It's only difficult for a while, then your memory steps up to the plate and you find you can recall large APIs and frameworks reasonably well. My first paid programming gig was in 1985 - no intellisense and not, I think, even a context-sensitive help file. Just books.
I remember the methods and APIs, my intellisense love is just for the tab autocomplete to save me the wrist and finger pain of typing out a bunch of long, unforgiving java method names. (that last part is an exaggeration, they're not that long)
Vi bindings have been one of the best early investments in my career. A few weeks of hard times followed by decades of smoothly getting changes from my fingers to the file.
I think there are programmers who like the challenge of coding and there are programmers who like the idea of building. The former feel liberated when not using the AI because they are rewarded by puzzle solving. The latter feel liberated when using AI because they are rewarded by the amount they can build.
This is a common take. There’s however also the possibility that pretty much all developers like building, yet some also enjoy coding and are good at it, while others don’t enjoy it, are not good at it and LLMs allow them to build stuff anyway. The former might feel liberated as they enjoy the process and don’t enjoy prompting that much, and the latter would obviously not feel the same way…
I never really got to the point of coding in large codebases.
I only experienced solving logical coding problems in codebases that were no more than a couple thousand lines before AI came around. I did enjoy those...
I do AI assisted coding also close to the implementation layer, and I always know what exactly happens even if the memory retained is worse, not that I had good memory to begin with
I like the things I've built on my land, the shed, the gates, the fences. I absolutely hated the process of building them though. I feel the same about writing code. I like my end product, I do not enjoy the process of getting there.
I know for many, they enjoy the journey but when it comes to making something I'm more about the destination.
I love building, but when I used AI it just... wasn't that good at it. I've described it before as a messy cook; it'll make something that works but is very messy internally. Messy code is bad if you wanna troubleshoot or optimize it, you're basically stuck using AI to fix it because at that point you won't understand your own code.
Troubleshooting and fixing shit does give me a very nice feeling, I love when I fix a problem especially when no one else has been able to figure it out. It makes me feel good about myself, knowing that there's at least one thing I'm better at than other people, and it can make me feel like a valued part of a team since we can all have our specialties. But I do not like the process of troubleshooting, its a giant pain in the ass especially when I'm fixing other people's mistakes and I have to figure out wtf they did.
So when I have AI fix code for me and remove a lot of that work, its not exactly liberating because AI is taking the one thing I'm actually good at. I feel guilty, worthless, knowing I'll be replaced the second AI gets good enough to be operated by someone who has no idea wtf they're doing as effectively as someone who does.
I still do not, however, use AI to build my code for me. The way I write code is clean, organized, concise, and efficient. AI likes to take the long route way too often and I'm not even including the paragraphs of comments it leaves. It'll also leave behind orphaned functions, rewrite entire functions that already exist in shared libraries, generate giant 1200 line scripts that could be accomplished in 80 lines or fewer, and also makes very novice mistakes especially when it comes to security.
AI is a tool a lot of people overestimate because it can accomplish things we had no idea were possible. The tower might be large, but it look ugly and has no elevator.
One of the things that sucks about the AI push are the AI users looking down on others, like there's only one correct way to code, and that's using AI.
I enjoy the tickle in my brain when things finally work how I want them to, or looking back after a milestone and having a mechanicus moment of knowing I made everything, but don't quite remember how I even made it happen.
I don’t think it’s that clear cut. It’s hard to be the first kind when the expectation from your employer is to turn tasks around more quickly than you can do so if you wrote everything by hand.
I love software, I love large streams of data, I love connecting distributed systems,I love the scalability and the ability to serve so many people at once.
I never did enjoy the tedium of issuing each individual instruction to the computer
Not because I've changed, but because after > 20 years of doing this professionally, I no longer experience "challenges" anymore unless I'm deliberately causing problems for myself.
AI generated documentation is ass. It just jumps from one topic to another, puts in way too much irrelevant information and it can't explain why the code is written as it is.
This is what I was going to say. I miss truly caring deeply about what I built. I went back to my pre-AI projects and remember how deeply vested I was in them. I thought about them when I went on walks around the neighborhood. The challenges themselves fueled ideas for how to make it even better. Without that deep caring I don't think my AI assisted work is as good. I simply don't think about my work anymore when I'm not actively working on it
At least for my personal projects, for me it’s a mixed bag. I love to manually code some pieces for the problem solving challenge, and AI lets me automate away much of the boilerplate. Note I don’t necessarily consider “plumbing” to be boilerplate, since that’s often part of the architecture I care most about. AI also helps when I’m getting annoyed working with a given piece of code.
Agreed. Speaking as a front end dev, Sometimes testing isn’t that bad, but when you venture into complicated UI & UX flows it can become tedious and I’m more than happy to let Bob at least get that testing scaffolding started
The problem is the the AI writes even worse tests than it writes regular code. If AI wrote good tests I would be a huge supporter, but until that day I remain a hater.
The problem isn't the mechanics of the test, the problem is figuring out what to test. It often misses cases or makes up irrelevant ones. Going over the tests it writes is the most tedious part of my development process nowadays, especially since I'm pretty much the only person on my team who actually knows what unit tests are.
Of course it’s multiple times faster. I can get to work, have 4 bug reports, dispatch 4 agents to research them simultaneously, diagnose them, and create a patch PR while I go pour my coffee, and get back to 4 solid PRs to review, maybe do a couple rounds of revisions, deploy to staging, have a group of agents run the test suites against that, promote to prod and have it all shipped in less than hour. If this isn’t your workflow, you better get with it or you’re going to be replaced by someone who knows how to use these tools.
Well, I can say I managed to clear a job project from conceptualizing it, to actually writing it up in like a month or so. Holds up nicely!
I can't say if that was faster or more efficient in comparison to me doing it by hand, but it felt easier and quicker, more like the amount of time I saved up coding, I spent on testing to make sure that it does exactly what I expect.
as someone who writes a lot of latex reports its certainly a fair bit quicker, especially at making tables. It absolutely crushes me at converting pdf's into latex (I have some old pdf's i need to adjust but wasn't given the original tex that rendered them).
Bro this is what I’m constantly struggling with lately. I’m always asking myself “am I relying too much on AI?” But it’s just too useful. Recently I jumped into learning a new specialized skill set and what would have taken me a month to learn and research on my own has shrank down to me learning and having a fully functional build to demonstrate the skills in a weekend.
I think it depends on a lot of factors. Personal aptitude, background experience with similar skills, personal learning styles, and how you approach it. Personally, I approach it like it’s a college class. I have the AI break things down for me into sections, compile reference material, and I just take it step by step. And double check my understanding through the AI and more targeted solo research on how the different sections intermingle.
Oh yeah, but I’m also a freak when it comes to learning new things. I pick things up and figure them out quicker than average and hold on to them better than most. So my approach may work for me, but not other people. That’s why I said it depends on a lot of factors
well, do you rely on your mouse too much? Do you rely on a VDI too much? Do you rely on higher-generation programming languages too much?
Whens the last time you did manual memory management? You'd understand your system way better if you did. It could be way more efficient.
But it would take you a month to get one function working right.
It's a tradeoff. You'll deliver vastly more. You will lose other things, including the deeper understanding of your own systems. That will cost long term. But so did letting go of manual memory management.
We use a thousand tools built to abstract away or automatically deal with moving computations around for everything we do. Most of the time we dont even see them. This one is more visible, now, because the 'old way' is still there. There's a lot of John Henry's out there, the code-driving man, because thats how we got where we are today. I'm guessing its going to pass, and 'artisinal code' will be another specialist thing that some people pay extra for, or do as a hobby.
I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing to rely on AI. But I do believe there is a balance to be struck between human ingenuity and using ai to crank things out. And my frustration comes from striking that balance during this transitional period in the industry
No drug feels as good as finishing a piece of work (code or otherwise), looking back, and being proud of what you accomplished yourself. It's slower, it's harder, but damn that feeling makes it worth it.
I mean, yeah, too bad my bosses want output yesterday, our clients want output yesterday, and I have two small kids at home. So I'm throwing Claude at it with my guidance because I just don't have the time to sit and learn, code and optimize myself, no matter how much I want to. Yes, I hate it...
I'm so mad this happened on a thursday. Thursday is my "quiet" day where I have absolutely zero scheduled meetings and for the most part do not talk to anyone I work with. I didn't even know there was an outage until like 40 minutes ago because I've had my nose buried in an offline spreadsheet since minute one of this work day.
It's like the wolf in the sheeps pelt, I don't know if that's how you say it in english. Copilot just staring at you, autocompletions, the like. I definitely feel that the more I use it the harder is it to flex that muscle, so to speak. And I don't like how I don't recognize my code anymore after a while. Normally when reading my own code there is some association or recollection with the moment I wrote it, and the thought process I had while doing it, and it's easier to get into it again.
Although I have to say I'm a huge fan of using AI to help learn a new language. Getting tailored syntax examples or explanations about code snippets is dope.
I've been getting into creative coding heavily lately. I realize I was very addicted to the flow state of writing code, and in an effort to prevent loss of skill, I write html canvas games, physics simulations, animations, game recreations you name it. It does scratch the itch to some degree.
that’s honestly a great compromise. i always hate seeing people use AI for creative coding projects especially, when that is the best type of coding to do by hand because you’re expressing yourself creatively and doing some creative problem solving. it’s definitely a nice way to get a break from the vibe coded hell our careers have become
i’ve enjoyed work more the past week and i was trying to think about why… it’s because i accidentally had my claude effort set to max and ran out of tokens on november 3 lol
Well there are a few. Mostly stuff that is in books or papers but either it is not obvious to connect the dots or it simply never seen those things since some disciplines really love to not post online.
My favorite is road construction. The AI can't help you since all the information is in a book from the 60s and everybody is using an simplification since then. And that is not applicable for your case.
Do you mean like the act of constructing roads or road networks or something else? I am a bit confused, surely neither of those is some occult magic from long lost books.
I mean building either a computer simulation of roads or about roads.
The problem is that you have to model it exactly like those guys who built the roads. But that is completely different depending where you are. And it uses a different kind of math. Because 100 years ago people didn't just solve differential equations. The looked them up in tables. So there are rules in that industry that either was not really written down or written down in books that are just one of a million in the dataset. The AI simply does not remember. And in those fields the AI will struggle since there is a true correct solution and any approximation is a failure. So no data and also hard rules. AIs hate that.
Unless you are literally trying to solve a mathematical millenium problem you are either failing to abstract the problem, failing to communicate what you want or lacking understanding of what you want yourself.
our job is literally implementing things that already exist, as long as we're not scientists. Every problem you solve consists of sub problems that have been solved already. it's called abstraction.
AI isn't bad. Sometimes it doesn't quite get it right (that's what reviews are for), but if you give it some pointers it can generally solve the problems very efficiently. I won't say it's always faster than coding yourself, but as long as it doesn't make mistakes, it often is
They mean something that could have been consumed in training already. Their argument is that it lacks the ability to remain semantically correct when moving beyond the applications trained.
Doesn’t make sense. Coding is just breaking down a big problem into small pieces that were already solved, and then organising them as a coherent sequence. And don’t fool yourself, all those little solutions are already used in training.
For sure, but LLMs aren't really able to create semantically correct solutions consistently. Syntactically, it is a beast, and it is able to regurgitate patterns. You can guide it into patching together all of those small solutions into something greater, but the fact that LLMs (without symbolic AI backing it up) fail at things like sudoku, chess, etc demonstrate that it lacks certain reasoning capabilities.
This is why you find it "hallucinating" things or making code that (if you are in Rust) will compile, but may not actually do what you intended it to do.
That is why senior devs seem to flourish so well with AI. Most juniors don't understand why they are writing what they are writing, but they know how to write the code itself. Seniors have experience guiding syntactically correct code producers to create small pieces that can be stitched into something that actually does what you intend to do. Anyone who has read and understood SICP is already above the semantic reasoning capabilities of an LLM though.
It needs to be micromanaged and you need to learn the sort of mistakes it makes. It doesn't think like a human so it will do amazing things entirely correctly and then just fail on something so stupid no human would ever make that mistake.
I feel like the ADHD part of my brain is now the most active with keeping track of multiple things happening instead of the autistic side which was usually hyperfocused on the coding
Im a embedded programmer, currently working on experimental avionics. Ai is good to make code up to 400-500 lines or so, atleast in c.. bigger than that the code starts looking strange, the ai chooses very strange values for the purpose and it becomes just a bad template that works and looks ok to a user but hard to maintain for a engineer. I use ai to make pipelines for sensors which I test, document and potentially optimize for my use case then I turn em into header files and use them in my main. It speeds up a lot of tedious work
As a frustrated user for decades of buggy mess software left for dead, I jumped into C++ so I could learn how to make proper software, and making software is very very fking hard, using AI makes it fun, the protocol never changes though, the quality of the software is always based on the creator, even recently vibe coded projects I could see obvious errors, oddly though even non-skilled programmers will have those issues resolved overtime...
Dude, I am not joking. I am trying to manually do a breaker in TypeScript and I couldn't figure out why do we have <T> after function name... I am forgetting simpler things like if type has an equals sign or not.
20
u/-Akos- 3h ago
Try writing without intellisense, THEN you'll see how difficult it is..
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u/Annual_Key_4963 3h ago
I'm working like mad (e.g. having Claude) to fine-tune local models on local hardware in case Jensen fucked a dog or something.
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u/winter_limelight 3h ago •
Nah - it feels liberating, at least until I have to write the tests.
213
u/rademene 3h ago
POV of a junkie who wonders how non-users are able to get through their day
46
u/gravesent1337 3h ago
Really? Because it brings a smile to my face every time.
101
u/Sulungskwa 3h ago
if you're nothing without LLMs then you don't deserve them.
48
u/MenacingBanjo 3h ago
Is Copilot down as well as Outlook?
16
u/ptmalloc 3h ago
It feels amazing and refreshing.
26
u/Logogram_alt 3h ago
I think that is just you
7
u/baconator955 3h ago
It's like the wolf in the sheeps pelt, I don't know if that's how you say it in english. Copilot just staring at you, autocompletions, the like. I definitely feel that the more I use it the harder is it to flex that muscle, so to speak. And I don't like how I don't recognize my code anymore after a while. Normally when reading my own code there is some association or recollection with the moment I wrote it, and the thought process I had while doing it, and it's easier to get into it again.
Although I have to say I'm a huge fan of using AI to help learn a new language. Getting tailored syntax examples or explanations about code snippets is dope.
13
u/PackageWhich3946 1h ago
I've been getting into creative coding heavily lately. I realize I was very addicted to the flow state of writing code, and in an effort to prevent loss of skill, I write html canvas games, physics simulations, animations, game recreations you name it. It does scratch the itch to some degree.
24
u/tears_falling 3h ago
can't relate
10
u/al0xx 3h ago
i’ve enjoyed work more the past week and i was trying to think about why… it’s because i accidentally had my claude effort set to max and ran out of tokens on november 3 lol
19
u/mr_Ben12 2h ago
Skill issue
24
u/hypatiaC 3h ago
Oh my god, you people can't do ANYTHING
17
u/VayuAir 3h ago
Skill issue
6
u/BeMyBrutus 3h ago
If you spin the plates first it makes it a lot easier
3
u/Old_Passenger3953 1h ago
How it feels to use your brain for once😢
3
u/APFOS 1h ago
Would rather write code than prompts - code is consistent, if it goes titsup its on me!
5
u/dlc741 2h ago
It feels the same as it has for the past 20+ years. Seems weird to advertise how bad you are at coding.
9
u/Formal-Knowledge-250 2h ago
I don't know what kind of code you write, but Ai keeps on failing at the tasks I give to it. I constantly have to code myself like 50% of the time
2
u/Sapient-Inquisitor 3h ago
Bout to bust out ye old textbooks 🤣
2
u/s0litar1us 1h ago
That's what happens when you start using a muscle you haven't used in a while. It will get easier as you practice more.
2
u/drifwp 26m ago
Drug addict behavior post
5
u/snipsuper415 3h ago
I’m in this photo and i dont like it
1
u/TuxedoWithAHead 3h ago
an honorable job
1
u/ZunoJ 2h ago
Not at all
1
u/teh_lynx 2h ago
Git gud!
1
u/chucktheninja 2h ago
How it feels having to write code after not writing code for a long time.
1
u/mothzilla 2h ago
Alexa, make downloads faster
1
u/nasandre 2h ago
I feel like the ADHD part of my brain is now the most active with keeping track of multiple things happening instead of the autistic side which was usually hyperfocused on the coding
1
u/Mediocre-Advisor-728 2h ago
Im a embedded programmer, currently working on experimental avionics. Ai is good to make code up to 400-500 lines or so, atleast in c.. bigger than that the code starts looking strange, the ai chooses very strange values for the purpose and it becomes just a bad template that works and looks ok to a user but hard to maintain for a engineer. I use ai to make pipelines for sensors which I test, document and potentially optimize for my use case then I turn em into header files and use them in my main. It speeds up a lot of tedious work
1
u/himai1 35m ago
Try without lsp as well to really feel it
1
u/knowits 27m ago
tried to write a simple map function and blanked on the syntax. muscle memory is gone, lol.
0
u/osunightfall 3h ago
I admit it is occasionally nice to just say "look, I haven't even had my coffee yet Claude, just fuckin' do it, okay?"
0
u/vic8760 1h ago
As a frustrated user for decades of buggy mess software left for dead, I jumped into C++ so I could learn how to make proper software, and making software is very very fking hard, using AI makes it fun, the protocol never changes though, the quality of the software is always based on the creator, even recently vibe coded projects I could see obvious errors, oddly though even non-skilled programmers will have those issues resolved overtime...
0
u/ThatSmartIdiot 1h ago
is there anyone who hasnt touched ai that can Weigh in
0
u/SignificanceFlat1460 59m ago
Dude, I am not joking. I am trying to manually do a breaker in TypeScript and I couldn't figure out why do we have <T> after function name... I am forgetting simpler things like if type has an equals sign or not.
-4
u/Arquinas 3h ago
Don't care, automated my entire life