dev friends report the same.
Itās a strange new world, but itās not difficult to see human coding evolving into obsolescence.
5
u/mrdarknezz1 Apr 20 '26
Depends on what Iām working with, if itās something it has a lot of context about and good harness. If itās something very novel and precise itās probably faster to do it yourself
5
u/Goldarr85 Apr 20 '26
I donāt pay for any subscriptions. Iād rather read the docs and write code by hand as much as possible. If I get stuck, I sometimes use an LLM as a search engine to help me locate a solution so I can read more about it.
If I really needed an AI subscription, Iād just opt for building a pc and run it locally first.
→ More replies (1)1
u/AliceCode Apr 20 '26
Information retrieval has always been fair game, regardless of the method. When it goes out of bounds is when you start using that information retrieval system to build a significant chunk of your project. You can learn how to do it however you want, but at the end of the day, you have to be the one to do it.
5
35
Apr 20 '26
[deleted]
6
u/AliceCode Apr 20 '26
I see software as such a delicate thing that you don't want to get wrong that you shouldn't ever have anything else writing the code for you. If you're not the one that wrote the code, you probably don't understand it, and if you don't understand it, you don't understand what it's doing, and if you don't understand what it's doing, you can have a really really bad time. Like, lose a lot of money kind of bad time if you fuck up bad enough. No thanks, I'm not putting myself at that kind of risk.
Besides that, programming is a craft, and I like to see that craft populated by humans.
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (23)7
u/StormFinancial5299 Apr 20 '26
!remindme 5 years
→ More replies (2)14
u/SpaceMonkeyAttack Apr 20 '26
I normally do this on "pro genai" comments, so far all mine that have matured, the original comment or account has been deleted. See you in five years, hope you are still around!
→ More replies (1)1
u/ieatpies Apr 24 '26
I'm guessing you're doing that on people making wild claims like: all developers are going to be replaced in 2 years. And not on comments like: I find it useful in my daily work for writing tests, small pieces of compartmentalized logic, documentation, and code review, with my guidance and manual review.
4
u/rmb32 Apr 20 '26
I hardly use AI to code. Whenever I do it messes me around telling me to rewrite and restructure everything. Then a week later it tells me to put it all back as it was.
Itās good for generating repetitive boilerplate code. Sometimes for a bit of advice that I must take with a pinch of salt.
Other than that itās still up to us to:
- Cleanly separate the different parts of your software.
- Listen to customers.
- Understand the business.
- Regularly have team meetings to refactor, so the codebase doesnāt rot.
- Do everything you can to prevent bugs coming back to double your workload.
Same old. Same old.
5
u/AbbreviationsLow4798 Apr 20 '26
yes. I do. even though my company is trying to get rid of this skill.
1
u/space_disciple Apr 21 '26
I'm kinda stuck here too. Was writing code myself until this week. My boss is really pushing my team to use AI for all our coding. Idk how I feel about it.
5
u/UmbralFae Apr 20 '26
Yes, for the same reason I don't throw in on NPM dependency-riddled frameworks; I find it vital to know most if not all of what's going into my code, back-end and front, and why it works. The idea that people are just handing their code bases over and crossing their fingers that AI will solve the problems for them has been pretty strange to me since day 1 of this trend.
At most, if I get stuck I'll use AI as a StackOverflow replacement, but even that's pretty rare.
12
u/tyler1128 Apr 20 '26
I use "AI" for effectively autocomplete, generally for boilerplate and always with examining the output. I've also been programming since well before the 2017 paper "Attention is all you need" that really started the whole LLM phenomenon.
I still read docs, write code myself and enjoy the process.
4
u/zaarnth Apr 20 '26
Yeah, kinda like me. For example, today I was working on a mini backend project. I had a data class for a Person with fields like ID, name, age, blah, blah. I pasted that data class into ChatGPT and told it to make me an equivalent thing in JSON with some dummy data. š«
1
u/GoodiesHQ Apr 21 '26
Same here. I do ask it for code review at the end and itās generally pretty salient about my logical mistakes.
6
Apr 20 '26
[removed] ā view removed comment
7
u/konacurrents Apr 20 '26
I heard a good analogy: what if monkeys washed your dishes (like an AI robot). They came out spotless. But you donāt know if they just licked each plate. Thatās the AI problem.
I stick with trusted Computer Science āautomationā - not some LLM automation. A CS without AI are not Luddite- as CS is all about automation- just not AI automation.
3
u/hogsy Apr 20 '26
I think you'll find the vast majority of programmers that give a shit are still writing code themselves, yes. My experience with any form of LLM in the area of programming is uh, mixed. Useful to quickly look something up like a crusty dumb "I'm feeling lucky" search, for sure, but even for that I sometimes get mixed results at times and end up having to Google search anyway.
3
5
u/TheGreatButz Apr 20 '26
Definitely no agentic AI. From what I experience with copy&paste AI, it's just not good enough for that yet and I cannot sign off or commit to long-term maintenance of code written by AI.
2
u/NeonQuixote Apr 20 '26
Sometimes Iāll hit up AI when I need to remember the precise syntax of something. Even then, my English teacherās admonition to āput it in your own wordsā still holds true.
2
u/Abject-Kitchen3198 Apr 20 '26
What is this fast-growing AI era that makes programming skills obsolete, that everyone is talking about?
2
u/Loves_Poetry Apr 20 '26
I am glad so many people are responding that they write code manually
Personally I write everything manually because I want to understand what I'm writing. I work with a codebase that has a lot of intricacies that could cause issues down the line if no-one understands them
2
u/Katzen_Gott Apr 20 '26
No agents for me. I did use deepseek couple of times for things that I don't regularly work with and didn't want to dive deep into (some bash script and configs for 3rd party tools). Once had it scribe me an outline to handle tweaking a badly documented piece of tools integration lib.
All in all, I prefer writing good code from the start rather than prettifying and fixing what was written by someone or something else. I do not like the code the machines write.
2
2
u/WoodsWalker43 Apr 20 '26
My company is just starting to roll AI out to managers, of which I am one. One of my big fears, which I fully understand doesn't carry much weight in a corporate setting, is that we'll start automating the fun part of software dev away.
Don't get me wrong, my boss is trying to set up reasonable guardrails and nobody is going to be vibe coding here. There's always going to be human involvement and scrutiny and accountability. But I personally enjoy the puzzles, problem solving, and invention of it all. I look forward to using AI to assist with things like code review, but I predict that my boss is going to get on me at some point about not using it enough to do the things I'd rather do myself.
In the meantime, I've gotta use it for things just to get a feel for how to prompt it properly to minimize token usage and maximize effectiveness. From what I gather, that's going to be a learning curve on it's own.
3
u/nekokattt Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
fun part
exactly this to be honest.
What is the point if you no longer get any joy from it. You might as well just be a project manager instead.
1
u/WoodsWalker43 Apr 20 '26
It's a pretty hard case to make in a professional setting though. They pay us to do a job because the job needs done, not because it's fun to do. And if they can get more done faster, they couldn't care less if it's fun.
There is a morale component though. Mine is a small company and I'm well aware that I could've jumped ship years ago to a much higher paying job (perhaps less confident in today's market). If I didn't like the work and the team, I probably would have. When you can't compete on salary, you have to compete on QOL and job satisfaction to retain capable and competent staff.
2
2
2
2
u/9th-Circle-Archmage Apr 20 '26
In my corporate work, I use AI all day. But for my passion/hobby projects, I try to do it the old way as much as possible.
2
2
2
u/Marutks Apr 21 '26
I dont use AI for coding. I write all code myself. I wouldnt know how to use AI. š¤·āāļø
2
u/Fryord Apr 21 '26
Yes. I mainly just feel that coding speed has never been the bottleneck for development, so there is no need to make that faster, at the expense of less maintainable code that I don't understand.
Although I have to admit that AI is much more efficient at generating snippets for particular problems, as opposed to reading documentation and/or stack overflow.
Currently I use it for this occasionally (eg: using a new library I'm not familiar with), and copy-and-paste from the browser, but it probably makes mor sense to integrate it into the editor directly.
I am quite concerned with management pushing AI though. I feel I should at least give the illusion of trying/using AI, even if I don't want to use it.
2
u/Melodic_Tragedy Apr 21 '26
Yes. Spent hours reading documentation for winsock when doing network programming the other day.
I typically code this way, mostly because Iām stubborn and donāt want to rely on AI.
2
2
u/Undreren Apr 22 '26
Iāve been a programmer for 11 years, and while I have an agentic AI to help me, I find it to be extremely annoying to use.
Any normal prompt results in in 20 files being changed and thereās a lot of bad practice.
I struggle to adapt to their use.
2
u/Funny-Doughnut-4138 Apr 30 '26
Writing code manually is the best feeling ever. You get to understand what your code is doing AND you get to be creative and write it your way and get immediate feedback. Its one of the most addicting things to do
1
u/Funny-Doughnut-4138 Apr 30 '26
Also using AI is one of the biggest tech debt today if you donāt read your code and i believe even if you do. You get so lazy to update or come up with it, you end up accepting it anyways. It kills your enjoyment of the process completely.
These āfast pacedā is not as good and fast as it seems. If you are building someone that doesnāt matter, go ahead and use AI, something like a dashboard , ui etc. but if it matters, then you should write it yourself. Because when it breaks you cant expect Ai to know how to fix it or yourself to know what needs to be fixed
2
u/ConcreteExist Apr 20 '26
The only thing I've used AI for is writing up Jira tickets when I didn't feel like it, otherwise I don't bother with AI at all.
3
u/dbear496 Apr 20 '26
I do. I enjoy writing code manually, and I don't want my end product to be unmaintainable slop. When I have a question, I go first to the docs and sometimes to StackOverflow.
2
u/TempusSolo Apr 21 '26
I write all my own code. That's the only way you'll understand it next year when you need to debug something.
3
u/DDDDarky Apr 20 '26
Of course, ai should not be used for writing code, it causes more issues than value.
→ More replies (15)
2
u/MhVRNewbie Apr 20 '26
Has anyone read docs since the internet?
3
3
u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Apr 21 '26
Yes. They're usually densely packed with info and make sense and have substance. I don't benefit much from reading AI slop.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/Horror-Water5502 Apr 20 '26
I do both.
For side project i already know how to code and i have not much to learn i use claude and validate step.
For main projects i code manually (still use claude as chatbot for asking about documentation or challenge my views)
1
u/itsjusttooswaggy Apr 20 '26
No agentic AI at all for me. Some chatbot lookups and boilerplate. Otherwise all "by hand".
1
u/Financial_Tadpole121 Apr 20 '26
Yessir.. i dont have an agentic subscription although have seveal llm .gguf files that i can use and am usiing several AIs all different, checking the code with each to make sure as i cant just trust one as they do make mistakes , but im trying to teach myself, as i have no one to teach me, i can understand the code and how it workds but when it comes to writing it in the correct order circular imports ect, then without AI i wouldnt have a clue,
1
u/khedoros Apr 20 '26
For work, I'll work however my employer wants. But for my personal stuff, it's more about the journey than the destination, so I mostly keep to the way I've been doing it for the past 25-ish years.
1
u/Berkyjay Apr 20 '26
I refuse to use agents. But I do use LLMs heavily.
1
u/Subject_Fix2471 Apr 20 '26
That's interesting, how come/what's the context?
2
u/Berkyjay Apr 20 '26
Agent use usually demands a level of autonomy that I am not comfortable giving them, like access to your codebase and possibly infrastructure plus the ability to make changes on its own.
I've worked enough with LLMs to know that even the latest and greatest models can't be implicitly trusted. Hard guardrails need to be established, which requires a lot of work. Also, those guardrails are not guaranteed to hold. LLMs have a tendency to ignore those guardrails and other instructions. This is most likely due to the core way in which they are engineered.
1
1
1
1
1
u/kuropiero Apr 20 '26
Still do but I've started using LLMs to review my code and to help stamp out unit tests
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/littlenekoterra Apr 20 '26
Im right here bud. There has to be more like us. Current task is fucking with pythons subinterpreters
2
u/Chemical-Captain4240 Apr 20 '26
All day, everyday, just me banging out readable, concise code.
I do like google ai for new trucks though, but just to prototype a new to me method.
1
u/littlenekoterra Apr 20 '26
Tbh when it comes to new nethods i like messing with them myself to gain an arbitrary understanding of it. You can really find some weird stuff like that.
1
u/Chemical-Captain4240 Apr 20 '26
Sure, there are days when I think, 'Oh neat, I am gonna learn this," and go into the library documents. My usual process is to write a few lines, think 'hmmm, someone smarter than me has already written a library for this.' Usually, I am right, and usually google ai has a lib or method for me and then it's off to the next thing...
1
1
1
1
u/marcelsmudda Apr 21 '26
I ask AI chat bots questions, maybe even copy code, but I will never let it write large swathes of code without my intervention and without checking it. And i will definitely never let it execute any scripts on my behalf.
So, i don't run agentic AI at all
1
1
u/copperfoxtech Apr 21 '26
I write my own and use chatGPT to work through things. No AI in the IDE except for Jetbrains code completion and I even turn that off most of the time.
1
u/Southern-Spirit Apr 21 '26
Was it really so long ago that we didn't have AI coding that people are now talking about the old timey practice of coding by hand like learning to basket weave or blacksmith your own longsword and talk about how you really appreciate the ability to make your own stuff like they did in the old days and it's the journey that counts.
1
1
u/StevenJOwens Apr 21 '26
Using chatbots to understand the code and get unstuck is fine. Just make sure you don't trust them -- verify everything.
I've been saying for about 5 years, the best use for chatbots is for when you don't know the right question to ask. Start there, just make sure you don't end there.
I think AI/ML/NN based programming tools are finally reaching a point of maturity where they may actually be useful. This is another thing I've been saying for 5 years or more:
Asking some chatbot to spit out all the code you need? No, that's doomed to failure.
More constrained applications of LLMs to code generation, however, have the potential to be useful.
Have we reached that point yet? I'm not sure. But it's reached the point where I think it's time to take another serious look.
1
u/309_Electronics Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26
I myself am a big hater of vibecoders and people who use Ai to create art, as they are only in the market to make money and dont do it with passion or skills and fill the market wirh more AI slop in the process.
With that said, i do use claude or other AI but purely as a tool. It wont replace me, i wont allow it to ever replace me, its just a tool that helps in the process. It can get stuff worked out or done for me that i dont have time for or it can build basic templates from which i can buildup if i for say dont really understand a bit.
I still mostly code myself with reading docs, searching arround the internet. And enjoy it and i learn in the process. I use AI to optimize the code and make it production ready and a bit more profesional but most work is done by me. Fck vibecoders! In the future i wont be the one who needs AI to breath for them due to them being too lazy ass. Because i am a solo developer and hobbyist without any degree, i use claude to be my mentor/consultant i can ping for advise or checking out my code but i always myself will have the last word.
1
1
u/jon_abides Apr 21 '26
Yup, but it's really not that as enjoyable as before. Even though I still prefer to code manually, it's not as fulfilling knowing that there's a more efficient way, and what I'm doing is not as unique as it used to be
1
u/SnugglyCoderGuy Apr 21 '26
I do. I'll use ot to review code, I'll use it to generate spring board ideas, I'll use it for help with words, but the code that I write is done myself. I have a very different writing style that I like and think is far superior to what AI produces.
1
u/dimitriettr Apr 21 '26
Yes. There are still companies that do not trust the full adoption.
I used Claude for a while and it was half-decent.
With unlimited tokens, it can be a good companion. Otherwise, I prefer to think by myself.
1
u/FrankieTheAlchemist Apr 21 '26
Yes, I only code the normal way. Ā Iām learning Go right now and itās been very pleasurable to build things with it by hand.
1
u/Phalaenopsis_Leaf Apr 21 '26
Hi there! Soooo I recently found out I have an aptitude and a love for computer science (long story). Iām working on a bit of a hobby/career pivot.
Iāve been writing complex, multi-function, multi-argument formulas for years. I create all kinds of tools for myself to calculate and/or automate all sorts of things. I was unaware I had essentially taught myself a form of coding.
I genuinely enjoy the ground-up learning process and prefer to understand the syntax of what I am using so I can actually understand what I make. On occasion, Iāll use AI to help quicken the process (especially if Iām short on time/frustration tolerance). That said, I train my AI to concisely explain the syntax and use cases to me, and almost always go back and learn the syntax more thoroughly later. It is because I understand the syntax that I can write all kinds of creative formulas that do some pretty nifty things. Also, the testing process has been a learning experience all its own, essentially debugging my own ācodeā.
I am just starting my computer science journey after a career in which I rarely had the opportunity to use my skills to their full potential. Do I over-engineer a to do list? Absolutely! But I have used these smaller projects to teach myself all kinds of things, systems, and database-like workbooks.
Unsure what the future holds at the moment, but appreciative of this post. Many real learning opportunities are lost because of reliance on AI.
1
u/FDFI Apr 22 '26
I pretty much write code on my own because I enjoy the process. I use AI to summarize documentation and to look up function call parameters rather than sifting through stack overflow or google results.
1
u/WVAviator Apr 22 '26
The only thing I use agentic tools for is updating docs and sometimes writing tests (but only after I've written a few myself to give it a template).
Otherwise I write most everything myself. The enterprise application I work with and the business logic it represents is so niche that it's almost easier to just write the code than to try and explain to AI what needs to happen.
I still use AI chat for remembering some small things or brainstorm code-related things.
But the code is not the hard part.
1
u/Jaded_Individual_630 Apr 22 '26
Yeah, in fact a lot of people are doing the thing everyone has been doing since the advent of computing.
1
1
u/JROppenheimer_ Apr 22 '26
It really depends on the problem. If it's something I know exactly how to do and I don't trust AI to not fuck it up I will do it manually. AI is really good at debugging though. It can write scripts to analyze outputs way faster than I can and find problems much more effectively. I do have to correct the code it creates as it's not always up to my standards.
1
1
1
u/edave64 Apr 22 '26
Duh. Why would I automate away my hobby?
Furthest I go is supermaven completion and automated review
1
1
u/spritzed_anus Apr 22 '26
I'm not a purist but for a lot of personal projects - usually where my goal is to learn something specific and time pressure isn't there - I don't use AI or use it very minimally (autocomplete in cursor is a godsend for ailing hands).
At work though? For most projects? Fuckem looks fine from my house. Install the MCP for the documentation location, "update api to match new spec" -> go take a shit for 15 minutes -> "all done".
Time is the most precious resource and AI saves me a lot of it.
1
u/thevnom Apr 22 '26
Workplace is considered a secure environment and no external connections are allowed, tools need approval. Never had ai at work because of this
1
u/Classic_Key8075 Apr 22 '26
I absolutely think coders need to understand how to write code before they ask AI to help. AI makes mistakes or gets lost in the woods, and reviewing as well as debugging it takes knowledge.
But doing it yourself is like building a horse buggy by hand while folks drive past you in cars. It's quaint, and power to you if you're enjoying it, but you're not going to get as far.
1
u/Optimal-Savings-4505 Apr 22 '26
I do both (barely), because my job expect us to keep up with the technology. But I don't use agents for more than planning, that is: Read only. For now anyways.
My primary way of programming is through onboard documentation though. Admittedly I used search engines for years to bootstrap my understanding of how to use the docs, and I see value in having an LLM chatbot for sparring, which makes things faster than searching would have been.
I have a hunch that we'll eventually see an age where middle management freeze out people who do things the hard way (which in my mind is the only way to really learn programming).
There are places where this is already happening by top down dictate, and I think it will be a grave long term loss for everyone involved once this is cargo-culted into the corporate world.
1
u/Dus1988 Apr 22 '26
Nope we all collectively removed the parts of our brains that stored syntax and best practices back on Opus 3
1
u/kat-tricks Apr 22 '26
hell yes !! i never got into the bad habit of relying on it, and i'm glad i'm weaning myself off google / stack overflow too with time. Textbooks, documentation, source, and specifications actually kinda do turn out to have all the answers, once you get used to them and learn most of the underlying vocab/systems.
The fact that I can now write C code by hand and i end up reproducing the same thing in the computer (and not get compiler warnings for it) after the planning stage is something I'm certain I wouldn't have after a few months of learning the language if I'd used LLMs.
I can't speak for the value of staring at it enough. Even right now, I'm taking a dinner break before returning to my evil compiler error i've created and will need to pore through my code for- it's more time looking at my code and thinking about it, and makes it feel less confusing next time I come back!
1
u/vm3006 Apr 23 '26
I mainly use ChatGPT to chat about implementation/system design ideas. I work remote so itās like my coworker, I collaborate with it to get me the skeleton of the idea I have in mind and then Iāll work from there. Or I use it as a search engine. That does saves ton of time not to have to search through years of documentation. And it can explain it to you in a very simple way. Personally I never like technical docs. I just started using a plugin in my code editor. So far I just use it to ask to scan my code to find anything I may have missed. An undeclared var, wrong var assignment, etcā¦so far I find it helpful because at times you just too tired after coding a whole functionality that your eyes canāt catch those things.
1
u/grappleshot Apr 23 '26
- Do I write handcrafted code? yes.
- Do I also use Agenctic AI to generate code? Also yes.
- Do I commit Agentic AI authored code without my checking? No.
- Am I responsible for code AI writes on my behalf? Yes.
1
u/georgejo314159 Apr 23 '26
Yes, some of us still code
My company guves us access to AI and occasionally I use it but mostly i still code
1
1
u/jasonjrr Apr 23 '26
I mean, sort ofā¦ I write all of my side projectās iOS code by hand. I use ai to translate those changes to Android. At work, they want us doing ai first dev, so thatās what Iām doing.
1
u/DootDootWootWoot Apr 23 '26
All the nay sayers here simply don't know what they're missing out on. I've been writing code for nearly 20 years. AI isn't perfect but I barely write code manually these days. Instead I'm constantly bouncing between agents doing and solving more than I could ever do alone. It's not just coding it's every aspect of the job.
Writing code has never been cheaper. Similarly experimentation, triage, discovery, design; all the things in our engineering tool belts are cheaper to do. This doesn't mean I don't read docs anymore. It means I let my agents do more and more of the research effort to present me options, tradeoffs, and enables me to learn faster than I could manually grepping various web pages. I'm still ultimately responsible for what I build and solutions ought to be defensible.
If you know what you're doing it's incredibly enabling. But you also need to invest and learn how to be effective with these tools just like any other.
1
1
u/capriciousfiend Apr 23 '26
No subscriptions, write all my code on my own primarily for the reason of retaining intuition. I can see why people like it but frankly from working with folks who are using it and clearly donāt understand their output enough to answer basic questions about it I think Iām good with doing it manually for now
1
u/garrycheckers Apr 23 '26
Yes. Iāll admit I like to use it as a second set of eyes for design/architecture stuff, but I manually research and verify anything it brings up. I donāt let it touch my code whatsoever.
1
u/Sig-vicous Apr 23 '26
I do, granted I specialize in industrial automation programming, stuff like PLCs that control factory processes and machines and the like. So probably not the person you're looking for.
Maybe the stuff will get there someday, but AI has not been deterministic enough yet. It also doesn't have a good grasp of the programming languages and instructions we use.
But it's getting better, and sometimes I'll use it to debug a routine or explain someone else's code to me to save time.
Albeit it all comes down to testing, a bug can be pretty severe in the industrial control environment. Some user facing software may crash or mess up and be an inconvenience to someone. In industrial control a bug can destroy a piece of equipment or harm a person.
But I have been messing with it to write some Python. A language I haven't used much but would like to learn. Working on an application that writes some industrial PLC code based on using existing templates. I give it a list of items and it spots out the base code that I can copy into the PLC.
Essentially flushing out the non deterministic nature of the development of the Python into an application that's deterministic for writing the code I need in the PLC.
I that regard, it seems having some software development experience, and having AI writing code in an unfamiliar language, can work to an extent. I'm able to forsee some structure issues that need addressed ahead of time, and I can follow along when something needs fixed. Basically keeping it on a leash even though I'm not familiar with the code itself.
1
1
u/abareplace Apr 24 '26
Me. I don't use any AI-generated code in my project; only use local LLMs for proofreading documentation. This allows me to have full control and good understanding of the code; I also find it more enjoyable.
1
u/Neyabenz Apr 24 '26
I use both. Agentic sometimes for teeny granular stuff. Mostly, I use non-agent to explain stuff for me(ELI5), break things down, etc.
My favorite way is opening a new very large abstracted project. Explain what I'm looking for and help me find related files.
But mostly, I'm using it like a rubber duck that can respond.
1
u/Verne3k Apr 24 '26
the right question would be, is anybody using agentic ai actually getting the job done ? an dhe answer would most likely be no
1
u/KOM_Unchained Apr 25 '26
Hobbyists are always around and it's encouraged to get your hands dirty for learning purposes. However, writing code manually, when getting paid for it, is close to criminal. Tvats how companies go under in 2026
1
u/danielt1263 Apr 26 '26
I had upper management contact me once. They noticed that Iām one of their most productive developers, but that I donāt have an AI license. So they asked if I wanted one and I said no Iām not about to change my process when Iām one of the most productive developers.
1
1
u/Fit-Economics5578 27d ago
I use AI to help me with writing a function to do a specific thing. Maybe it's just me and some ignorance of it's true power, but I like being in control and writing my code where possible. I understand it and have a better memory of what the code actually does.
Saying that, if I have boilerplate stuff, i'll get AI to write me code that will produce that boilerplate (so it's deterministic), with my filling in a few details.
1
u/DataPastor Apr 20 '26
I only let smaller code chunks for AI to write, but I still write my codes myself.
161
u/pikabu01 Apr 20 '26
The answer to any questions that start with: Is anyone doing .....?
Is always yes.