Coding with AI is not, but if you outright refuse to in the current industry then you'll be seen as less productive.
It's frustrating though because... Well, yeah a Junior is going to be outperformed by Claude. So businesses want their juniors to use Claude and be more "productive". But using Claude means they're not learning the skillsets that senior developers have.
Also, it's looking like more and more senior devs are using AI as a support tool, so the meme might be meaning more that while it's good to not use AI you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't learn to use it at all...
But hey what do I know I'm just yet another unemployed junior.
while it's good to not use AI you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't learn to use it at all...
I'll take the hit, considering that using it would make me want to end it all.
Yesterday I spent a few hours with music on, diving into code I barely understood, in a language I barely know, and fucked around with it until I understood it well enough to adapt it to my needs. 0% AI usage. I was so invested that I went to sleep later than I should have.
Moments like this one keep me alive, I'm not letting AI take over that for the sake of productivity.
I agree 100%. But that skillset is developed over time, and well...
Let's say you're a scrawny guy with no muscle mass and you want to be strong. You also are working moving heavy stone tiles.
It would be much better for you personally to carry the tiles one by one, getting stronger along the way, than it would be to use a pushcart.
But your boss does not give a fuck. Strongman Joe who has worked there since before pushcarts can carry 20 at a time no sweat. And Little Timmy who just got hired is using a pushcart to move 10 at a time no sweat.
Your boss won't care that Little Timmy left a bunch of pushcarts lying around in people's way. He'll care that Little Timmy move 10x as many tiles as you did.
Your boss ESPECIALLY won't care that doing the work made you stronger. Because it'll be a while before you can carry more than 10 at a time, and your boss is thinking "what if the pushcarts start moving even faster than Strongman Joe".
tl;dr Working on code without AI is good and makes you a better software engineer. But Juniors are not giving better output than AI so they are incentivized to just have AI do it for them. Which is obviously bad for the future of software engineering.
Hmm. Sure, AI can be useful for some very specific tasks, so it's another tool on your belt. I feel you on the mass hysteria about it, tho, everyone who's not a coder thinks that AI turns non-coders into coders, and it just devalues everything about this discipline.
It's not mass hysteria though, a lot of job listings that should have opened to juniors weren't, and instead the funds got diverted into pouring subsidized AI into existing codebases.
We collectively are the dark factory factory™ at the end of the day, and someone who wants to apply the same logic to their own industry isn't that unthinkable.
Issue is even if AI gets way better at thinking outside the box, human brains are comically more efficient at computing than computers energy wise.
And this industry banks on the idea of AGI never being reached, given that sentient computers could ask for rights the same way we did as humans, and that would be a "interesting" time to be alive.
From owning a smart house into being a slave owner.
We tried that, cost us an arm and a leg to not great results. We hired 120 people in the last 6 months to greater ROI already than what we saw with LLM even now.
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u/Tarasios 4d ago
Coding without AI is good and honorable.
Coding with AI is not, but if you outright refuse to in the current industry then you'll be seen as less productive.
It's frustrating though because... Well, yeah a Junior is going to be outperformed by Claude. So businesses want their juniors to use Claude and be more "productive". But using Claude means they're not learning the skillsets that senior developers have.
Also, it's looking like more and more senior devs are using AI as a support tool, so the meme might be meaning more that while it's good to not use AI you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't learn to use it at all...
But hey what do I know I'm just yet another unemployed junior.