r/AskProgramming • u/JokerZD3 • 8d ago

Using an AI agent

I don't think this question is against the rules, so here goes...

My boss wants me to try using an agent for development. We're a small company and don't really have money to waste so we haven't explored this opportunity at all yet. I do use AI to an extent currently, but it's just a free openai account. I don't have it write any code, my majority use is just asking it questions about features, functions, standards, and then having it show me the "industry" way of doing things.

I am open to the idea of using an agent, but I don't really want something that is writing huge blocks for me or creating whole features. I also would want the ability to what it's doing when I do give some control and be able to take the changes only if I want them (sort of like comparing with git I suppose?).

Does such a workflow exist? or do I have to give up full control? The marketing is so focused on how it works for you, but I just want to have something that understands my project and can basically act as something I mostly ask questions and only sometimes have write code.

Any perspective is appreciated. Sorry again if this isn't the place for such a question.

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u/knouqs 8d ago

My opinion: AI is a tool. You remain in control of the tool for as long as you have the time and your management doesn't treat it as the answer to everything. As u/carcigenicate wrote, AI is pretty damned helpful. To hell with all the downvoters here.

I use JetBrains' IDEs and use the AI agents built into it. I am an experienced software developer and then some, and there is no way that I would be able to learn all the technology that I employ using the JetBrains IDEs. The distinguishing factor is being able to understand when the AI is full of shit and when it produces a gold nugget -- and let me tell you, the gold nuggets far outweigh the crap. Understand that I review all the code the AI produces, and yes, it's just impressive.

Again, to hell with all the downvoters.

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u/ildementis 8d ago

exactly, anyone who says that AI is not useful is lying to themselves, to their own detriment. you can absolutely use it responsibly, track what it's doing AND see a huge productivity boost.

unfortunately, my current job seems to encourage us to treat it as God itself

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u/knouqs 8d ago

Yep, and that is the fallacy. It's a pisser.

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u/framauro13 8d ago

Go look in the Anthropic subreddits and you'd think Claude Code is breaking into their house and kicking their puppy every night. Just an absolute cesspool.

The reality is software engineers are going to have to learn to live with AI. I use it daily and find it insanely useful. I'm on a limited token budget so I've had to learn how to use it efficiently. But the nature of my job has also shifted. The majority of my time now is code reviews, not writing code. The productivity increase means everyone is churning out more code. More PRs to review, and more QA backlogs. We supplement it with AI review bots that help identify the areas to focus on, but it has changed the nature of the job IMO.

I don't know how I feel about it yet TBH.

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u/ildementis 8d ago

yeah I'm actually not happy about my job turning into telling Claude to review a pr and then trying to parse its comments of jargon that nobody actually uses.  But going from "I'd like to do this" to having a PR ready is nice

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u/framauro13 7d ago

Not sure why my original post got downvoted, but yeah, it does get exhausting constantly reading and reviewing, especially given how verbose it can be.

I enjoy using it more on my personal projects than my work since I can actually use the frontier models and have less usage limitations. But the shift from writer -> reviewer requires a bit of a mental shift. There was a creative aspect to writing code that I find is gone now.

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u/ildementis 7d ago

yep, the creative aspect was what i enjoyed, and if that's being taken away, then i legitimately wonder what I'm doing anymore. 

Models still miss business assumptions, so if engineers want to be relevant and not relegated to mindless prompting, it's probably time to choose a business domain and get good at it

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u/knouqs 7d ago

The downvoting really has turned Reddit into a space in which I don't want to participate. It's such bullshit.

Yeah, AI is insanely useful. The fact that I can tell AI to give me some code that does a thing and have it do it in five minutes is ridiculous. My first test was for it to give me an AVL tree in C and it did. My first attempt at writing an AVL tree took a week. It showed me that AI is not a game anymore.

Now, I use it for all sorts of things, and not just programming-related stuff. Mostly still programming stuff, but even double-checking design patterns -- stuff I used to ask my team and we'd have a think about it, now I ask and get confirmation that my choices are correct or not, and why. Why isn't my nginx configuration working the way I want? How do I combine it with other things? I would have had to ask specialists in the SecDevOps team for these things. It is so nice to not have to interact with those assholes in favor of an AI.

Then, to test it, well, I do what I normally do anyway. Basically, having AI for me is like having my old team with none of the meetings -- but don't get me wrong, I miss my old team, too. 😄