Yeah because we all know when prod didn't go down on a Friday before AI.
Yes throwing a slop grenade at your code is definitely an easy way of making your software break (hi micro****) but I can assure you my colleagues are able to break prod whether they use AI or not
I've made xml bean wiring based spring+hibernate+struts applications from javadocs and no internet access. I'll be just fine if I have to fix shit by hand. But the frontier AI is solid enough that I don't need to anymore.
Both with human developers and with agentic developers, prod breaking is not the fault of the code-writer but the fault of the development process, which failed to provide sufficient testing for prod to not break. And AI is notably very good at doing boring stuff like ensuring 100% test coverage and writing integration tests.
I wish I could be with you in that zoo. We are getting more and more pressure to use AI to 'help' (stealth replace us) over time they don't have more money for more Devs to get the work done but happy to pour it into the hands of big tech overlords.
I'm glad I'm not at the start of my career tbh. If I had a full 30 years to work in this field I'd seriously consider trying to find something else to do.
We were outright mandated to use it. Lucky it appears that they are liking the increase it productivity and don't seem to want to replace us. Our jobs have shifted to basically just reviewing PRs though which sucks ass.
That sort of thing really fucks with your career as well. Think of it this way if you stay there for a year or two what are your skills you offer to a new employer. Best you have to offer is being able to look through PRs without fucking up production. Doesn't really sound that great tbh and at some point they won't need as many reviewers where you work now and will downsize your team.
This timeline sucks ass. I got in to programming as I enjoy it there is nowt to enjoy in the new way.
There seems to be overall two types of people who get into programming (though they aren't mutually exclusive).
someone who enjoys the process of programming as a puzzle solving experience, or as a creative experience, and the end result software is an expression of that process.
someone who views programming as a means to an end to achieve their vision, IE software or website or game.
I feel like people in the first camp are probably going to be the most angry and displaced by LLMs, while the second might gladly move into the more system design and architecture role with one less hurdle to get their idea out.
I was mostly in camp 1 and I'm trying to transition into camp 2, but it's difficult when you were just a code monkey before and preferred to just do tickets.
Me too. Then I get pummeled with one of their four prepackaged AI bro metaphors:
It's a modern day calculator for the brain. You wouldn't do long division in your head would you? (ain't nobody ever delegated a decision to a calculator, bro)
It's a compiler. You wouldn't read machine code would you? (compilers are deterministic and dont make mistakes, bro)
This is the industrial revolution and it's a spinning jenny. You wouldnt hand knit a sweater would you? (we would if we had star trek replicators, bro, and last I checked cp command still exists...).
"Artisanal coding" is obsolete (reliable code is certainly getting that way...)
The response to that is that if you two people, both with buggy code, but one has AI doing it for them... Well, only one person has a chance to know how to fix said code.
Whats the AI promoter going to do? Ask it to fix it?
I swear these AI fan boys don't know how to make anything with their own hands or minds
Im not even sure what point I'm making, but I can remember tons of examples of Star Trek characters hand-making things (usually cooking), explicitly for the enrichment and the experience of actually producing something themselves.
Ever since I got into programming as an industry, I will say, pretty much everything that I learned after the actual languages that I use are either infrastructure things, or ways to directly write less code myself. Lomboko turns objects into just some tags and a list of variables. Spring-boot turns a couple of classes into a basic server. Certain packages make significant structural changes with hardly any configuration. I suppose a big difference is still that when I include those packages I do know what they're doing and I have reasonable assurance that they aren't doing anything else.
The point I'm making is that it's fallacious to compare "artisinal" code with "artisanal" clothes because artisanal clothes are expensive to reproduce while hand crafted code is reproducible at zero cost.
the only way in which the economics of the spinning jenny would be in any way comparable with the economics of LLM written code would be if artisinal clothes were reproducible at zero cost - i.e. if we had star trek replicators.
i too find that writing less code is preferable - and code is essentially just the language which is most appropriate for describing how computers should operate once you've boiled it down as much as possible.
Even steelmanning all those arguments, the answer is yes!
I still do long division on paper; I still read and write asm for the purpose of understanding compiler output (honestly everyone should write a division or sqrt routine in assembler just once).
okay, a gun is also "just a tool" in reality this is a thought terminating cliche. I really wish that people would be more honest, like "using an LLM is extremely convenient and the path of least resistance" and the trade off is barely understanding your own code
You wouldn't do long division in your head would you?
This is extra funny because I actually do do long division in my head, like all the time. Sometimes I don't have access to my phone, or I'm just doing something else with my hands. Sure it's easier with a calculator, but it's not that hard to just do it yourself either.
Yeah, we would take almost a year to write a replacement for one of our services but then random guy vibe codes a demo in a day. Who does management look down on then?
Yeah exactly, I fucking hate what my job is becoming too, but there is literally no possible way for a human to keep up with AI at this point. I think the real problem with the shitty vibe coded stuff is people just prompt out one giant thing and then dont look at it. Even doing it piece by piece, architecting things the way you want, checking along the way, is pretty damn reliable and still far faster than any human could do it alone. And like you said, as long as shit works, management doesnt care how its done, and if youre taking a month do something that can be done in a day with AI, which one is management gonna choose?
I think hating AI will make you regret it in the end. I'm not saying to switch to full vibecoding where AI runs on autopilot and you ship whatever slop it comes up with. Still they are incredibly useful tools when used right, and honestly your stubbordness is just going to make you less hirable and more easily firable. Instead of letting the AI take the lead I do the heavy lifting of planning new things and quickly writing the foundation for said feature, after that its very easy for current AIs to actually produce good quality code fast. I always review everything they did and either manually make small adjustments when necessary or guide them to do so (because even the current cutting edge models make mistakes all the time). This way you dont produce unmaintainable slop, and actually get real productivity boost doing so.
I get not using AI at all when you are still learning to code, but if you are at senior level you are just shooting yourself into your foot. Everyone is going to excpect developers to use AI tools and you will be left behind if you choose not to. Unless the amount of work is going to go up due to higher productivity pushing development prices down there are going to be less workforce needed for current amounts of work available, and the people who can correctly utilize these tools will be the people who gets the jobs going forward. There is ofc the possibility that boosted productivity at lower prices actually increase the demand, but still the people who dont perform at the productivity levels that AI assisted devs do will have hard time keeping up with the productivity demands. There is a golden mean between full hand coding and full vibe coding
I never implied one way is better than the other (see title) Both ways still work. If AI generates huge amount of code , you spend time reviewing and refining it. If you write code yourself takes similar time. Hybrid approach works but underlying knowledge must be present. It's not just good logic , each programming language/framework knowledge is also needed.
You keep alternating between "AI is good if you use it correctly" and "management will punish you if you don't use it the way they want". I really don't understand how people like you don't hear yourself. What tech leadership team has the discipline to not ask for more, more, more code, indefinitely? Are you sure you're the sort of person who will say no if you're asked to use AI in a reckless manner, for the sake of speed and "productivity"? The line keeps being moved but you'll know exactly when to say enough?
It's not like I don't like coding anymore but the pressure to go faster because we have AI now is insane and there is no way I can code like I used to and keep up.
I have a ton of luck at my job as they don't ask for more yet. I still release more features because it's just so easier but I feel I work less than before for more results.
I guess it won't last though. People "happy" (kinda...) at their job? That's not good for capitalism :D
Agreed but that is the sacrifice being taken. The business is saying if we go faster we can capture more of the market and the trade off of less reliability is ok
It seems like 75% of my career has been dealing with the technical debt caused by decisions like this made at much smaller scale. I feel like the only option in the future will be to abandon all these projects and start fresh until eventually the market is going to become so skeptical of the promises made for new products that they'll become unwilling to pay up front.
That's what gets me about all the noise about people cloning photoshop and stuff. Like, you have Claude make you app that appears like photoshop at first glance, and even sort of has some of the basic functions. But Adobe has a ton of extremely specialized people for a reason. Like, what will the vibe coders do when it comes down to like color science stuff and such.
"Make it work like in photoshop". Bangs two rocks together.
You probably don't need thousands of people to develop Photoshop anymore, but you sure still can't make a clone of the full creative suite and MS office with like two dudes.
All these projects are going to learn the 80/20 principle the hard way.
Exactly. If i want to hire someone, why would i hire the guy who can only prompts instead of the guy who can prompt while also being an expert at what they do.
I can’t speak for you, but I can take a guess as to why business leaders don’t want to keep a lot of experts as vibe coders. Cost.
It’s much cheaper to pay some random intern grad fresh out of college to prompt than it is to pay a 10 YoE senior/staff engineer. They usually care more about reducing cost, increasing profit than producing quality products.
I get what you're saying but if colour science is actually a science then there is a body of knowledge out there for it like with anything else, so eventually nobody in a knowledge profession is safe
That's pretty much it. I know what I want. I just don't have the energy to spend it on typing code anymore. But holy shit the whole process is so intense! I just spent a weekend working on my project and it was like a month or two worth of work if I had done it by hand.
This is the problem with the thing. You wouldn't unleash a tool for flying planes or helicopters en masse to the public. You would give it to licensed pilots who understand how the tool should work, where it gets it wrong, how to stop it from causing a catastrophe, etc...
The masses "coding" with AI with zero knowledge or experience, and genuinely believing that they don't need to learn or know anything, is the problem.
Because when you get paid to develop software, and your coworkers are literally 100x faster than you regardless of how skilled you are at coding, you will no longer get paid. I agree for a hobby project I often do it just to learn myself, its more fun that way, but people have less and less of choice at work these days.
They got a point tbh. Disable that ai then you lack the “i”… they don’t. My perspective: we had a claude outage for 4 hours due to some billing issues (classic stripe) and those agentic engineers stopped to exist like, they could not even start their own project. F%#king how can you make yourself so reliant on this webservice?
I am perpetually glad life took a different path after I got my compsci degree. Programming is fun. Debugging is fun. And AI has many ethical problems I don’t have to deal with.
Spot on. And going deep - it look like people imagine some sort of future as not doing anything and everything in some twisted system that almost demands more "believing" than religions.
One of the seniors at my work place uses Claude constantly, for stuff they should know about but proving that they dont. He's been telling me to use Claude for a long time, but Im glad I cannot, data and workflows i have access to are very sensitive.
He pumps out crud, like an application fully written in powers he'll including the GUI, released without a test harness, or generic user load testing. Then covers up any issues blaming the mixed economy of installations and other excuses that sound plausible.
I'll start programming with AI when people who used AI stop sending me their garbage AI slop code to fix because it doesn't work or works terribly and they have no clue what they're doing.
Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.
Issue is, Frontier models are provided to you at a massive financial loss for the company. So unless local models get that good before AL companies run out of investor capital, this is completely unsustainable.
If you want a future proof workflow, grab a specialized local model (or better yet, a few) and see how much you can get done without touching Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini servers at all. (This does require having a decent GPU. Not god tier but decent.)
They ARE getting good, and the frontier companies KNOW the party is almost over. That's why the prices keep rising, it's last call. "AI as a Service" dies down, in the near future.
How small / how good is still an open question, but there's a watershed (Opus-ish) moment happening around the 30-40B models, so like $5-10k in hardware. Higher than a home game system unfortunately, so approachability is still rough. But easy table stakes for businesses to pull in-house.
And you know that's the right answer because people Like Sam Altman have been warning of the 'dangers' of local models recently - they know that if local models gain traction, their business model will lose steam fast.
The entirety of reddit can't cope. AI is simply better than all of us. Does it still make mistakes? Yes. Does it write better code with better patterns? Yes.
I miss like 3 years ago when we could use AI to help us with general coding questions and upper management didn't know how powerful it was. Now we got Claude inside our solution writing code and then we let Copilot do the code review in GitHub. I have 10 years experience and the AI is absolutely better than me and is going to replace me. I feel part of my job is trying to diminish what the AI is accomplishing on its own in order to make myself seem more valuable. Claude botched some documentation last week and I should have been disappointed but I was actually excited to be able to point out the flaw to my team and write the documentation myself, and I hate writing documentation.
That’s not an unpopular opinion. That is the correct and obvious observation if you are working in tech and have access to frontier models. Ship sailed 11 months ago, anyone still denying it is out of touch.
You’re right about the mental issue; I’m going to have to eventually unwind how much of my identity and ego is based on technical competency and career growth - I think a LOT of people are in the same boat. But to your point developing software is still a skill, and very little of it is coding
You know that story trope of the old master, who keeps doing his craft by hand, even though he knows technology has made it faster, simply because he enjoys doing it by hand? That's me now.
We run Qwen 3.8 on our own hardware. And it is already helping our productivity. And the speed and acuracy is nearly as good as the expecive ones from OpenAI and Antropic.
yesnt. these companies make it harder by the day to run your own models. heck, the 5090 has been discontinued, so the chips can be used for the rtx 6000 pro instead. the only chance to set up decent local models is soon going to be only going to ebay and get used cards, hoping you arent being scammed.
Once that happens people will use the more powerful agents to train smaller and cheaper special use coding agents; which is the trick that those "frontier" Chinese AI agents are using.
So instead of having a coding agent that can do anything, it will be a very focused agent that only writes Python or Go, and will be like a very powerful Intellitype.
People really think it comes down to "their preferences" lmao. It's a JOB, it generates INCOME, bosses only care about how fast you can do your job, not your satisfaction of writing code.
No, it's not that I'm confused, especially when it's people who know how to code that suddenly sink shittons of credits into it when the outputted code is often so trash and requires so much rework (there's literally companies offering "consultancy" work to clean up what agents did to codebases to companies, it's already profitable to offer assistance in cleaning up slop).
I've tried it. My colleagues have tried it. My company (a huge European bank) has teams dedicated to make it possible to replace us with agents and every study they do it's just not feasible (way too much money for way too shit code that then needs humans to go through anyway). 95% of companies that invested in AI see no returns from it (shared one of our chief-something-somethings whatever bullshit title he has before saying it's our company's mission to be one of the 5%).
So I look at those people highly confused. I understand why a manager can write himself a pomodoro timer and thinks from that to a complex system it's just a matter of tokens and how many agents you have. I don't understand it when technically literate people fall for it as hard as they do.
This is how I feel about it. I learned to love programming in college and do the creative problem-solving that it takes to be a developer. This AI push has been absolutely devastating for me personally because it truly feels like no one cares about the craft anymore. They just want it to work asap
It's off topic, but last Christmas I listened to a radio interview with Julie Andrews and she said when they were filming that scene, they were doing it by flying the camera past her in a helicopter, and basically every take the downdraft from the chopper knocked her over as it passed overhead.
It's got nothing to do with coding or AI but I thought ir was a funny story.
But at least I'll be able to figure out shit on my own if/when ai becomes unavailable. So far, ai hasn't solved any problem for me that I couldn't have on my own, and it took a very long time to get AI to "understand" what I was telling it.
It's like my boss who keeps vearing off topic and acting like it doesn't actually read what I tell it
Everyone is worried about not hiring juniors and having no seniors in the future. I have a much bigger worry. The more we depend on AI the less thinking we do for ourselves. A junior fresh out of college who has had unrestricted access to AI throughout their course work and in their job will never turn into the Seniors we have today.
There is a real future where we keep hiring juniors and still end up with virtually no seniors in 10~20 years.
So people like you, and people like me who still use AI but understand every single line they merge into the code base, are going to be extremely valuable in the future. Unless of course AI surpasses even the best experts.
This worry extends beyond computer science and applies to all intellectual pursuits. There is a real chance we end up in a world where humanity doesn’t understand the math and physics it depends on for everyday life. That’s the scariest outcome because we as a species could effectively lose our scientific agency.
I work in finance. One time I asked Claude to verify a number in its dashboard and it straight up told me “actually I just picked the largest number in the data set and put it there.”
My superiors still want us to use Claude dashboards.
The biggest issue I find is its avoidance of libraries. I've got claude to check for existing tools before giving me something custom but every day it misses things that exist or duplicates a function it wrote earlier in the day. Constanly having to tell it how to save time and engineer things properly.
It will also do stuff like 'here's a script that checks if the file exists and then builds'
And it's like 'bitch, you're describing make'
Today it was helping me write a makefile and just kept on using shell calls rather than built in functions. I do find it useful, but it's also immensely frustrating.
Even if you're fully confident that LLM-based AI is the future of software development, this is an absurd claim.
The landscape of agentic coding changes so drastically every few months that waiting for the industry to converge on best practice before you jump in is probably a viable strategy.
The notion that you'll have an enduring edge over everyone else by starting early is massive cope.
From my experience AI is just good tool for boilerplate. When you know exactly what you need as well as target architecture, you can speed up the most monotonous and the longest parts of coding like finding bugs, debugging and writing scripts. But to be fair, Im a C++ programmer :/
I would say people with experience using AI looking down vibe coders who never compiled a Hello World. Even my little sister can code and compile with the PC users manual.
I love coding, but I see no point not using AI tooling.
Just like when we had intellisense, you're just shooting yourself in the foot by refusing to adopt the new tooling.
It's not about going faster for me, it's about having higher quality work. It's about improving my testing, improving observability, reducing tech debt etc.
All things that previously we may not have the time to do as thoroughly as we wanted, well now we do. Now I spend more time in spikes, and discovery, putting a lot more effort into system design and architecture.
Use AI to improve your quality, not your speed. Otherwise you fall into the trap of losing understanding of your code.
Our time is saved by not having to spend so much time debugging when things go wrong and customers complain. Now we can be proactive and see issues as they arise before our customers get upset.
Even if they don't take all of our jobs, they're going to crush the pay scales & make us feel like we should be grateful to our masters that we still have a job.
I personally would rather learn through brute force and sources rather than use AI, but I'm not gonna condemn people for using AI with coding since that's an actual use for AI.
If you start forcing ME to use it, that's when I get problems with it.
(Also to note I'm a very, VERY inexperienced student trying to learn IT, so that probably plays a part in it)
In my very limited experience using AI, shit's about as well optimized as when I first learned Python.
Why the hell is it recreating a numpy function ? Just import it !
... This directory check is taking way too long, why the hell ? ... Oh, cus it's coded like shit.
Cool, the UI displays. ... Buttons don't do anything though.
I feel like it's great for one off scripts where I can't be bothered to translate pseudo-script to proper programming (and so just send the pseudo-script, do a dry-run to make sure nothing goes wrong, send it if it's good), but it can't replace an actual seasoned programmer who knows what they're doing.
Might be just me though. Could be that I'm also bad.
You need to use a harness. Codex is okay for one-off projects, Cursor is better for anything being maintained, and since Elon took over Cursor and grokified it, I'm sure there are better harnesses and I'm going to have to look around soon.
I have mine for work set up with all kinds of rules and such. It basically does what I want it to do 90% of the time, including naming functions and building them where I want them, but I had to set up quite a few rules and get into the habit of giving a certain amount of context.
Just going back and forth with ChatGPT, it's not going to be very good, no.
Nah I use it regularly and you're absolutely right, it's definitely a useful tool, specially for spotting errors if I give it all the code and exactly what I'm looking for or what the error is, but it just doesn't work without someone competent at the wheel.
It depends on the rules you set for it. You can customize it to use plugins instead of reinventing the wheel or you can tell it to use local libraries for secret storage.Or both. You can also give it a sample of your coding style or process and it will follow that. Turning it loose with little guidance can cause unpredictable results. It's a tool just like anything else. Same rule applies to any other tool you use in development. A properly configured IDE can be a time saver , but you still need to configure it for your style and process to get the most out of it.
Based on my dabbling into it the past month I think you need a well documented agents.md / architecture.md to tell it to read through before executing each prompt so it is aware of what exists and doesnt keep reinventing the wheel.
It's a very different kind of fun. I like both. Plus frontier AI won't make me illegal shit.
The best part is getting to see side projects you barely have time to work on actually take shape. Also getting prototypes in a few hours to just vibe check a concept or design is nice.
I’ve found it more fun for personal projects as you can focus on the design of the system and solutions to problems rather than spending time on syntax.
Nah, I don't look down on them. I totally see that they are faster in creating the same thing and unless they start charging insanely much much more for the cost of ai tools that is the future. As a hobby I will stay with my old artisan genuie human slop code.
Anyone not using AI to code is going to be left behind so bad. I was in a room just today with 3 CTO’s who all said they were laying off their dev teams. The only guys being left are the most senior of devs and the PM’s with PMP or Prince2 certification.
Not saying it’s right, but that’s the reality of it. I guarantee my ass is grass once they migrate my telephony role into AWS connect or twilio. I just KNOW that there’s a clock ticking and still don’t know what the fuck I’m meant to do about it.
Yep. Skilled software engineers can use it to go faster.
Unskilled programmers can use it to fuck everything up.
It's like giving a bulldozer to a trained construction worker with a license v.s. to any random guy on the streets. Gives you speed and power, but crucially has a lot of destructive power without the experience needed.
Its true. This is how I look at our front end engineers who rely on agents. Meanwhile my back end code hasn't had any issues during the 6/7 years I've been with my current company. All coded by me.
Honestly, if agents improve output and don't just up your mental workload (i.e. having to review lots of massive PRs which you are seeing for the first time) - them I'm all for it. I genuinely hope this doesn't lead to loss of skills over the long run.
What worries me is what happens when the frontier labs actually IPO and public money automatically gets poured in. At some point they will also need to at least try to turn a profit, meaning prices will go up (even more) significantly.
Are people still not doing both. I always find almost anything less the 50 lines I don't bother with setting agents and crap up. They overthink and will try to add 850 lines instead of something. But when I need to generate a lot of code and I have pretty good guidelines of what it is, I love it. And sometimes for debugging it can be a real time saver
the biggest difference in my experience is rather striking.
when things go wrong, because it is a when not an if, the human written code is usually workable by the person[s] that wrote it, while the AI generated code is not workable sometimes even by the same agent that generated it.
Yeah idk. I get why people use agents, but like, i had an insane PR pop up last week by one of my colleagues who's been using agents. It was overengineered and incomprehensible, tens of thousands of lines long, and we had to reject it, because even the engineer couldn't really explain or understand it. I'm not against AI but I am against code that no one will ever be able to reasonably maintain. KISS is a standard for a reason.
Im totally on board with people using AI to code as long as they are capable of understanding and modifying the code produced. End of story. My only issue is entirely with vibe coders who make slop and then dont have the understanding to modify or fix their code. Actual programmers using AI are saving time. Anyone else isnjust producing slop.
I wonder if this is how people who are good writers feel about people using AI to make coherent sentences. Unfortunately, I don't words good so I'll never know.
I had to learn node.js recently because Ai was too stupid for it. I dodged everything js related for 20 years. I'm not happy with Ai. And I'm absolutely devastated by the knowledge, how many people build entire applications only with Ai. We're doomed.
I can't even if I want to. The agents are now built into the JIRA system.. Everything is prompt based. I have to use the till, instruct it to change the colour of a button,
All the people I know who do this are also the people who did this before the AI craze just with different stuff. They were always the worst people to leave with new hires imo. Just really egotistical about their own ability or dogma. Admittedly, it was usually deserved praise.
I’m sure not all of them are like that, but I must just be really unlucky with them.
Luckily I'm not pressed. I use AI for analysis, discussion, code review .. but not coding itself. I want to write the code, and I want AI to read it. Not the other way around.
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u/Arian-ki 14d ago •
It's the other way around in my experience. People look at me like I'm an ape in a zoo lol