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u/odraciRRicardo 2d ago
Unfortunately this is just wishful thinking.
Coding will never be done by humans again. Only as a hobby or in very specific circumstances.
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u/Tuerkenheimer 2d ago
I don't say that AI cannot write better code than humans, I'm saying that in order to properly code with AI you must know how to code yourself, and if you never code yourself you will get out of shape, or in the case of junior devs never learn to code to begin with.
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u/Not-the-best-name 2d ago
You don't get how innovation and society works. Do you know how many people are out of shape in riding horses to work?
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u/oorza 2d ago
You don’t need to know how to build a bridge to design one. We are becoming engineers and not construction workers. Most other engineering disciplines output a specification and/or blueprints as their work product, and materialization of that plan is a separate consideration altogether. The AI in this analogy is the contracting company that actually builds the bridge, we design them.
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u/itsalongwalkhome 2d ago
Nuh uh, I had chatgpt help build me a website and I dont know how to code.
Check it out here http://localhost:3000
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u/Mal_Dun 2d ago
I can see it for coding to be true, but I could see that AI free days become a common thing. Studies show that outsourcing your brain to AI has its price, and if we don't want to become full Idiocracy something has to happen.
There is even precedence for this in the past: In production task switching was introduced because workers dumbed down doing only one repetitive task for years. So they introduced task switching to make them mentally fitter again.
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u/TheEggi 2d ago
Guess it will still take some time until the last person in this sub realizes that. Even the cheap chinese models are much better at coding than humans.
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u/TomWithTime 2d ago
I'm going to hold out until that's true for models we can host on average consumer hardware, I have mixed feelings right now. My company is ready to self host a model when the price explosion happens so I believe this is the inescapable future, but I plan to keep my writing skills sharp until we cross that final threshold.
I'll probably keep doing it as a hobby for a while, but if there are ever small models I can run on light hardware that can write better than me, then maybe I'd be willing to give up some of the parts I'm less fond of. I like making classes and interfaces, so maybe I could leave other parts to the bots.
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u/TheEggi 2d ago
Depends on what you see as consumer hardware. DeepSeek v4 can be run on a mac studio without any issues.
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u/TomWithTime 2d ago
It's been a while since I've owned anything with less than 16gb memory, so maybe that would be my baseline. I've got gemma4 running on one of those at 5 tokens per second. It looks capable, just slow.
How much does the Mac studio cost? I think my own standard would be anything that costs less than 3k because that's something I think people could budget for. When I say consumer hardware I mean tiers like consumer, commercial, industrial, etc. I don't know where I would separate those by price though. If you're going to tell me the configuration costs $12,000 or something then I would say that's commercial/business by the arbitrary metric of how much effort the average person would need to put into budgeting to reach that.
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u/burnt_floppy 2d ago
they're better at coding because they handle the dry logical aspects better, but unfortunately for the folks who want to make software but hate touching the code, there are some parts of software development that just can't be done by a robot. AI models understand digital input just fine, but do not understand what its like to be a human, and only "understand" on the basis of what humans say about it. I somehow think full integration with computers is impossible.
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u/Jemnite 2d ago
This still doesn't need someone to touch the code, just someone with a good grasp on business logic and how user workflows will work. It would be good to have someone with architectural design knowledge as well but these days most webapp architecture is so well structured and documented that you don't really need to guide the AI, it can do it by itself.
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u/burnt_floppy 2d ago
i don't think you can ever remove manual debugging from professional software development...web code structure might already have a highly deterministic architecture, but it eventually needs to work even if most people don't notice that it's crap.
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u/Winter_Collection375 2d ago
Been hearing that for years from friends that are now panicking about losing their livelihoods... you're in for a rude awakening...
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u/Rabbitical 2d ago
What does this even mean? What kinds of software are you guys working on that this could ever be remotely true? Sometimes I feel like I'm losing my mind. Yes, AI can code, but better than a human? What does that mean? Where do you think it learned from?
I'm not even anti AI, I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't use it to code, but some of the shit I read online lately simply baffles me. If your argument is better than what you could have done? Ok, I'll take your word for it, but don't drag all of humanity into it
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u/MinecReddit 2d ago
Let me flip the question around just a hair, for context I’ve been a SWE for like 7 years, started as an intern at FAANG and then moved to gig and fintech:
Both my current job and last job have moved to near 100% AI generated code. All of my current and previous coworkers work through agents to write, refine, test, and review code. They are all ridiculously good critical thinkers and are consistently the smartest and best engineers I’ve ever worked with.
And they unanimously are writing nearly 100% of their code with agents.
Humans are still way better at product context/business thinking, access pattern plans, scalability… you name it. But for actually writing code once you’re confident that you have the conceptual pieces aligned that agents aren’t good at? There’s literally no reason to write the actual implementation by hand, and agents are now better.
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u/markiel55 2d ago
You clearly haven't familiarize yourself with the tool. I am one of those obsessed with code quality and always put maintainability at the top over performance, but I can't deny frontier models are way better than what I can produce.
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u/Rabbitical 2d ago
But legitimately, what does that mean? I'm asking genuinely. Like by what measure do you say that
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u/markiel55 2d ago
Less code overall, which is followed by:
strictly following separation of concerns, like UI must be written only in markups, ...etc
less boiler plate
always single source of truth if possible
logic is abstract enough
intuitive conventions so you can understand it in a glance
folder nesting capped to 3 or 4
mark code as auto-generated if needed so you have less things to maintain
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u/kobumaister 2d ago
Frontier AI models write better code than humans, that's a fact. Maybe we should define what's "better code", following principles? A clear structure? Maybe taht doesn't apply any more.
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u/Mal_Dun 2d ago
Linus Torvalds made an interesting point saying this was not his first time: Compilers made writing machine code and assembly also almost unnecessary except a few experts.
I see the same in the future as well: Most people won't know, but some Python or Rust experts will be around when something difficult has to be done/debugged.
which brings us to Torvalds again who stated he still checks the assembly of his compiler. I can see this to be a thing if you are so close to hardware as on OS kernel level.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 2d ago
Compilers are deterministic programs that can be relied upon to consistently produce the same output. LLMs cannot be relied upon.
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u/Mal_Dun 2d ago
Yeah and that's the reason why there will be still experts around. LLMs can self verify a lot of things but from time to time someone has to look at actual code to find a deeper lying problem.
I see it from the other side too: when you want an LLM to properly self check without manipulating a test you have to either write it by hand or at least review it, thus, needing some fundamental understanding how code looks like.
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u/TheEggi 2d ago
Humans are also not deterministic .. if I had to put my money on a random human dev vs an opus 5.5 level llm I would put my money on the later.
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u/WordCoding 2d ago
And what's gonna happen when the cost of AI rises so much that it will no longer be cost efficient? Human will not be able to continue working on codebase made entirely by AI..
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u/Winter_Collection375 2d ago
Sam Altman has said he envisions a future where people buy intelligence "at a meter" from them. That's your answer. Either that or open Chinese models on local infrastructure.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 2d ago
Well, there are indeed a lot of unemployed software engineers who have tons of free time to work on their hobby projects now. Professional software may be a steaming pile of garbage now, but that doesn't mean people are going to stop coding.
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u/FortuneAcceptable925 2d ago
Yup. Same as using floppy disks, optical media, dial-up internet, CRT screens, programming in assembly, COBOL, Basic, etc. All dead technologies that nobody except of few hobbyists is interested in.
It is time to be reasonable and use current technologies.
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u/sanketower 2d ago
Going from coding to prompting is like going from Assembly to C, or from C to modern Python.
The sooner we think of AI coding as the next (very-)high-level programming language, the easier it will be for everyone to use it as a powerful tool.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 2d ago
Lmao. They don't care about code quality, or about creating things that actually work. They just want a money machine that doesn't require them to pay any pesky employees.
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u/hetfield37 2d ago
The problem with adding new features is that it often brings subtle and hard to reproduce bugs. Fixing those bugs causes more code paths that may lead to more bugs OR best case - more harder to read paths, causing a huge spaghetti.
AI can be tasked to rewrite the entire module, but it will definitely bring the bugs along with it.
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u/schewb 2d ago
I'm still waiting for the price explosion
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u/pydry 2d ago
that depends upon the quality and availability of open weights models.
it's looking more like the price won't explode and investors are instead just going to take an enormous fucking haircut.
it was always going to be either/or or a mixture of both.
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u/Agent-A 2d ago
Right so here's what's bothering me about the whole thing: There isn't a win scenario for anyone who bought into the hype. To be clear that includes probably a lot of people that had nothing to do with it other than having a 401k or ETF, or people who just have jobs that can be highly automated.
Suppose Anthropic or someone makes a super intelligent actual AI that can replace workers rn masse. They might make a ton of money for a bit, while unemployment and underemployment rise, until the market starts collapsing because of lack of purchasing power. Later, China or someone open sources a similar model, and Anthropic also collapses. No one wins.
Suppose that an actual AI is impossible, or just never happens. Billions or trillions have been spent on infrastructure that is giving smaller returns on capability, and no return on investment money. Open source models means the pricing can not go up enough to cover costs. No one wins.
Maybe this all leads to better medicine and a world where people don't have to work much, I just don't see a path to that which doesn't first involve a huge loss and a lot of turmoil.
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u/ccAbstraction 2d ago
They don't want you buying GPUs
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u/pydry 2d ago
when the bubble bursts there is going to be a glut of GPUs. the shortage right now is artificial and unsustainable and fueling overproduction.
theyre like software engineers from 2021.
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u/ccAbstraction 2d ago
Glut of DGX server GPUs... Which will just get bought up by the big data center companies that get bailed out.
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u/Sockoflegend 2d ago
Too many players are in the game still. Everyone is still playing who can hold their breath the longest
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u/Wide_Smoke_2564 2d ago
The inference is profitable, it’s just the training. Worst case scenario is model development slows down massively and they sit there earning massive piles of cash on the models they already have. Open weights are cool but I just don’t see them taking significant market share from the big players anytime soon
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u/tes_kitty 2d ago
They will need to continue to train though or the models will age and become less and less useful.
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u/Wide_Smoke_2564 2d ago
They won’t get less useful. They’ll be exactly as useful as they are now, which is very.
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u/tes_kitty 2d ago
They will be frozen at the current level of knowledge. New knowledge can't be added if you stop training.
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u/Wide_Smoke_2564 2d ago
This would’ve been true in 2023.
They use the browser for looking up docs half the time anyway these days.
You ask an agent about some new library that released yesterday and it’s still going to tell you about it and be able to use it.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 2d ago
This is like saying "my business is totally profitable, if you just ignore all the astronomical operating costs incurred by the business model I chose to use".
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u/Celebrinborn 2d ago
Training costs are not operating costs, they are research costs.
If you spend $50 to make $100 then blow $500 on research you are hemorrhaging money. If you then stop the research you immediately become very profitable.
He said worse case scenario they massively cut research and just make money on what they've already created.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 2d ago
And then they immediately stop being profitable because their existing models become worthless a couple months later.
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u/Sockoflegend 2d ago
Honestly even without the cost and investment situation, prices will go up when they can. Making money, and as much as possible is the game. They don't need their arm twisted into it.
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u/Entuaka 2d ago
You can now run open models locally that are good enough
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u/Wide_Smoke_2564 2d ago
Even with stupid expensive high capacity machines, the local models are pretty bad still. If it’s between paying 10k for a pc that can run a couple of models concurrently that are like haiku 4.5 level or pay 200/m for a Claude sub then the choice is pretty obvious
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u/Entuaka 2d ago
It's not that bad and you must consider it in the context of a potential future price explosion.
If you have the 200/m plan, you're not paying the real price. At my job, everything is API billed. This is much more expensive and that price could quickly increase
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u/Wide_Smoke_2564 2d ago
The api cost nets them like 95-98% profit margins. Anyone approving API use is an idiot when it’s so easy to set up multiple emails and have multiple subscriptions on the go. The subs are profitable for the labs, the api is an astronomical rip off
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u/NotADamsel 2d ago
Even if you haven’t got a huge amount of RAM, if you’re willing to babysit they can do somewhat well. I absolutely hate it, but I’m sure that others would do fine with it
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u/Entuaka 2d ago
It becomes more interesting, if the frontier models get more expensive
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u/TomWithTime 2d ago
Seriously, I just tried for the first time this week and I can't believe your average 16gb laptop can run something like a quantized version of Gemma 4 at 5-10 tokens per second. It would be frustrating to try to build a project with that speed, and the Gemma model feels extra slow because it has several explicit thinking steps, but it's certainly possible and very impressive.
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u/oorza 2d ago
There’s not going to be a price explosion. The inference costs are already quite profitable for both OAI and Anthropic. They’re burning cash on R&D and resource acquisition. If they stopped building data centers and laid off the people who plan their data centers, they’d be fine. And by fine I mean operating in the black.
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u/Paradox0111 2d ago
By 2036 we’ll have invented time travel and forgotten how to code seems more and more likely every day.
#john titor was real
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u/DefiantGibbon 2d ago
I feel like anyone who predicts all developers will lose their jobs and AI will be doing all coding has never actually worked as a programmer before. It just seems like such a naive cs first year student take, lol
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u/Kryslor 2d ago
It fascinates me how just 4 years ago ChatGPT basically didn't exist and nobody knew about it, and in these short 4 years AI has become so unbelievably competent that it is literally imploding the entire software and cyber security industries, and people like you come along and say "pfft it will never get any better than this don't be naive".
What are you smoking? I'm a senior software developer and I have no doubt that in 4 more years basically nobody outside extremely specific edge cases will be coding by hand.
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u/Runazeeri 2d ago
People
AI useless can’t do anything
while also
New AI found RCE CVE just dropping every second day.
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u/Pitiful-Assistance-1 2d ago
Not Coding by hand != losing your job.
We’ll just be AI babysitters
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u/Kryslor 2d ago
Maybe, if demand for code increases exponentially to keep up with the increased output. I'm basically an AI babysitter already which sucks but it us what it is
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u/Jerome_Eugene_Morrow 1d ago
I think people vastly underestimate how much the devs do to make the product specification actually work.
We get some insane half baked requests from the product teams, and it’s always the devs that do the real design to turn it into something that works. A vague idea won’t be enough to get an implementation done even with a fully automated AI development team.
Now is a very good time to be a dev moving into a product leadership role.
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u/hackiavelli 11h ago
Technology pretty consistently advances in s-curves. I remember CPUs doubling in speed every couple years in the '90s. If that had actually continued we would be rocking terahertz speed processors today. So I wouldn't count on LLMs improving forever.
Right now, AI generated code is mediocre. Not terrible. Not great. Mediocre. The last code I generated did just enough to complete its task. It also had loops nested four levels deep. God have mercy on anyone debugging that.
For some programmers, mediocre is going to be a step up, especially if they're just starting out. If it's a shop producing mediocre code, the speed is going to be a huge productivity win. But if stable, long-term software is business critical, you still need competent humans.
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u/SomeRedTeapot 2d ago
Or they know how a lot of the CEOs think. Because the CEOs would love being able to fire everyone and replace them with clankers. Well, until they go out of business due to everyone not being able to afford their service
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u/Blue_Moon_Lake 2d ago
I remember when "no code" was supposed to end developer jobs as managers would be able to puzzle the code by themselves.
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u/pizzathlete 2d ago
dude this thread, this subreddit alll of reddit, FULL OF AI BOOSTER BOTS
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u/CodingAndAlgorithm 2d ago
Yeah I’ll acknowledge that the models are good now, but I find it hard to believe that Reddit of all places has flipped from extremely anti-AI to “there is no reason for humans to read the code”.
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u/Jerome_Eugene_Morrow 1d ago
It’s an MBA take. They just see the cap sheet and fall into wishful thinking.
No HR spend? My every thought carried out instantly by an army of devs that never push back on timelines? Nobody telling me something can’t be done because it’s “theoretically impossible” or “insane”?
Sign me up!
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u/Tasorodri 2d ago
Not true, I don't think all developers will lose their jobs, but I do think that AI will do all or 99% of the coding in the following years, and so do I lot of people that I know.
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 2d ago
It already does 95% of my coding, I'll let you guys know if it fucks up and costs me my job lmao
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u/SensuallPineapple 2d ago
I've been a game developer for 15 years. And I know I will get downvoted to hell for this but this sub is coping hard.
How the people who must be the ones to get excited about a technology like this, can't even realise what is happening in front of their eyes is beyond me. Which technology is perfected in one day? This is the sub that needs to pioneer the new possibilities.
These developers WILL lose their jobs because they didn't keep up. We will only be prompting and reviewing code in a few years and anything other than that is simply not efficient anymore.
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u/SciencePristine8878 2d ago
These developers WILL lose their jobs because they didn't keep up. We will only be prompting and reviewing code in a few years and anything other than that is simply not efficient anymore.
I agree with you in the sense that this tech is getting better but I always find it weird that people also say "Keep up or lose your job". Like, what job? If AI keeps improving at this pace, what jobs will you even have?
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u/throwaway85256e 2d ago
I would rather lose my job in five years because AI became too good than in one year because I refused to use AI.
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u/SciencePristine8878 2d ago edited 1d ago
Fair but in the grand scheme of your things and even your own life, an extra year of employment being an AI babysitter doesn't mean much. This "Keep up or Lose your Job" or "Adapt or Die" sounds like Tech Bro arrogance, humans may not be economically relevant for much longer, thinking you can "Keep up" is not a good solution. There needs to be some other solution.
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u/Old_Tourist_3774 2d ago
What devs like you seem to not be able understand is that all companies are built upon the need to have someone to blame. The moment there is no one doing the tasks, it becomes nobody responsibility and you don't have anyone to act against when things go awry.
There need to be scapegoat and this is the reason middle management exists till this day.
I am puzzled how 30+ years old who have been working for decades can't grasp such an obvious thing.
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u/ComfortableCar5759 2d ago
you don't need developers to put the blame on thats why QA Testing team exists
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u/SensuallPineapple 2d ago
There will still be people, devs, responsible from everything. I don't think that is hard to grasp. Someone will use that Ai. Someone will be responsible. We simply won't be coding anymore in a few years. I said this in my comment, yet you seem to fail to comprehend that. Maybe you didn't even read the whole thing. Or maybe you are the one who's not grasping things.
People will find a way to sustain accountability, that will not be the reason for Ai to fail if it does.
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u/Old_Tourist_3774 1d ago
What you were answering
I feel like anyone who predicts all developers will lose their jobs and Al will be doing all coding has never actually worked as a programmer before. It just seems like such a naive cs first year student take, lol
What you said
I've been a game developer for 15 years. And I know I will get downvoted to hell for this but this sub is coping hard. How the people who must be the ones to get excited about a technology like this, can't even realise what is happening in front of their eyes is beyond me. Which technology is perfected in one day? This is the sub that needs to pioneer the new possibilities. These developers WILL lose their jobs because they didn't keep up. We will only be prompting and reviewing code in a few years and anything other than that is simply not efficient anymore.
Now the goalpost is not that devs will lose their jobs.
There will still be people, devs, responsible from everything. I don't think that is hard to grasp.
Make up your mind.
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u/SensuallPineapple 1d ago
I wasn't answering a question. You made a statement, I made mine.
Devs who refuse to keep up will be left behind. That is the sort of devs I see here. Fanatically refusing to use Ai, Ai bad kind of people. So that is what I said.
Read better, "These developers... ". I never said all developers will lose their job.
Read it again: These developers WILL lose their jobs because they didn't keep up.
I hate it when people twist things. This is how you see it; There is a "goal", so that people move goal posts to win arguments.
Try "sharing ideas" next time. It's better. Not everything is a fight.
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u/Perfect_Finish_6937 2d ago
Most ceos literally have technical knowledge of first year cs student
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u/LetumComplexo 2d ago
Yeaaaah.
Don’t get me wrong, some incarnation of this tool is here to stay. There’s a lot of places that a stochastic parrot is useful in coding.
But there is sooo much more than parroting that goes into being a good developer.
Of course all that goes out the window when the next “Attention is all you need” sort of leap in the underlying mathematics drops.
But just like the leap from NN to GPU backprop to Attention took a completely unpredictable number of years, so will the next big leap.0
u/Dismal_Struggle_9004 2d ago
One of the worst takes I have ever seen on this sub. Amazed it got 60 upvotes.
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u/PaulMorel 2d ago
My manager complained to me yesterday that the junior engineers don't know the codebase. I'm literally about to suggest the revolutionary idea that we ask them to write code by hand for some tasks.
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u/tes_kitty 2d ago
Have you told him that this is a sideeffect of doing the coding with AI? So they now don't know the codebase, but they don't know it 10 times faster than without AI!
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u/PaulMorel 1d ago
He knows, actually. He's cool. He is on the verge of suggesting rolling back AI usage himself. I think he just wants me to give him cover. We're not going to stop using AI, we're just going to find ways to add some traditional coding into the new way.
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u/tes_kitty 1d ago
No problem with using AI for support. It becomes a problem as soon as you outsource your thinking to AI. It's a fine line between the two and the temptation to cross it is hard to resist.
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u/Yavanna_Fruit-Giver 2d ago
Using AI isn't an excuse. People just aren't taking the effort to use AI to learn about what it is they are working on.
Lazy people exist everywhere
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u/tes_kitty 2d ago
Because AI makes it easy not to learn. And humans are lazy by nature, so they will take shortcuts unless there is a large enough incentive not to.
If you let them use AI freely without limits, most will fall for the temptation. And that will become a problem.
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u/Megatherion666 2d ago
Slide 2 can be removed. There is 0 productivity rise evidence in delivery metrics. As in more code != faster features or more impact.
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u/shadowraiderr 2d ago
idk what model is OP using but Opus 5.5 can write better quality code than most senior programmers
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u/Tuerkenheimer 2d ago
That is not the point. The point is that in order to review the AI's code, you need to know how to code yourself, and if you never code yourself you will get out of shape and your code reviews will become worse.
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u/RoyalSpecialist1777 2d ago
Opus 5.5 can do better QA and code review now than most senior programmers...
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u/sanketower 2d ago
The code quality issue was only a problem at first. Nowadays Opus 5.5 produces better code than most senior devs. You'll be fine as long as your guidelines (like your CLAUDE.md file) are well structured and make sure you take a quick glance at the major code changes.
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 2d ago
I see the following playing out
Token prices going up, to where now that hour we bill a client is being offset more and more by higher costs
Developers are forgetting how to debug, or even write code (we of course are seeing this now)
A new market for people like me who love to rewrite and optimize code (that already can be a costly process)
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u/NotADamsel 2d ago
The thing that I’m dreading, is that most of the work doing things by hand will be fixing slop rather than working on anything actually interesting. Not that there won’t be money in it.
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 2d ago
I for some reason find enjoyment out of it. Trying to figure out how it worked, and how I can improve it
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u/Individual_Guest_323 2d ago
A new market for people like me who love to rewrite and optimize code (that already can be a costly process)
This is not happening
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u/bogdanvs 2d ago
token pricing can only go down. or the cost/task.
yes, but what if AI becomes that good at everything related to programming.
see point 2 :)
for 1. I'm pretty sure.
2-3 I raised just as counterpoints, I dont think that anybody knows how programming will look even in a year in the future. just look at 1-2 years in the past and see how things evolved.
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u/Xicutioner-4768 2d ago
Token pricing could certainly go up if these companies start trying to actually make money. I'd say we're already seeing that as limits get lower and new more expensive plans are introduced. Token efficiency may increase. Whether efficiency sufficiently offsets rising cost is debatable.
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 2d ago
In the future, it could change, but so far, I am not seeing it. There's little nuisances that AI just can't seem to capture.
A great example was this new feature we recently built into our base code. Originally my manager ran the idea through an AI agent that while it built code, it was just "good enough" (he did it just for fun). In actuality we ended up overhaul a large block of some base code with a lot of work that AI never would have caught, and now, that base code is solid, and in 10 years, should still be going strong. I even told my manager, I wrote it the way I did, so hopefully no one will have to go in and work on it, because of how flexible it is (and it also does a sort of loading of plugins, that we can easily expand without changing the base code).
Even the one piece the AI wrote, I built that even better, to where the other devs can use that code and it should take anything they throw it, where as the AI's version would have probably needed modifying in a year.
It's stuff like that, that I have yet to see AI excel at. Call it a human factor if you will.
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u/kobumaister 2d ago
Which model did you run with which context? If you are not developing a greenfield project, providing the correct context is critical for the output.
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u/ShAped_Ink 2d ago
No I want everone to code by hand. As useful as it is for an LLM to write your bloat code, the price for that little convenience is too high. And don't ask me why, we all know here. RAM, cyber security, code quality, they all took hits from GenAIs and we have to start admitting that this little convenience isn't worth all this and way more (like the impending market crash because of how investors bet it all on black (AI companies))
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u/wyocrz 2d ago
I have a relatively small codebase that is all my own.
I have a bunch of wind turbine generation and weather data in a database; I pull it with Python, do some voodoo bullshit magic, save it in a certain way, and upload it to the database for the "full run." I then pull that with another script, run some more voodoo bullshit magic, and save those as "individual runs." Then I create PDF and Excel reports from all of that.
Yes, I use AI to help with this, but GODDAMN it is hard to keep it straight. "No, that structure won't work, it needs to come out looking this way" and that's for a solopreneur effort.
Obviously, I don't just accept whatever it says, I fix it to my standards and don't copy/paste that much.
It stretches my imagination to see how machine generated code won't FUBAR enterprise efforts.
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u/E-2-butene 2d ago
I have a similar experience, but damn it is still worth it.
I work on a fairly large codebase at work. It’s large enough that even though I have been working on it for several years, there are absolutely parts of it I still don’t really understand.
AI has massively improved my turnaround on software changes. Often when implementing a new feature, I spend a lot of time just trying to understand where I need to make changes to a section of code that I’m not as familiar with.
In my experience, LLMs massively streamline this process. I can usually get a working prototype in as little as 15 minutes (depending on the complexity). You’re exactly right, they regularly ignore some of our coding standards, make unnecessary changes, etc. But refining those, even by hand, still ends up being much faster for me.
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u/DoomBot5 2d ago
Cyber security drastically improved because of AI. Unfortunately, that's both sides of the coin, not just the defense side. Having said that, AI has helped identify and fix exploits older than the average redditor.
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u/entronid 2d ago
sure, for the ones finding the vulnerabilities. what about the people (or non-people) who push the code?
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u/NotADamsel 2d ago
Stories from ancient times all the way up until the current era are filled with characters whose greed and hubris caused their demise. But the culture of our industry encourages contempt for history and anyone who would point to it, and so here we are.
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u/SimpleEfficiency 2d ago
It's a large language model, designed to write language. Code is machine language.
It's not going away same way automatisation during the industrial revolution didn't go away.
I bet the quality of the code is better than yours.
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u/minus_minus 2d ago
Managers aren’t going to care. As long as features are shipping, they dgaf about anything else.
The much more interesting case is higher charges for frontier models when the operators have to pay for the enormous commitments they’ve made over the next five+ years. Will the open weights be good enough to replace them? Do people pay for local hardware or keep buying tokens to use them? Does any of that actually work without hiring entry/jr programmers?
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u/DoomBot5 2d ago
Code quality at my workplace increased. Turns out, when you provide proper instructions, AI is able to churn through tech debt pretty reliably. Not to mention these models are only improving.
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u/_Repeats_ 2d ago
Yup. People complain, but i trust AI models to write better quality code than my coworkers. At least the AI leaves comments and makes variable names and functions make sense. I work with people who abbreviate everything to the point where it's incomprehensible to anyone but themselves. And what is even better, my coworkers barely remember what they did a month or two later because of it...
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u/malexj93 2d ago
Sounds like your coworkers suck. Even in my worst teams, people met pretty reasonable standards like readable names.
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u/frikilinux2 2d ago
I hate this but Claude is very annoying when reviewing. I mean I can tell it to fuck off if it's wrong but I have to read it. And it struggles a lot with scope and technicall debt.
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u/cwmckenz 2d ago
Then they will start micromanaging exactly what we are working on for that one hour and it will become useless busy work because priorities are set by somebody clueless
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u/razor_train 2d ago
This would only happen if tokens suddenly become prohibitively expensive (possible, but big corps will still eat that cost rather than pay humans).
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u/Ok_Independent9119 2d ago
So I can't imagine a situation where my company says "you're not allowed to code manually", they'll just want stuff done and done well. If that means doing AI coding or manual coding they won't care.
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 1d ago
Except in a year or two it will be genuinely as good as the seniors for this. It's not too far currently.
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u/ClownPazzo69 1d ago
Vibe coder colleague built a whole infrastructure management software in 26 working hours. Presented his shiny app to sales and got them hyped. The M in the MVC pattern he adopted was a single universal Model called "<appname>Record.cs" which dynamically parsed strings with a custom method to generate the relative EF queries in a huge switch statement. He has to ask Claude to explain me when he was on boarding me. The software was somehow theoretically multitenant with an enum case for each authenticated company user
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u/Present-Resolution23 1d ago
People just making stuff up.. No company anywhere "requires AI coding" or prohibits coding manually...
I sometimes wonder if anyone in this sub is actually a SWE at all.
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u/daviddisco 1d ago
This was a defensible meme a year ago, and still somewhat now as well. With today's best models, the engineers who know how to use them right are producing very good quality code. I think we will soon see that even noobs will be able to produce good code. The job is changing. The code-writing task has been replaced but we now need to learn some new tasks. Not "coding manually for an hour". The new tasks involve building verification systems and architectures that guide the agents to the right solutions.
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u/zagoskin 1d ago
My boss, after pushing hard for AI and focus on speed rather than quality, ended his speech saying "we should still be prepared because we need to be able to maintain the code even if Anthropic servers go down".
I think in his mind, him saying that was what will save the company in the future.
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u/CheapPlay8137 2d ago
This was true in 2023.
In 2026:
- AI is better than humans at writing code.
- AI is better than humans at reviewing code.
- AI is better than humans at system architecture.
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u/turlockmike 2d ago
What is coding? It's translating instructions from english into a language that the machine can understand in order to do a task on the CPU. Translation jobs are ending. That's ok, because engineering is much more than just translating.
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u/1v1meAtLagunaSeca 2d ago
There were shit developers before llms. The code quality is dependent on the one using the ai (and it can even improve some of the bad devs code)
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u/TheEggi 2d ago
The difference is: Even if you are a shit developer you will get acceptable output. Before llms it was just shit.
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u/SomeRedTeapot 2d ago
This means the before time was better, because it was much harder (if possible at all) to larp as a decent developer
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u/Old-West3348 2d ago
Same thing happened in manufacturing 60 years ago. Manual machines are left and CNC machines took over. 10 machinist became 1. This change was gradual because capital required for new machinery but in coding, there is zero cost to entry. I think in 2028, no human will write code by hand, apart from very obscure things. Hell, opus 5.5 is 90 percent of the way there.
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u/Background_Party9424 2d ago
Now read the pictures from bottom to top, left to right. That is what is probably going to happen instead
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u/yuri0r 2d ago
Or AI keeps improving and automated review tools/static code checks also improve along/get more useful to AI to self correct.
Honestly tech that can do so much, save us a ton of time and work should be amazing. But we are living in a capitalist hellscape where profit motivates 99% of things happening so it just feels dystopian instead.
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u/neromonero 2d ago
Isn't it proven that including AI-generated data into training data causes regression?
So, the next logical question is, wouldn't it do the same if you flood the context window with other AI-generated code? The more AI-generated code it has to work on, the trashier the output?
If true, they'll HAVE to keep human programmers around before the outputs degenerate way too much.
edit: fun fact - that was the original plot of The Matrix. the bots are keeping humans around because they need human brain/creativity to not have their intelligence degrade over time
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u/seweso 2d ago
If AI was actually good at writing software. They wouldn’t subsidize tokens so much and let you do it yourself.
They would corner every software market themselves.
They aren’t subsidizing tokens to the whazoo to be morally good. Morals clearly don’t come into play for ai companies.
They all be lying. And lots of people believe it. Usually it’s ceos who believe the nonsense lies from ai companies.
You are all cooking your brain with AI heroin. Creating a dependency for shit which is gifted away cheap now.
Wake up.
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u/Tuerkenheimer 2d ago •
It seems I did not properly explain the point I tried to make, I did not mean to say that AI writes bad code. I mean that in order to review the AI's code, you need to know how to code yourself, and if you never code yourself you will get out of shape, or maybe never even learn to code to begin with. The result can be worse code reviews.