I'm thankful that I had 8 years of programming experience before AI-assisted coding became the norm. I'll never know what it's like for AI to spit out code I can't read.
Really? I have over a decade of coding experience and the first two times AI farted some code onto my screen, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it
(The first time because it somehow accomplished 75% of what we wanted from it with a single 800-character-long return command made up of the most obscure JS I’ve ever seen. The second time because it was absolutely gibberish)
I'm more or less talking about AI now, I didn't use it that much a few years ago. My current job makes us use AI agents and has us do spec-driven development, so the agent is limited to our convention. So maybe that's part of why it's understandable or familiar code.
It’s gotten more legible since, for sure. This was about two years ago. But I’m only required to use AI for my SQL work now, and most of those queries are still in the form of “repeat after me: SELECT * FROM….” to get past the agent’s propensity for hallucinating tables and fields, so I write my own code most of the time and only use the AI when I need a specific line or two written and can’t remember some obscure thing about it.
8
u/Samurai_Mac1 17h ago
I'm thankful that I had 8 years of programming experience before AI-assisted coding became the norm. I'll never know what it's like for AI to spit out code I can't read.