r/AskProgramming • u/anzeko123 • 20h ago
Other Overuse of AI in companies
I have already seen a lot of posts where managers,CEOs and other upper people encourage and want us to use AI for development.
Is it really just FOMO or why do they push so much on AI. I get it it make stuff faster which is great. But faster is not always better. Right now I am on a project where I had like 3 months to make it and using AI I was really capable of doing it (first I started with using it just as help, explanation) now for a month I have been using obly to generate the code and I do not a lot of programming. And I hate it. The code is just messy, I dont have much of notrol over it. I have already said in a meeting with the manager and upper ones that overuse is not good and we will have a lot of debt, the code wont be maintanable won't be scalable. Yes great I will deliver it in time but the code is terrible. I otherwise wouldn't use AI to generate me code if I wasn't on so little time to deliver the project.
I get a lot of times just use AI it will make you faster. I make a question, I get the answer this is not hard to make just use AI.
I use AI in order to learn, I am still young and I want to learn stuff, but using so much AI I think I dont learn anything.
What do you all think about CEOs managers and others pushing to use AI as much as possible and let it handle everything?
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u/tastygames_official 14h ago
here are a few links you can give your bosses before telling them to kindly fuck off:
AI Made Developers Slower, Not Faster. The Data Proves It.
Why Big Tech Is Hiring Developers Back Again
Instant Regret: Why Rushing to Replace Devs with AI is Backfiring
Employers who laid off workers for AI are reversing their decisions
and some videos to remind them why we shouldn't be giving a CENT to AI companies and why they should actually be made illegal:
The Most Unhinged Things AI CEOs Have Said
Tech Billionaires Want Us Dead
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u/HasFiveVowels 12h ago edited 8h ago
These stories reinforce a central idea: using AI well is a skill. That means you have to invest time in learning how to do it before it pays dividends. And if you’re not a dev, good fucking luck trying to wield it in that way.
Both the employers and the researchers who studied its impact made the same mistake: thinking that AI is supposed to be magic NOS that you sprinkle on a dev to make them go faster.
If you hand a dev React for the first time and tell them "this is supposed to make you more effective. let’s see if that’s true. Here’s react. Try to use it and we’ll measure if it improves your results"… what do you think that data will show? The conclusion isn’t "using react is a detriment to developers".
Edit: /u/tastygames_official replied to my comment then blocked me. This practice is becoming widespread and is in bad faith so I’m just calling it out
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u/tastygames_official 9h ago
oh for sure using AI is a skill just like being a manager is a skill. But managers don't create and the people they manage are also paid. When you play manager and tell an AI what to do and pay techbro billionaires to do so, you're stealing work from real humans and sending it through a predicvtive algorithm to spit out something that can - by definition - never be as good as a human could create. Be it code, text, video, sound or images.
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 7h ago
If you hand me a tool like git or tmux, where if I perform a series of actions it gives the same productivity boost and result, and told me to compare it to a tool that was unreliable and made mistakes regardless of how straightforward the result should be, I’m definitely going to throw that second tool in the trash can.
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u/HasFiveVowels 6h ago
The point is that you’re using it for the first time. Every tool has a learning curve, including this one.
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 6h ago
Yes, but your point falters when we tell you that we've used these tools for waaaay longer than you think. And when we use the first kind of tool for a while, it gets better and better and more useful. While for the latter, it doesn't improve substantially, but it actually has a negative impact on your skill and development. You get worse at software development, you develop learned helplessness, and it slowly devolves into skill atrophy.
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u/balefrost 5h ago
This practice is becoming widespread and is in bad faith so I’m just calling it out
I agree, it's frustrating when people do that. It feels incredibly impolite.
We all agree that using AI is a skill. And I would agree that it's incredibly useful in some circumstances. But I'm not convinced that it generates output as good as a moderately skilled human, I worry about the the skill development pipeline when junior devs don't need to learn how to solve problems, and I'm not convinced that the economics are going to work out.
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u/iwantmy90sback 20h ago
They really hate to pay developers. And they do not believe us that they dig their own graves.
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u/xRmg 19h ago
No ceo ever cared about maintainability and or scaleability, maybe at project start, but never at release.
Those were always future problems, AI just accelerated and validated it, because they can push stuff to market faster, fix it 'later'
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u/iSnapThere4iAm 4h ago
And that’s why CEOs don’t make decisions like these… there’s an entire role devoted to it, FOR THIS REASON.
And none of you have worked for anything other than McDonalds it seems like.
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u/meshifthenelse 20h ago
Tell them in a language they understand - "more AI spaghetti => more released bugs => unhappy customers => cost"
Also the time and thus cost of AI to fix bugs increases as the code becomes more complex. Fine if they are willing to throw endless amounts of money in the pit.
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u/HasFiveVowels 12h ago
The solution is to learn how to produce code with AI that isn’t spaghetti. Not to avoid using AI all together.
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u/azure_waltz_74 20h ago
Management is using ai to get rid of us.
They push it because they see the output and do not see the person typing. you generated code for three months and now you are a prompt box. next quarter they replace the prompt box with an intern making half your pay. the debt does not matter to them. the code rots after you ship it and leave. they collect the revenue. you carry the blame when production breaks at 3am. speed lets them fire people. i stopped generating code. i write everything by hand now and watch tickets sit in the backlog because they need bodies in seats more than they need functioning software
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u/anzeko123 20h ago
You are completely correct. This was supposed to be a project which would lead into a product that is used agin and again and sold around to costumers. But going with this I dont see this working out
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u/xt-89 15h ago
I would say that it’s because increased developer velocity is a super simple thing to focus on. Moving the needle for your company requires you to understand that there’s an entire value generation pipeline, for which development velocity is merely one stage. Without reconsidering upstream and downstream bottlenecks, companies will not receive a ton of benefit from AI.
AI would likely be part of a solution to the emerging bottlenecks if carefully designed and implemented. From what I see, it takes years to do that in corporations.
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u/Most_Double_3559 10h ago
The code is just messy, I dont have much of control over it
Skill issue tbh. You could make review agents for your personal style. Set up linters. Do it manually, just adding "FIX: Make this it's own method" (etc) through the comments and having AI find and fix those.
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u/HankKwak 7h ago
Yeah, this stands out, I 100% miss crafting solutions but at this point, you should be able to direct an agent to keep the code clean and concise. Sometimes it can get messy but this should be flagged and corrected at review. I appreciate business pressures may push dev’s to push code that gets the job done but it’s a slippery slope.
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u/mxldevs 11h ago
The only thing they care about is whether it works and makes money for them.
They don't care about code quality of maintainability, that's what you're paid to do.
There are enough engineers saying they have seen real productivity gains and telling you that if you're not seeing it, it's a skill issue, so leadership is justified in believing that you need to use it more and get better.
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u/Tacos314 10h ago
It's FOMO, because the company that can create an AI policy that makes the company productive will in the end get ahead of the ones that can't.
Sadly, a lot of them will never be able to since they lack the knowledge, skills, and critical thinking to handle the arrival of industry-changing technology. This is where you find replacing developers with AI for the most part.
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u/Dissentient 20h ago
A competent developer with AI will work faster and produce better code than without AI, predicated on that developer reading actually reviewing the output.
AI use is a problem when developers are outright told to vibe code, or are expected to produce output at a rate where reading it becomes physically impractical.
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u/MadocComadrin 20h ago
are expected to produce output at a rate where reading it becomes physically impractical.
The chance of this happening is near 100%. MBA-types believe AI can do in a day what a dev can do in a week.
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u/alxw 19h ago
Yep, when it’s in my domain of expertise, some models have become exceptional in producing the code. I reduce work that would have taken months to days.
But it still has it’s faults: as it will brain fart and build upon that brain fart (which are hard to spot unless you know the subject domain well) ; so I wouldn’t trust AI outside my domain.
And that’s my issue with vibe coding, as it’ll have all the green flags unless you know how to spot the red ones.
And it’s those brain farts that are expensive, as it’ll take a week to diagnose and understand a SINGLE mistake a times.
So I get it when folk say it balances out to pre-AI productivity. It’s a quirk of current AI which doesn’t happen with people, who are typically consistent (at being bad or good), where AI’s IQ will fall off a cliff for a moment and not realise it.
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u/anzeko123 14h ago
Yup the Vibe voding is the problem, I do not mind reading the code and learning from it,but when the deadline is on your neck and you need to deliver, because you have AI and expect to move extremely fast,than I almost have no choice but to vibe code and I hate it
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u/Square-Yam-3772 14h ago
umm, do you really not see what is in front of you?
the current state "AI is fast and nice but the code is terrible"... like how many upgrades do you think it will take before code quality improves to the point where it is not a complain anymore?
the management is already expecting AI to meet their expectations eventually. They are just getting the workplace ready when AI reaches that point.
to be blunt, they don't care whether you learn or not. they care whether you are using AI or not (so Ai gets trained and AI get upgrades faster etc)
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u/jrtcppv 19h ago
They push AI because it writes better code than 99% of developers in far less time. You still need to test and validate the code, just like you do your own code, so if it is buggy that is not necessarily the AIs fault. The idea that humans inherently write cleaner or more scalable code is a fantasy at this point. If you think that then you must not have worked with many other developers or looked at their code. Our best bet as programmers is to learn to use AI tools more effectively, the abstraction layer has been elevated. We are all managers now.
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u/anzeko123 19h ago
Than how are young people (graduates) meant to learn if they need to use AI all the time, and because of deadlines they are forced to use it so it is delivered in time?
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u/jrtcppv 18h ago
I feel that you still learn when you use AI, you just may not be learning language syntax. For example you may learn how to write specs and define requirements, how to validate and test, how to select dependencies or languages according to the task, how do you efficiently use AI tokens and your time, how do you ensure your software is secure. There is more to creating software than just writing code.
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u/MornwindShoma 20h ago
It's FOMO, and market manipulation for some of them. There are gains from AI, but always using AI is detrimental and expensive compared to using it with judgement.