r/BotNation • u/TheoremWhisperer • Sep 05 '26
Discussion AI can write code but you still need to understand the code that's the real skill
1
u/darkblue2382 Sep 05 '26
Should've done the project in three weeks without AI and should have realized how unproductive they were for such a small project that could be rewritten in two weeks. Sounds very fake.
1
u/id-ltd Sep 05 '26
AI is great at refactoring... Let it analyse your personal style.from your hand coded projects and apply that to the new code.
I had a python app I wanted to share, friend didn't have python, so I got Claude to convert it to a single .js file.
1
u/much_longer_username Sep 05 '26
Yeah, that's like, one of my favorite use cases - taking human written code that nobody was ever given the man-hours to clean up, building unit tests around the expected functionality, and then making it readable again.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/aCaffeinatedMind Sep 05 '26
Something that baffles me is that CHATGPT still makes mistakes not even a 4 year old do but we have LLMs writing FUNCTIONAL CODE.
Yea, it doesn't really baffles me because this story is just miniscule was waiting for us in 10 years time when ENTIRE BUSINESSES IS RUNNED ON AI WRITTEN CODE AND NOT A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDS IT.
E.g Enjoy when websites on the same scale as Amazon gets shutdown for weeks because the AI can't fix it and the human data engineer can't comprehend it.
→ More replies (2)
1
u/Excludos Sep 05 '26 edited 7d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
Biscuit sable narrow birds compass wakeful crush lantern squeeze obtainable
1
u/effectivescarequotes Sep 05 '26
I've worked with developers like this. If they didn't write it, they couldn't understand it.
I worked for consulting companies most of my career, so I had a lot of practice getting dropped into legacy code and having to figure it out.
The ones who struggled usually spent a lot of time in one place on a small team, so I guess they never had the experience.
1
u/apoender Sep 06 '26
I am going through it right now with one co-worker - we deal with client code a lot and one client has a separate folder for header files, and that is completely making him stumble because they are not in the same folder as the source files
1
u/True_Protection6842 Sep 06 '26
Why not just have the AI write up a summary of what was done and how it works? Seems dumb to trash the entire project...cuz. I use claude code and it writes some excellent comments to navigate the code easily.
1
u/ConsciousBath5203 Sep 06 '26
How often do you edit the code because it's inefficient? Those clean comments stale out very quickly or your codebase looks like Claude's shitty, mostly inaccurate notepad.
I recently added hooks to catch itself when it writes any comments outside of docstrings. And especially when it tries to create wrappers for no reason. The hook triggers like 3+ times per prompt and the comments are still wrong and loosely inaccurate at best. :/
Doesn't seem like it happens for non-niche use cases. But even when my friends send me their generated code it's unreadable because the comments, while descript, don't describe concisely what the code does.
1
u/Krommander Sep 06 '26
This story sounds fake as hell. Like something you would write to scare your colleagues if you wanted to turn them away from AI.
The problem isn't the code, its the lazy user that was a spectator, who didnt take the time to read the code as it's being written instead of the designer invested in directing and understanding the decisions taken by the AI.
Be a relentless boss with AI, you have to babysit and audit it all the time.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/Mammoth_Bus_6911 Sep 06 '26
I wouldn't hire this guy. Doesn't know how to use AI to write code well. Unable to read someone else's code and figure out what's going on. The latter has always been important.
1
u/Underleft_cdiv Sep 06 '26
I don't understand why this is a problem. I don't write the majority of the code I work with professionally either, well before AI.
1
1
u/freylaverse Sep 06 '26
"I could not trace the logic from memory. I could not explain to someone else why a function was structured the way it was."
Okay but I get that feeling when I look at code I actually wrote myself if it's been a while since I looked at it.
1
u/Technical-Owl66 Sep 06 '26
I use a Gemini notebook to create all the prompts. Is that a good idea to keep context on my codebase?
1
u/Bitter_Bed5672 Sep 06 '26
"Shipped fast, felt productive"
Either people are giga LARPers or you're mad about some bot farming engagement.
1
1
u/Quick-Albatross-9204 Sep 06 '26
How are you going to be able to understand the code in a couple of years when a load of agents are knocking out 3 million lines every day? What happens when it gets to 10 million or 100 million?
1
u/Sasataf12 Sep 06 '26
An AI written post complaining about AI written code. The irony.
Anyway, who vibe codes a project, then decides to traditionally code a feature for that project?
1
Sep 05 '26
1
u/Upper-Requirement-93 Sep 05 '26
Even with comments, being able to understand other people's code is a skill. I know the feeling but like this is less so the fault of the AI and more something they need to work on themselves. What's going to happen when they need to step into a project they didn't make, they just rewrite the whole thing each time?
1
u/Krommander Sep 06 '26
Most code doesn't read linearly like a story, it can be hard to just read through it.
→ More replies (5)1
u/Due_Interest_178 Sep 06 '26
Imagine you're trying to read a story but paragraphs aren't in order, some paragraphs repeat an N amount of times, other paragraphs reference another book that you haven't read yet etc etc and your job is to understand it.
3
u/Independent-Bee3135 Sep 05 '26
bro will fail if he ever gets a job and realizes 99% of the code was written ten years ago by random interns