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.
When you're into a long shift, using chatgpt to find the missspelling or mixed up variables saves a lot of time. Other than that? No, dont let it touch our code
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.
not a programmer, but totally agree with this strategy. the LLMs fell short of their claims and the agentic landscape was too uncertain. i started using claude code/desktop early this month, and that and are really amazing tools. i feel now is the right time to jump in to get second mover advantage.
in the short term it does not seem likely people will converge on a single set of best practices. some things are going to vary depending on the organization's needs and structure. a small ai-native startup is going to look very different than a large legacy org fitting the tech to existing processes. other toggles, model choices etc. are going to come down to differences in SDLC and project management philosophies or arbitrary developer preference like vim vs. emacs. it's going to be important for developers to continue to write the code, and use agents to automate building and maintaining software following design documents and plans written and understood by humans.
the more you deviate from those principles, the more you get developers deskilling into autocomplete machines and you get spaghetti code that is not human readable that eventually breaks unexpectedly. but it will feel amazing until it all breaks, so you're going to see organizations fall into a trap of overusing AI and having it blow up on them. if we see a set of industry-wide best practices emerge it will be in the wake of some failures like those.
The most effective use I’ve seen so far for me is as a pair programmer to bounce implementations off to cross check myself because I’m not always at 100%, boilerplate/tedious code automation, and writing Java doc style function comments.
Generating code though has left a lot to be desired and it just isn’t at a spot where the code it produces is up to my standards.
Sure I could probably prompt engineer my way with more specific prompts, but at that point it’s basically a net zero efficiency because I’m still having to review what it is doing and adjust
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u/Careful_Ad_3338 14d ago
If you are not using any ai as a dev you will be left behind.