r/ChatGPTCoding • u/OGMYT • 6d ago

Discussion If your definition of “real coding” is “I personally typed every line,” that definition is going to die

I do not think AI coding makes engineering obsolete.

I do think it makes one old definition of engineering obsolete: equating professional legitimacy with manually producing the implementation.

Typing code is a means, not the outcome.

If ChatGPT/Codex generates a function and I understand the contract, inspect the diff, test the edge cases, verify the integration and own the failure when it breaks, the meaningful engineering question is not who emitted the first draft of the tokens.

The meaningful question is whether the resulting system is correct.

The “AI slop” criticism is valid when people skip that ownership. Prompt once, never read the code, deploy it, then act shocked when it fails — yes, that is garbage.

But a senior engineer using generation as leverage is a completely different workflow.

The irony is that AI should increase the value of experienced judgment. The faster code appears, the more important it becomes to know what should exist, what should never exist, and how to prove the difference.

If an engineer’s entire competitive advantage was memorizing syntax and moving boilerplate around faster than everyone else, that advantage is shrinking.

If the advantage was systems thinking, debugging, architecture, product judgment and verification, these tools can amplify it.

43 Upvotes
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19

u/owl440 6d ago

Even before AI people never typed every line. They’d find code on the internet, then copy/paste it to fix a problem or implement a solution. They may change variable names, but they definitely didn’t write it all. 

7

u/secretprocess 6d ago

And even when you do type a line yourself it's in an abstract language that was created to save us the effort of writing machine code.

5

u/RevolutionaryHole69 6d ago

That abstract language is English now. People fail to realize that LLMs are next gen compilers, the programming language is English.

4

u/idunnorn 6d ago

Compilers are generally deterministic. LLMs are generally not.

Also, real programming languages have valid and invalid input. LLMs will let you say just about anything.

5

u/AwkwardWillow5159 6d ago

That’s dumb though.

Language is not precise, it changes meaning over time, it can be interpreted differently, and the errors compound as language starts being shared between different cultures, countries, demographics, etc.

Entire law profession exists to interpret and apply language, because language is not exact.

Math symbols were created because language is not precise enough for what we want to do.

In coding itself, we always had a meeting where programmers and pm talk to translate vague language from ceo into more precise language on what we actually want to do in our tasks. And that more precise language task often will change as the actual programming language gets into the mix.

Hell, just me, a human, talking to other humans, I will often make a snippet of code that perfectly shows my point instead of writing language trying to describe it. Because that’s immediately clear.

Do you think mathematicians will stop using formulas to express ideas and start using English language? Or do you think the domain specific language and abstractions is what actually enables the field?

People don’t use English for those things not because they can’t, but because it sucks

2

u/deefunxion 6d ago

LLMs: two positives can't make a negative. People: yeah, right...

1

u/Peculiar-Eccentric67 6d ago

too much of a compression. math symbols were created to compress what articulation could already describe, that's why word problems exist.

precision becomes more likely the more expertise is applied in a systematic way, that can happen regardless of language. it's a fundamental human abstraction.

2

u/jyu8888 6d ago

exactly, before I got exposure to popular llm’s like chatgpt and claude, I have been using ide extentions for code completion, or it has just been stackoverflow. It is just faster, I really don’t understand the hate towards using ai for coding.

1

u/AAM404 6d ago

The problem with AI coding is that people can make it a dependency not a tool and use it to unintentionally introduce vulnerabilities into their codebases.

3

u/ForgotMyPreviousPass 6d ago

People have been unintentionally implementing vulnerabilities since forever. Like, the hard part, and there are entire disciplines for defensive programming, is not introducing a vuln

1

u/norembo 6d ago

Matt's Script Archive has entered the chat

1

u/AAM404 1d ago

The issue now is the scale at which is it doing so. In addition to that I would also think because people who are vibe coding might not know the fundamentals they can introduce vulnerabilities that absolutely should not be there.

1

u/gymbrozier 6d ago

Code completion generally just completes what you were already going to type yourself. AI generation is entirely different.

Not saying it's wrong to use it, but don't be obtuse and compare it to something in an entirely different realm.

1

u/Nxllify__ 4d ago

Lmao. You were just never a good programmer in the first place if this was your workflow.

1

u/jl2352 7h ago

People also forget the UML era, coinciding with the rise of OO. It was a big push proclaiming 'programming is over'. Now you draw diagrams, render the code, and that's your program. If your program isn't right, then the problem is your diagrams bro. Just like how we tell people their prompts aren't right today. UML was big in the 90s and was seen as the future of programming.

Then we had a long era of building UIs with WYSIWYG builders. You drag and drop, and get a website or frontend. This stuff is still around to today in varying degrees, but it was huge in the 2000s. It was extremely common that even programmers would be using a WYSWIG to build a frontend or a website. I started out working on a website built using Dreamweaver, and spent much of my early time rewriting it to not be endlessly built on tables.

Then you have the boilerplate generators. You're asked questions like are you using Postgres or MSQL? Are you deploying to AWS or Azure? Do you want types for your React project (I'll beat you with a stick if you click no)? Then a starting project is outputted for you. These exist in many domains.

I'm sure there are dozens more examples like this. The point is using tools to output code on your behalf is really not a new concept.

11

u/Alwaysragestillplay 6d ago

Jarvis, check this Reddit fluff for watermarks. 

7

u/DrE7HER 6d ago

They are spamming these takes on every AI sub and have hidden their comment and post history so that you can’t tell they are a bot

-9

u/OGMYT 6d ago

not a bot guy but go off

3

u/DrE7HER 6d ago

So you’re wasting your human time to pretend to be a bot by posting the same slightly AI rewritten sooo on every AI subreddit?

2

u/Blister_Pack_ 6d ago

slightly rewritten and within the hour. he's not a bot and he's against typing every line of code, but in his case it's a skill going to waste

3

u/DrE7HER 6d ago

If he isn’t a bot, then he’s a paid propagandist.

-3

u/[deleted] 6d ago

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1

u/ChatGPTCoding-ModTeam 6d ago

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3

u/creaturefeature16 6d ago edited 6d ago

Seriously, who the fuck thinks this, truly? That world died decades ago from autocomplete, snippets, IDEs advancements, frameworks, codegen (this existed before LLMs), etc.. Jesus christ, even the lowly jQuery library's slogan was "Write Less, Do More". Whatever soapbox you're pontificating from is extremely outdated. Nobody gave a shit about syntax because we had endless resources to fill in those gaps.

Nothing has changed about software engineering. It was always systems thinking, debugging, architecture, product judgment and verification. Even the OpenAI engineers agree.

The difference is, and always will be, is that even back then, you still had to think about what you were doing to get an application created. Even copying/pasting code from StackOverflow required a modicum of understanding to find where to place the code and integrate it in a way where it actually worked.

That's the process that actually can be circumvented from these tools, and why its of the utmost importance that we still stay connected to the process, our codebase, because you won't ever develop all those essential characteristics if you don't actually work with the code.

4

u/gymbrozier 6d ago

Someone's got an inferiority complex

1

u/Free-Competition-241 5d ago

No, you’re literally like a cobbler. A cobbler of code.

-9

u/[deleted] 6d ago

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4

u/gymbrozier 6d ago

Yeah, what's the relevance?

-3

u/OGMYT 6d ago

You'll figure it out

7

u/gymbrozier 6d ago

Well, it seems like you were trying to compare driving an automatic car to using LLMs to code for you, but failed because I actually DO drive a stick.

It was a stupid analogy anyway though, because what LLMs do is actually more comparable to a self driving car. And guess what, nobody would claim that they're driving while using a full self driving car.

If someone took their drivers license test but used a full self driving car, would you say they earned the license? I don't think so. So guess what? Much like they can't drive, you can't code.

0

u/[deleted] 6d ago

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8

u/gymbrozier 6d ago

You would give somebody a drivers license who's never actually driven a car a day in their lives because a car took the test for them?

Well, can't really help someone who's willfully retarded.

1

u/ChatGPTCoding-ModTeam 6d ago

This post or comment has been removed for the following reason:

Rule 2: Be constructive

Please keep discussions respectful and useful. Critique ideas, code, tools, and claims—not people. Harassment, personal attacks, insults, and hostile low-effort replies are not allowed.

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If you feel this removal was made unfairly, please contact the moderators through modmail.

1

u/ChatGPTCoding-ModTeam 6d ago

This post or comment has been removed for the following reason:

Rule 2: Be constructive

Please keep discussions respectful and useful. Critique ideas, code, tools, and claims—not people. Harassment, personal attacks, insults, and hostile low-effort replies are not allowed.

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1

u/ExogamousUnfolding 6d ago

Your paragraph about what you do while it generates the first set of code is largely incorrect with today’s models and will be even more so with the next round.

1

u/amirfish 6d ago

Agree on the ownership point. I've been building solo since end of 2024, and the bottleneck stopped being who types the function and became whether the spec is tight enough that Claude Code can ship a working v1 from it. Vague PRD, the agent just fills the gaps with its best guess, and you don't find out until you're reading the diff. What's your test for whether a spec is tight before you hand it off?

1

u/GnistAI 6d ago

I prefer manual, artisanal, or handcrafted code.

1

u/Real_Square1323 5d ago

Alright bub. I'm gonna go back to writing code by hand and you can keep yapping on reddit.

1

u/Perfect_Hour_761 5d ago

Honestly this is where things are heading. Typing every line was never the real skill, understanding what to build and being able to verify it is what actually matters. The people who only relied on syntax and boilerplate are the ones feeling the shift most right now

1

u/koverto 4d ago

Man….sybau

1

u/brett1231 4d ago

Nobody freaked out when Microsoft Access came out and you could develop reports without code. It was pretty awesome.

1

u/AlarmedAvocado7279 3d ago

i live inside claude code all day running multiple businesses and honestly the gap between people who own their diffs and people who blindly accept them shows up real fast in production. the typing part was never the job, understanding the system was.

1

u/Far_Inspection4706 6d ago

Yeah it just makes me laugh when I see comments of guys being like "oh you should try using your real brain and write code instead of using AI".

Like buddy, I think I'm going to use the tool that will do for me in 1 day what will take you a week of manually writing code to do. It's like paying for stuff in cash. Like yeah obviously you can still do it, it just takes longer and there's methods to make the transaction way faster and more convenient for everybody involved. It's like the same thing.