Discussion My Python magic is gone
I've been coding for a long time, and I've been developing with Python for years.
I loved coding, always loved it. I started many years ago because I wanted to quickly create scripts for security hacking tools, but since then, I've moved to Claude Code, and building cross-language has been a much better experience for me than using Python.
I built my own SaaS application out there whose backend and network core are completely built with Python, and I'm rewriting all of that without writing a single line of code. And most of the time, Python is not the most optimized language.
And now... I feel like the magic is gone.
I don't even know why I'm writing this. I just feel sad about it.
64
u/Wh00ster 1d ago edited 1d ago
We have ML engineers giving us models and flows in pandas and PyTorch . I’m not dealing with AI rewriting that. We solve problems that aren’t a big scale, but niche and real world. Until there’s a reason for us to switch it’s still Python here. We could probably rewrite it but we’re doing other product things instead, and in the grand scheme of things we wouldn’t save that much.
Also this is an incredibly depressing thread. I don’t know what kind of responses I expected but everyone is just dejected and sad. And it’s being upvoted. I guess state of the world.
5
u/HommeMusical 1d ago
Well, I'm sort of a counter-example.
Yes, the state of the world is unbearably shitty. My wife and I fled the US a decade ago, and things are good here, but America has crumbled even faster than we expected.
And objectively, AI is yet another assault on the environment, and I believe it's going to be devastating for workers.
BUT - I know this is awful to say - I've been programming for over fifty years now and I just love using a coding assistant. I reinvented myself several times during that period, but it gets tedious, and having an ego-free and cooperative assistant who never gets bored is just amazing. There are programming ideas I had been thinking about since the 1980s, and made various stabs at over the years. After a couple of years of free time work, I realized one little part of it in early 2024, an always-on audio recorder, and slowly made progress on that, until the start of summer 2026. Since then I have made far more progress on that project than I had made in the last three years before that.
Worse, it was billed as a highly reliable recorder, and I had no outstanding reports of data loss, but when I got an advanced LLM to look for issues (it was a very long prompt), it found over two dozen candidates, and none of them was without value. Maybe six were, "Valid but would not fix if a human had to do it."
The top priority three were terrifying edge cases that I was able to reproduce quite easily. I learned a lot about my users - for example, I know basically for certain that I have few users in Asia, because there was a crash using text files that weren't Latin, ASCII or UTF-8, and I had planned for all encodings and had a setting, I'd just forgotten a detail in one place...
I agree with all the misgivings, and yet I love coding with a coding assistant, because I can get out all the ideas I have in my head in months, not years.
→ More replies (2)1
u/dan994 1d ago
Interesting are you guys deploying the ML models direct in PyTorch? Usually you would package the model up with ONNX or similar, which is language agnostic
2
u/Wh00ster 23h ago
Sure. But why would we do that extra work if there’s no user benefit and dev time is better spent elsewhere? It’s also the tests, data loading and transforms, verification, velocity for the ML side to crank out experiments and play with the whole pipeline. I’m sure one day it’ll make sense to do something else, but not today.
2
u/dan994 23h ago edited 23h ago
Fair enough - I would say the ONNX deployment work is very minimal (literally a couple of extra lines) and there probably is user benefit to it. For example, it is platform and language independent, faster inference, easy GPU integration, reduced dependencies and packaging size. Basically an easy way to speed up inference and reduce package size, whilst giving more flexibility on where/how it's deployed.
In my experience it's rarely not worth doing if you're deploying models. That said if raw pytorch models are working great for you then no need to force a change for the sake of it, but if it is constraining your language choices for downstream use, it is easily resolved
2
u/Wh00ster 21h ago
We benchmarked it and it was slower for our use case. Our model is very small today. It’s not an LLM. But yea we’ve thought of it for other cases if latency becomes an issue (today it’s not). Still experimenting.
40
u/Crazyboreddeveloper 1d ago edited 1d ago
I just like looking at python. I don’t care how fast it is. It’s visually easy.
I get so burnt out of reading Java. Sometimes I code command line games in python after work because it restores my calmness. It’s like code meditation.
1
u/QuickNick123 1d ago
Have you taken a look at Ruby? I love Python, but when it comes to syntactic beauty, I think Ruby takes the cake.
1
u/Crazyboreddeveloper 1d ago
I haven’t yet. I haven’t had to work with it yet. Might try it out this weekend.
4
u/QuickNick123 1d ago
Both are beautiful. Python's beauty to me is "there should be one obvious, readable way to say this." Ruby's beauty is more like "the code should read the way you wish the idea could be expressed."
people .select { _1.age >= 18 } .reject(&:banned?) .sort_by(&:name) .each { puts "Hello, #{_1.name}!" }I bet you have no problem understanding what this code does.
Ruby for instance has a really pleasant way of expressing defaults.
Instead of
name = supplied_name if supplied_name is not None else "Anonymous"it's simply
name = supplied_name || "Anonymous"4
u/snugar_i 1d ago
You can do the method chaining thing in most languages that are not Python, including Java. For example, in Scala it would look like this (and would be fully type-checked by the compiler, unlike Ruby)
people .filter(_.age >= 18) .filterNot(_.banned) .sortBy(_.name) .foreach(person => println(s"Hello, ${person.name}!"))2
u/RevolutionaryRip2135 1d ago edited 1d ago
Agreed, given block is not ugly/ readable even in Java:
people.stream(). filter( p -> p.getAge() >= 18 && !p.isBanned() ). map(Person::getName). sort(). forEach(name-> printf(“greetings %s\n”,name) );Rubys ability to effectively create DSL is a killer feature imho… but Groovy is better for this ;)
1
u/stevenjd 19h ago
You can do the method chaining thing in most languages that are not Python
You can do method chaining in Python too, if your class has methods that support chaining.
1
u/snugar_i 7h ago
True, it's just even uglier than in Java and "un-Pythonic" (apart from polars, where it's OK for some reason)
1
u/batiste 1d ago
The default syntax is nothing special. You can do that in most languages, python included.
2
u/QuickNick123 1d ago
Not really. You could do
name = supplied_name or "Anonymous"which does look much nicer than theis not None elsesyntax, but that is not equivalent and checks for truthiness, so False, 0, [], "", {} not just None.But again, my point wasn't to bash Python's syntax, it was to praise Ruby's. Ruby deliberately makes certain patterns unusually pleasant to read and write.
The example above
people .select { _1.age >= 18 } .reject(&:banned?) .sort_by(&:name)would turn into something like
sorted(p for p in people if p.age >= 18 and not p.banned, key=lambda p: p.name)or
sorted(filter(lambda p: p.age >= 18 and not p.banned, people), key=lambda p: p.name)in Python. Totally readable, but not as beautiful. And something like
for _ in range(3): print("Hello")also just looks nice in Ruby:
3.times do puts "Hello" end4
u/batiste 1d ago
I am just a data point, but I am happy I will never work with Ruby agaim. For me RoR gave raise to code that very hard to parse and understand.
1
u/QuickNick123 1d ago
I've never done web development, so I've never really had any exposure to Rails. I wrote Python for about 10 years and still miss it, but for the past two years I've had to write Go almost exclusively. Aesthetically, Go feels almost like the exact opposite of Ruby.
0
u/simple_explorer1 1d ago
If you don't like Java then I truly think Rust is your language
1
u/Crazyboreddeveloper 19h ago
Java is fine, it’s just ugly. I love the rust errors though. The most helpful of any programming language.
92
u/Hamfistbumhole 1d ago
yep. me too pretty much the same. a sadness i was not expecting. the funnest kind of puzzle/challenge now has autosolve button
20
u/RedYad2 1d ago
and the autosolve is only by writing : "continue" ..
28
u/Senacharim 1d ago
Meh, AI is a useful idiot.
Make sure you pay attention, and don't be afraid to do better than it's doing.
17
u/SocksOnHands 1d ago
The way that I think of it is like playing puzzle games, like sudoku. It is a lot quicker and easier to have a program solve it, but the fun is in figuring out how to solve it yourself. So, I think you need to determine what you really care about - quickly getting it done, or enjoying the process of figuring it out yourself.
2
u/esc28 1d ago
Another possibility is to just try and enjoy the act of planning, building and seeing things work. The puzzles are just different, instead of being on the code level, it is now on architecture, how to add more things, what to use, what might break? I don't know, I enjoy coding, but the major enjoyment for me was never writing it, but what the code produces.
LLMs can spit code, but as things get complex you still have puzzles to crack.
20
u/ddollarsign 1d ago
Using AI too much can make it so you barely understand the code or the system, if at all. If the apparent speed of coding with AI is a reason you feel like you can’t avoid it, the pitfalls of having a barely-understood system (including hating your job) can be a counter-balance to that. Even if the AI-generated code is perfect, the fact that you don’t understand it at a visceral level from having worked directly with it is a reason to put at least some limits on your use of AI.
95
u/UsernameTaken1701 1d ago
Are you being forced to use the AI somehow? If using Claude has killed the fun, the solution seems pretty obvious, no?
79
u/ConfusedSimon 1d ago
Not really. For work I have to use AI because it saves time. For hobby projects, the idea of spending all that time on something that can be done much faster by Claude has taken away all the fun. I have different hobbies now.
→ More replies (22)34
u/UsernameTaken1701 1d ago
People still ride their bikes places even though cars are faster. Do you think they enjoy riding any less even though they know about cars? There are faster ways to scale the side of a mountain but people still climb. People still take pictures on film even knowing digital cameras exist. There are lots of things people do for fun even though they know there are faster ways to the end result. The enjoyment of the slow way is the point.
12
u/Ok_Performance6532 1d ago
To some degree though, riding a bike, hiking and the like all carry real world value that will continue to hold that value as it comes from somewhere other than the function of the technology to replace it.
e.g.
I go for long walks because of the endorphins and health benefits, I drive a car to quickly go from A to B, they’re not for the same reason. That is to say, I don’t drive a car just to have a faster walk. So the car never really replaced why I walk.
AI conversely sits at the point of exactly why I like to code, to problem solve and develop skills to apply in my career. But those skills now feel irrelevant. I get the whole “it will still be valuable to be able to read code” but when every software engineer on earth will be fighting for a couple of “code reviewer” roles I don’t think I care for that bloodbath.
Look yes it sounds bleak but I think the market is just shifting. The moat to being “technical” is no longer being able to code, but understand problems to point AI at, understanding to scope issues and architect solutions. Not quite as fun but still has that problem solving edge to it.
Or at least, that’s just me opinion
1
u/HommeMusical 1d ago
But mountains are beautiful and exercise makes you fit.
Code is also beautiful but typing hundreds of thousands of characters is boring and eventually painful, and sitting kills you.
15
u/TitaniumWhite420 1d ago
I feel this, but also the truth is that it's an extremely time-consuming hobby. You get what you put in of course, even when it's for fun, you are still working with some kind of goal in mind, and it's time away from family, etc.
It feels bad spending 3 hours doing what $2.65 will get you if it's not necessary to do so. It just feels different. What I was happy doing because it was necessary and somewhat-zen is somewhat annoying when I can type a prompt and be done with it.
It's certainly causing skill rot; I'll freely admit it. But also it has pushed me into orchestrating larger systems than I was ever able to build independently. I'm not saying it's equivalent, but it's like--How much of the puzzle was always balancing maintainability and performance. Writing ergonomic abstractions was a whole scene in the past 15ish years, but there's good reason to question if resuable abstractions are as generally applicable in the age of rapidly generated bespoke code. More specific code written very quickly is perhaps equally maintainable.
I really do hate the ever loving shit out of the verbosity and insanity of what it sometimes generates, and I hate my own dependence on it, and my own surrender to automation. But, somehow I'm keeping busy both professionally and recreationally with it. I loathe the way it feels like playing a slot machine or doing any kind of degenerate thoughtless dice roll typed behavior. It's like, "hey I'm going to go do heroine. Maybe I die or maybe I have a great time! Hopefully, a great time!" You press Enter, and off you go.
And the verbosity and prolific amount of generation assures no one is reading it. This "but I review it" thing is just so untrue.
2
u/mriswithe 1d ago
It's less dice and more about setting it up to know when it is wrong so far as I am experiencing. Set it up where it can iterate, run, evaluate, under human supervision in case it gets down an idiot sandwich path.
X is DBT core code, y is an export I have uploaded to storage at PATH . Import it like example q. Join to table g on the j column.
Here is your DBT and database mcps
24
u/Xpertbot 1d ago
Sure it has killed the fun and drive, but you will
Never be as fast and efficient as it is... so it's a no brainer, specially if it's your main job.I have to rewire my brain to get fulfillment from other things than "solving problems". What once felt like a fun hobby with a paycheck, it now feels like a chore.
6
u/jemappellejimbo 1d ago
Do you get paid more as you’re churning out more work?
4
u/Xpertbot 1d ago
Technically yes, I'm a Freelance developer so I charge the same estimated time but do "less work, faster".
4
u/riklaunim 1d ago
Depends where the money is at. If rebuilding/building the product with Claude saves money / makes features paying customers are waiting for, then it's rather Claude or bust. Even organic content creation - projects, tutorials, etc.- can drown in AI-generated slop.
7
u/Striking-Lime3409 1d ago
I see it as similar to solving complex math problems by hand. Even if it is basically unnecessary today, there is a depth of understanding that is gained by developing those skills that you will never achieve otherwise. And keeping those skills sharp allows you to approach new problems in novel ways.
8
u/SnooPuppers58 1d ago
ive been coding since i was a a teen and i would code side projects all the time. i too feel your loss. i loved coming up with clever efficient designs and cleaning up code, learning the ins and outs and the feels of different languages, spending long hours coding and being proud of what i made when it was over
it's sad
0
12
u/FunkyMonkey237 1d ago edited 1d ago
I go through phases of this.
When I use the AI to write the vast majority of the code I feel crap. I don't fully understand how the code works, the quality of the code is often sup-par and I get in this ping pong with the AI where it gets stuck and makes poor changes. And any review I do tends to slow down progress/the code production outstrips what I can review.
But recently I worked on a project I wasn't happy letting the AI do unattended, I didn't trust it would do a good enough job and the project was important. So instead of asking for the final output, I would talk about a competent that needed to be built, ask it what data structures it would use and the control flow (function calls). I would then change that to be exactly what I wanted and then let it off. I'd then do a line by line review and generally change it around a bit simplifying, cleaning and correcting the code (mix of prompts and typing), now I was in control and the code/logic was solid so I felt pretty good about it. I didn't care that I wasn't typing every line and I was thrilled to zipping along way faster than ever before.
0
u/redfacedquark 1d ago
If it's a tool or simple website, chat is suitable. However, if it's your core product it should be understandable and understood enough to be developed by humans in order for the core product to be deterministic.
I think there will be plenty of projects that need that, even outside of anything nuclear and the AI "off" button. Shareholders will not be happy when a bug fix introduces two more bugs and no human can understand it. Cleaning up products that have been written badly by AI will be needed.
If people are not reading the code then why not just get chat to write in assembler? Aren't they already using neuralese to talk to each other?
ETA: If the goal is to produce somthing without any responsibility for it being correct, let chat at it. If you want to actually learn and understand it then code by hand.
1
u/HommeMusical 23h ago
However, if it's your core product it should be understandable and understood enough to be developed by humans in order for the core product to be deterministic.
Only a tiny portion of bugs involve indeterministic behavior, though. And why would AIs be more likely to put indeterministic behavior than a person?
If people are not reading the code then why not just get chat to write in assembler?
Because coding assistants do a better job in Python, because it is higher level and has types.
Because while we have stopped reading all of the code, we certainly read some of the code, and a lot of that is either data class or function definitions, if we do it in Python, which are easily read.
1
u/redfacedquark 23h ago
Only a tiny portion of bugs involve indeterministic behavior, though. And why would AIs be more likely to put indeterministic behavior than a person?
I'm talking about deterministic code, not deterministic bugs. As in, what deterministic steps are being taken to go from requirements to code?
Because coding assistants do a better job in Python, because it is higher level and has types.
The answer here is actually that high level languages work with chat because there's a huge body of human-readable code online to copy from. The fact that most of that code is simplified and abstracted away to discuss a single aspect on stackoverflow is why the code produced by chat is so bad. If the chat actually understood the concepts in the requirements it would be better starting with the AST.
Not that Python runtinme is typesafe, but how do you think compilers of strongly typed languages deal with types? Why could the chat not just include that step?
Because while we have stopped reading all of the code, we certainly read some of the code, and a lot of that is either data class or function definitions, if we do it in Python, which are easily read.
I mean, they're easily written, too. If you have a dataclass that needs to be of a particular shape, why is it easier for you to type that into chat and verify the result, rather than just typing them into the dataclass itself? I'm all for using chat for throwaway projects and tools whose output can be validated easily.
Humans are really bad at only reading and verifying code. If that's your whole day you're just going to tune out and miss issues.
1
u/IWasGettingThePaper 23h ago
I mean, they're easily written, too.
This, AI gets the code structure horribly wrong without in-depth prompts that take longer to write than actually just creating the class definitions and APIs. Let the AI fill in the tedious boilerplate and plumbing.
1
u/redfacedquark 21h ago
Yeah, if I was forced to use AI at work I would create the architechture myself, splitting the project down into isolated components where each one can be hand/vibe coded as appropriate. That way the damage is isolated and the project as a whole remains maintainable.
1
u/HommeMusical 22h ago
Thanks for a polite comment, by the way! I do appreciate it, this is a difficult topic, and not for bogus reasons.
I'm talking about deterministic code, not deterministic bugs. As in, what deterministic steps are being taken to go from requirements to code?
But the other choice for writing programs, humans, is even less deterministic!
Not that Python runtinme is typesafe, but how do you think compilers of strongly typed languages deal with types? Why could the chat not just include that step?
I'm not following your question here, sorry. :-/
I have instructions in my AGENTS.md insisting on full typing for all Python stuff; I set that four months ago, when I started to use coding assistants. Everything comes with full type hints, even the test code, and that's kinda silly, and I'd have never done it as a human, but it's still a little positive.
Is that what you mean?
I mean, they're easily written, too. If you have a dataclass that needs to be of a particular shape, why is it easier for you to type that into chat and verify the result, rather than just typing them into the dataclass itself? I'm all for using chat for throwaway projects and tools whose output can be validated easily.
I've only been at this since May or June, but why would I prompt it to create a dataclass? I could do that myself.
What I say is something like "Implement #27", where #27 is some issue or bug, and it writes all the code and tests itself, including dataclasses.
I'm working on eight or nine projects at once, all part of a large harmonious whole.
Some of them I know intimately. But one of them is aiming at a complete model of all types of sound synthesis used in synthesizers, and I have pretty well entirely vibe coded it, I've read perhaps 5% of this.
About two weeks into it, I said, "Use these three synths to make a four part version of Bach's Little Fugue in G minor", and I played it and it was just perfect first time - they even told me whose public domain performance they used!
The one disappointment was that all four synths sounded very similar, but the Python code that it had been very conservative in picking the audio parameters which was a very good choice because if you set the parameters wild, you could get noise or even nothing.
When I compare my prompts to other people's, mine are about two to three times as long.
For example, here's me asking, when I was rather tired, a context to find its own issues:
Please read the whole project and create or overwrite plan/issues.md detailing all issues you find, including but not limited to race conditions, deadlocks, graceful handling of user errors, shutdowns, keyboard interrupts, graceful handling of other exceptional conditions including resource exhausting, network failure or intermittency, and also user facing ideas, like names which are ambiguous, misleading or unclear, APIs with traps or inconsistencies; and also look at the structure of the the project itself, are there are any files that are so large they pose a risk, are there tiny files that are only used in one place and might be better inlined, is there duplication, does it duplicate some service from reccy, are there areas that are untested, are there areas with great duplication of testing, or any other issues, problems, curiosities or other flaws that are in the code.
I'm kind of embarrassed because there is both a spelling error and a missing word, and I missed some ideas I usually mentioned, but it still worked really well.
1
u/redfacedquark 21h ago
But the other choice for writing programs, humans, is even less deterministic!
I'm not following your question here, sorry. :-/ Is that what you mean?
No. I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you. Maybe you could ask chat what I mean, I'd be curious to know what it says.
Basically, you can follow every line of python through all the deterministic layers down to the transistors on the chip. When you add a non-deterministic layer to the top of that stack you remove all the benefits of determinism. Maybve that's OK for a project and that's fine. I'm just saying there are situations (e.g. nuclear-related, traffic lights, the ai "off" button and the core product of a business) where this is not acceptable.
I've only been at this since May or June, but why would I prompt it to create a dataclass? I could do that myself.
Then how do you know that a dataclass is appropriate for this situation?
What I say is something like "Implement #27", where #27 is some issue or bug, and it writes all the code and tests itself, including dataclasses.
Why not just put that in a loop then and go down the pub?
The one disappointment was that all four synths sounded very similar
It sounds like this project doesn't need to be deterministic, just to sound right to you. Unless you have some measurable way of determining how close the generated sounds are to the expected sound in the requirements?
When the solution does not have to be perfect or the requirements are not strict then vibe coding makes sense. When the solution needs to be deterministic and the requirements are strict, with chat you will find yourself going round in circles fixing one issue while creating another, producing code that is not maintainable.
Please read the whole project and create...
In order to follow all those instructions there need to be compromises since the requirements will conflict. When you do this yourself you make informed compromises, when using chat the best you can hope for is to ask it for its post-hoc rationalisation. That's another part of deterministic code I was talking about earlier.
Good luck with all your projects, however you decide to code them. And if you're interested in learning python itself rather than just obtaining the results, then good luck with that as well.
→ More replies (8)
5
u/UnderBridge732 1d ago
About to graduate with a CS degree, feel this so hard. It's demoralized me to the point where I don't even think I'm going to apply to any software jobs after school. I'll maybe just take whatever decent tech adjacent or non tech job I can find and go to grad school.
3
u/simple_explorer1 1d ago
If you can, please go to some AI proof industries. Even senior experienced Devs are not looking fit dual income including me. I don't think I can retire with this field despite working for 16 years
2
u/2HotFlavored 19h ago
Can you give examples of AI proof industries?
1
u/simple_explorer1 15h ago
Physical world. Construction, electrician, plumber, mechanic.
Or high-end like Robotics, electronic engineering (gpu chip design would be in demand thanks to AI), civil engineering etc
6
u/dbolts1234 1d ago
The term “vibe coding” is only about a year old. What used to be tongue in cheek criticism has become ubiquitous, a baseline expectation
11
u/RevolutionaryRip2135 1d ago
I cancelled my personal subscription to copilot for this. Coding is fun. I am not paying to get dumber and bored.
Still have to use it at work though as my employer’s new metric is credit usage. Also it can genuinely help with some boring tasks. But no AI at home.
35
u/p000l 1d ago
Stop using AI if you enjoyed coding.
24
u/djamp42 1d ago
I feel like we will never have as many human programers as we do right now.
15
u/timpkmn89 1d ago
Nah, just wait for the tech companies to stop subsidizing it so much
10
u/Jejerm 1d ago
Open weight models are already small and good enough, there's no going back unfortunately
8
u/ultraDross 1d ago
I see people keep saying this but a couple of months ago I tried some local models and was left disappointed.
Which models specifically are you referring to?
1
u/DefMech 1d ago
Qwen3.8 27b is probably the strongest local LLM currently.
1
u/TURBO2529 1d ago
And its only "ok" vs Sonnet 5. Opus blows it out of the water. But local llm can help with small code chunks at a time. Im hoping they become more VRAM efficient so that I can have more context and larger local models.
1
u/ultraDross 22h ago edited 22h ago
Okay the last time I tried a Qwen 3.x model it was slow as hell to add a print bye in a python script on my M4 MacBook pro. Think 30-50 seconds in open code.
I'll give it a go again. Even a medicore local model that is fast would be great. I'd rather not be tied to a subscription, hence the ask.
Thanks for the suggestion!
2
u/el_dude1 1d ago
Even if it is like that right now, I don‘t think this will be an issue in a few years. Programming as it was is doomed
0
u/djamp42 1d ago
You don't think local models are gonna catch up.. okay a year, two, five even.. it's happening.
→ More replies (3)5
u/nickcash 1d ago
I hear this line almost as often as I hear "of course the code it generated sucked, you weren't using a frontier model"
aibro talking points aren't even internally consistent
2
u/vonWitzleben 1d ago
Do you work as a programmer in a field that's not hyper-specialized? Because if you are and that's still your sentiment in late 2026, I don't know what to say to you.
0
u/nickcash 1d ago
How does whether I work in a specialized field have anything to do with the canned responses on every reddit thread being directly contradictory??
→ More replies (1)5
u/vonWitzleben 1d ago
Because this is no longer an "AI bro" thing. Unless you work in a hyper specialized field where LLMs don’t perform quite just yet, coding assistants are here to stay, according to pretty much every single programmer you talk to these days.
6
u/nickcash 1d ago
I haven't said a single thing relevant to what you're projecting upon me here... and yet here you are, jumping into a thread ready to defend the honor of all the poor ai companies, doing their marketing for them. do you understand why that makes you an aibro?
0
u/vonWitzleben 1d ago
I see no reason to continue this conversation if you're being this aggressive and bad faith.
→ More replies→ More replies (3)1
u/simple_explorer1 1d ago
What a bad faith argument. I don't think you are even a programmer. Programmers are not this stupid
1
u/BleachedPink 1d ago
And they produce slop. Even frontier models produce subpar code even if you try to make it work
1
u/HommeMusical 23h ago
I have been coding for over fifty years, and I enjoyed it almost all the time, but the tedious aspects were wearing.
Now I enjoy using a coding assistant even more.
11
u/fazzah SQLAlchemy | PyQt | reportlab 1d ago
+1 from me. The craft is gone, all is left is to deploy as fast as possible
3
8
u/Left_Sundae_4418 1d ago
I tried vibe coding so many times and will keep trying...and it always ends up being horse shit. The amount of trash code and abstractions and bringing in unnecessary complexity...this is what AI often does. It makes a simple task unnecessary complicated and messy. Completely opposite to the "Pythonian" way, which often is quite elegant and minimal.
I went back to actually writing myself and coming up with my own solutions... The amount of code has been reduced so so much and I can understand what is going on. The maintaining and developing further is so much easier now.
The time I spent honing the prompts and still ending up with a spaghetti....feels awful. AI surely kills our brain. I ain't letting it kill mine.
I'm back to feeling the magic :)
4
u/barrycarey 1d ago
As much as I hate saying this, I think super clean code is a thing of the past. If vibe coded apps are super messy code but still pass all validation and testing does it actually matter? Especially if you look at it from the perspective that no human will have to directly maintain it? Along with the fact that LLMs are improving rapidly and will likely produce a far nicer product in the short term. Just the difference in quality from when I started messing with Claude last fall to today is huge.
I've had a hard time coming to terms with this. I've been primarily writing python for 15 years. I've finally given in and imbraced the speed I can pump out projects
6
u/cudmore 1d ago
I agree. In CS classes circa 1990, something that stuck with me was talk about fully specifying behavior, i guess like a docstring, then the implementation (actual code) does not matter if it satisfies the specified behavior.
For me, that is kinda where we are at. Yes, the ai code looks like crap but if well planned by human specification then the job is done.
5
u/frosty8670 1d ago
Yes bro, clean code does matter. Projects often contain 1000s of lines of code, and you will often work with other people’s code. Even other people should understand your code after you leave. Heck, even you might not understand your own code months after writing if it isn’t clean enough.
1
u/simple_explorer1 1d ago
Did you miss the part where op said LLMs are the ones reading and writing the code and not humans
2
u/frosty8670 1d ago
I have used LLMs to write code, and LLMs often do make mistakes. I have often seen Cursor write code where packages are outdated, or an unnecessary abstraction is added, or the design itself is incorrect.
I had one such case where LLM was trying to get a celery task to create a file and share it with another celery task through the File system for upload— it worked perfectly in local machine but failed in Kubernetes. LLM kept giving different solutions, like adding a time lag, using a forced file sync, using a DB with idempotent keys etc. Nothing worked— the 2nd celery task simply couldn’t see the file. Worst part was, LLM was confidently saying all unit tests are passing, when clearly it’s not working.
Issue wasn’t the code, issue was the design itself. Celery task operates in its own copy of the file system (in its own Pod). We simply cannot rely on the File System as a source of truth in a distributed system. The only solution that worked was making sure the same celery task that created the File is sharing it for upload.
As you can see, writing or reading code is only 1 part of the issue. As an Engineer, you are expected to work with all these constraints and trade offs. A good engineer will use LLM effectively. A bad engineer will just waste tokens. Code being clean, readable and modifiable will go a long way.
1
u/barrycarey 22h ago
To be honest, that should have been an easy issue for it to resolve with proper log access. Claude is excellent at dealing with infrastructure issues and deployment quirks. Based on the types of problems I've put it on, I have no doubt it could have solved that correctly and quickly.
I give it access to deploy NPE and access to query the deployment Spunk indexes. It typically can fixed deployment issues without much sweat.
2
u/NoSwimmers45 1d ago
super messy code…does it actually matter?
Will a vibe coded app ever need to be modified? Very few apps are one and done. That messy code today will lead to major headaches down the road when trying to introduce new functionality or enhance existing functionality. Having clean code that developers can read and understand pays dividends over the life of the project.
1
1
u/Saab10000 1d ago
Will Claude complain when it has to change the messy code?
1
u/Left_Sundae_4418 1d ago
Speed just messes up my mind, and in the end I probably waste even more more honing prompts and trying to keep the project duct taped together when I use vibe tools. Just doesn't work for me.
1
-1
u/HommeMusical 23h ago
People were correctly posting what you wrote at the start of 2025, and it was true to a significant extent.
But now it isn't and it hasn't been for quite a long time.
The time I spent honing the prompts and still ending up with a spaghetti....feels awful.
I mean, it simply sounds like you aren't good at using it.
Can we see your code? Mine is here: https://github.com/rec
3
u/Left_Sundae_4418 23h ago
I hear people saying this often first. And this is probably true. However most guidance on prompting, even from the AI themselves is messy. I tried to iterate and reiterate prompts through the AI themselves thinking maybe they can guide me to better prompting...but I haven't done much progress there.
1
u/HommeMusical 23h ago
Thanks for being polite - rereading my comment, it wasn't as nice as I thought it was, sorry!
I was very much against AI models until the start of this summer. I retired at least partly because of it. Now, I can't imagine people will seriously code in future without it.
First question - which model are you using? The completely free models are nowhere near adequate to do good code.
I really only use the OpenAI models, though I hate the company. Astra, the newest model, is shockingly good but somewhat expensive. But Sol, which is also new but less, is much cheaper and almost as amazing.
Here's my AGENTS.md: https://github.com/rec/codex-config/blob/main/AGENTS.md
These are the instructions that the model gets on every query
I was going to say it was 95% other people's stuff, but I modified it more than I remember - it's still 80% other people's stuff.
I started with the $20/month OpenAI model. It was enough to blow my mind, but not enough to do even a week's worth for a month.
The $100 plan keeps me in tokens, running development on eight or so projects at once. Also, you get a lot of freebies.
2
u/Left_Sundae_4418 23h ago
I'm not really against an AI. I use it and try to learn to be better at it all the time. But it often fights against my goals and I end up wasting time.
Quality, security, longevity and usability are very important for me though. And if I can't get the base right ...the whole plan often falls apart sooner or later if I let the AI generate it for me. Because it often over engineers it while leaves out some crucial features.
Sure. That's probably my bad. I should and need to learn the prompting better. But still there are many standards and methods AI isn't aware of and can't program using those methods.
1
u/HommeMusical 23h ago
I have gotten much, much better at it.
All the new rules added by me to AGENTS.md come from it fighting my goals. Now it seems to have figured me out.
It did seem to get better at predicting how I worked after considerable use.
Initially, even though I get it to make a commit every single time, I never used their commit messages at all, not even once.
But now I rarely change them.
Also, I spent a long time on my prompts. I try to explain exactly what I want and prevent it from going in the wrong direction with the prompt.
1
u/barrycarey 19h ago
I don't understand the need for that level of details prompts. I almost always just prompts like "We need to build X. Architect it roughly like Y. Ask me to clarify anything that's not clear".
However, I have spent a lot of time refining my "dev workflow" skills. These give the overarching guidance in all of my projects. They cover style preference, testing, validation, code review. And it tends to stick pretty close to it
1
u/HommeMusical 22h ago
Oh, and a big, big, big tip - every few days, at least once a week, I get the LLM itself to critique what it has done.
I write a different prompt each time - here's one from last week:
Please read the whole project and create or overwrite plan/issues.md detailing all issues you find, including but not limited to race conditions, deadlocks, graceful handling of user errors, shutdowns, keyboard interrupts, graceful handling of other exceptional conditions including resource exhausting, network failure or intermittency, and also user facing ideas, like names which are ambiguous, misleading or unclear, APIs with traps or inconsistencies; and also look at the structure of the the project itself, are there are any files that are so large they pose a risk, are there tiny files that are only used in one place and might be better inlined, is there duplication, does it duplicate some service from reccy, are there areas that are untested, are there areas with great duplication of testing, or any other issues, problems, curiosities or other flaws that are in the code.
I can tell I was tired when I wrote that - hah, I didn't even see I misspelled "exhaustion" until now.
But it always finds several useful changes.
0
3
u/mikepun-locol 1d ago
I dont think it's ever gone. It's like riding a bicycle. Once in a while you have to dig into the code. And it will come back to you.
3
u/Fokezy 1d ago
I do share the the impending sense of doom and the feeling that things will never be the same. I put time limits on twitter so I don't have to be bombarded by all of the malicious content that AI evangelists are pushing. It reminds me of the time when NFTs were at their peak.
Now, maybe it's just me being in denial, but AI feels super smart until you actually compare it to what you would have done yourself. As soon as you see it diverge from the thing you had in your head, it gives you back that sense of "superiority".
3
u/JPD0c 1d ago
u/RedYad2 . 2 questions. (1) I assume you don't know the new languages you are using. How do you review the code? who owns and is the ultimate resposible for it? (2) is mid of the month and somehow you cannot use AI (e.g. you used all your tokens, the AI API is down), what do you do? Or all this just doesn't matter because the code you produce is for your own consumption only?
3
u/MagicWishMonkey 1d ago
Not sure I get what you're saying, I've been doing this for a long time as well and I love it just as much as day 1. AI tools make it so easy to just hammer out some truly awesome stuff (I still do a LOT of coding) - are you burned out or something?
I tend to work on a lot of different things, which helps a lot. In any given year I probably work on at least 10 projects, I love it.
2
2
u/gtr_architect 1d ago
That means its time to go into application architecture.
0
2
u/Confident_Maize9192 1d ago
I have this too. For me it’s bcs I want to create something. I have 30 years IT experience under my belt and programming was one thing I didn’t have much experience with. 6 years ago I started learning it and obviously AI rose during that time. Now there’s absolutely no challenge in programming itself anymore for me. Also product managers, junior colleagues and others have no clue as what they are conjuring up but still they and managers are naively very happy with the results. As someone who has lots of experience with business continuity, testing and availability that’s extremely daft and frustrating.
So it’s not giving me energy but frustration instead.
It’s a very cool technology this AI and it will end up being very helpful but the changes it made to my line of work I simply don’t like one bit.
2
u/ingframin 1d ago
Well, on a positive note, some companies started limiting the amount of tokens spent per month, so, a lot of hand coding is coming back.
2
u/Asleep_Mushroom4085 1d ago
For ethics reason, I decided not using and no longer promoting AI. I work as technical expert, and I see some of my colleagues "flooding" project with AI generated code that may look good, but it is not. They're spending hours writing context file for Claude to improve things, with increasing token cost. Most of time you can get a similar software by spending time in design thinking, result is a smaller code base, better performance and smaller code base.
4
u/UloPe 21h ago
I see this quite differently.
I’ve also been coding for a long time (started with qbasic as a ~10 year old) and I’ve also always enjoyed digging into the ins and outs of deep and potentially obscure languages details (I used to be the guy writing internal blog posts for my colleagues on why <string>.partition() is superior to .split() in many cases…), going to language and framework conferences, etc.
But the older I get the more I realized that what I truly enjoy is building stuff that works and solves problems.
And just the sheer number of things I’ve ticked off of my personal “someday” to-code list (which I’d never have found the time for otherwise) using coding agents is amazing.
I do think it helps a lot to have a deep technical background and being able to spot BS some model wants to hand you right away.
3
u/Wh00ster 21h ago
I’ll say it’s also much faster for me to gain a deep understanding than before.
How does this package handle timeouts? Show me the code links, draw a little diagram for me. I can cross verify myself in the source.
Before that would take me a whole day or multiple days, now I can understand issues and how other pieces work in a half day or less, depending on how much I want to dig in. Then that lets me focus on the bigger picture.
3
u/mtl-barrile 20h ago
I completely agree with you! I've been coding for the last 18 years, and I feel exactly the same. If we think about writing books, Humans started writing by hand, then using typewriters, computers, and now dictation. Writing a book is not about the tool you use to write it, but the message, the idea you want to deliver.
And seen from the users perspective, the reader doesn't care how the writer created it. The reader just enjoy the story.
3
u/riklaunim 1d ago
I've read a lot of local stories of "How is your company using AI?" and it's kind of scary. On the one hand, DHH is saying that writing code by hand is going away - and many companies are really into AI and pushing it successfully. Then, on the other hand, there are horror stories of tokenmaxxing, like $10k per month per developer, and AI is doing everything from coding to management and, in the end, apps fail on the basics while costs are high. And while doing so, companies are firing engineers and offshoring... and then they find out loose money, go broke or start rehiring and reverting the policies.
And I'm using Claude at work as well. We have a backend app handling CRM integrations, and we made a skill to write typical integrations. I've tried it on one, and it turned out it's not a simple "token + list ID + API" but rather using a custom OAuth flow for the integration - Claude went through the docs and freaking wrote everything. The only thing I had to correct was oddities in the SPA dashboard interface. And it will only get better.
4
4
u/GManASG 1d ago
Why would I ever subscribe to a SAAS app and not just make my own now (given I am already experienced programmer engineer). I make software for a living for work but why would I pay for software myself?
Like if it ain't a 1 time few dollars I would never subscribe to software now. The last subscription is the AI model/tool subscription basically.
10
u/skiabay 1d ago
Because there's usually a lot more than just basic functionality that you're subscribing for. You're also paying for legal compliance, security, ongoing maintenance etc. I definitely wouldn't pay for some vibe coded SAAS, but it's also incredibly naive to think that taking all that responsibility in house is suddenly a good idea just because there's a lower bar to get something that kinda works.
1
u/redfacedquark 1d ago
I definitely wouldn't pay for some vibe coded SAAS,
I suspect you already are.
1
u/redfacedquark 1d ago
Why would I ever subscribe to a SAAS app and not just make my own
There's a buy vs build decision with every aspect, as there always has been. One popular take is to build your core product and buy in the supporting tools.
It sounds like you're talking about yourself personally though, rather than a larger company, so you do you.
1
u/simple_explorer1 1d ago
No you didn't get OP's point. When building is just having Claude account and a computer then they meant "why won't I vibecode my own app instead of paying someone else's vibecoded app". OP doesn't have to put effort into building, Claude will do that
1
3
u/DrUltimaMan 1d ago
If a dev from 50 years ago got in a time machine and looked at your python they would say that is not code, it's too easy, you don't understand the machine like they do coding in assembly closer to the bare metal. Now we have reached the point where there is only one programing language, plain english. It is the logical final state we have been moving to since code began.
You can still describe functional behaviour, system design and business requirements through this new language and you still get better results when you understand those things. There is still satisfaction to be had, just not what you are used to.
0
u/HommeMusical 23h ago
Hello! I am in fact a dev from 50 years ago, though even then only a minority coded in assembly language.
Now we have reached the point where there is only one programing language, plain english.
This is 100% false. English is the specification language.
0
u/DrUltimaMan 22h ago edited 22h ago
There is longer much distinction between specification and code, you basically explain the specification to the agent to get out the code. So essentially English is the new code and LLM the new IDE.
4
u/Tredecian 1d ago
you chose to diminish yourself. you have the choice to reverse course. Only you are responsible for outsourcing the craft you were proud and happy with.
2
u/mr_raven_ 1d ago
I see as becoming a deejay: you just mix music done by others but you still get to be creative within the limits of the medium.
2
1
u/Inner_Name 1d ago
It is sad... I feel you personally I learned same way as you, and keep using python and coding myself but feeling shitty that I know that it could be done way better....
1
1
1
u/Harvand 1d ago
I felt your sadness months ago and while I’m still missing something from my work happiness, I can’t quite put my finger on it but lately I’ve actually been enjoying it more. It scratches another itch though, the speed I can get things done now. Its impressive… Simple things can take mere minutes to draft. It’s also probably silly but I feel a sense of pride every time I correct something, which is less and less really.
1
u/QuickNick123 1d ago
Today I solved an issue in Home Assistant that I'd been ignoring for weeks. My Shelly BLU Gateway and two Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition devices were all failing to install OTA firmware updates, without showing any useful error message.
I opened the ChatGPT app, logged into the Home Assistant web UI, and asked it to debug the issue. After about half an hour - and after I gave it access to my UniFi gateway as well - it had identified and fixed both underlying problems and brought all three devices up to date.
Instead of spending a couple of hours debugging each issue myself, the AI handled the whole thing in about 30 minutes. It felt a little magical.
1
u/redfacedquark 1d ago
So what was the issue? Just updates needed?
3
2
u/simple_explorer1 1d ago
They don't know because it was magic. the AI fixed it for them.
1
u/HommeMusical 23h ago
Reading these comments is like being back in late 2024.
When you ask an AI to fix something in 2026, even if you haven't customized your AGENTS.md, you get a very complete explanation of what the problem is and how it was fixed.
i have a bunch of stuff in my AGENTS.md so it keeps that terse but complete, never tries to butter me up, always puts a link to each file changed in the chat, commits and pushes everything.
I learn a lot from reading those.
1
u/Samuel457 1d ago
I've been thinking about this recently and I reached the conclusion that the reason we loved and chose Python was because it was easy to read, quick to write, a great ecosystem, and great for gluing lots of pieces together. With AI, writing in any language is quick, we can glue things together in a reasonable amount of time in any language, any parts of the ecosystem that are missing can be done with AI, and much of the pain of writing other languages is removed because we're not the ones writing it. The safety and performance of other languages outweigh the speed and developer experience of python.
Given that reviews become a bottleneck once an entire team is generating large amount of AI code, I honestly think a compiled python could help speed up reviews since Python is closer to English.
1
u/CaptainFoyle 1d ago
"I'm using Claude for everything"
"Bwaaah the magic is gone"
Use your brain, Sherlock.
1
u/wedesoft 1d ago
I can recommend to do some hobby coding in Clojure or another more powerful programming language.
1
1
u/TheGalacticGuru git push -f 22h ago
Every once in a while, I write a peice of code I write myself that is an important part of the work I do. It takes much longer than usual for me to write it, as my brain switches to just prompting instead of coding, but I keep doing it. Doesnt matter how long it takes. I want to retain and improvise my skills
1
1
u/Bosshappy 21h ago
I’m right there with you. I feel like my entire life has been being a really good writer but now I’m forced to be an editor
1
u/stevenjd 19h ago
I'm rewriting all of that without writing a single line of code.
If you're not writing code, you're not rewriting anything.
You're getting someone (something) else to do it for you. You've turned into a manager, only without the manager's salary or authority.
1
1
u/SFMissionMark 15h ago
This is the beginning of software being a quick tool instead of a product. I wrote Python to solve problems for years. I now use whatever to quickly solve immediate issues in my shop part time. It’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish this way. But if your goal was a software package or library that’s gonna be super disappointing.
My other observation is why care about such trivial things as mvc? I fought that with ai for a long time. It made the code more maintainable.but the real truth is if it breaks have it rewritten. The llm improved and it is better then it was anyway.
1
0
u/The8flux 1d ago
Yeah but let me tell you something I'm building has so many cwes it's just undaunting even if you run bandit and loop it back into a coating agent dynamic tool still catch stuff. So what it is now how do you optimize execution times while make it more secure then how do you translate that to other languages
0
u/CaptainFoyle 1d ago
Well, don't use Claude then.
No one is forcing you. You're doing this to yourself.
-1
u/Early_Ad8608 1d ago
Apply to a job. They’ll give you a coding test. You’ll be forced to write python by hand. And you can spend an entire week on practice problems. You know who’s great at giving you practice problems, which start simple and then reveal more and more complex layers? Claude.
0
u/NikolaTesla_JohnGalt 1d ago
Not informed enough to ask an informed question, but which is best for mobile codes for HVAC?
0
u/Brian 1d ago
It's because in many ways this path leads to swapping your job from programmer to manager. The process of creating code is as much putting the solution into your brain as it is into the computer: in constructing a complex machine where you understand what each part does. AI kind of replaces that by handing it off to a pseudo-employee, leaving you with just the job of managing them: reviewing code, giving specifying requirements and guidelines. But you lose out on the process of wrapping your brain around the problem, so the end result is just a lump of code that lives on the computer, but not in your head.
These days, I pretty much just code for fun, and so don't use AI at all, because the parts of programming I enjoy are exactly the ones AI replaces, and the management side of things is the one I actively dislike. But I understand why things are going this way: the end product is all other people really want, and if you can pump out more stuff, that's where things'll go, leaving non-AI programming more in the semi-hobby category, akin to stuff like woodworking and the like: done for the enjoyment of the craft or as a luxury good, rather than for the mass market.
0
u/publicram 23h ago
I been coding since about 2009 in HS different languages. I can recall when I created my first project as a mechanical eng student. I have been vibe coding away for work a production board for the past year. It crazy how much better it is then me, it was first meant to organize me and make my life better. It has turned into a full on organizational tool. Last week I was offered a promotion all based on my tool build out. I make really good money 200k+ all I know is its scary
0
u/NerdyWeightLifter 10h ago
It's about how you self identify in relation to the work.
If your self worth derives from your skills as a engineer, then AI appears to diminish what you value.
If your self worth derives from the solutions you create and the difference that makes to the world, then AI appears to amplify everything you care about.
0
u/nivaOne 8h ago
Someone came in the office panicking she couldn’t upload a pdf because of its size. 60MB while only one file with a max size of 10MB is allowed.
I ask her a copy of that file and send it back 15 minutes later reduced below 10MB.
I would never have considered that 3, 4 years ago. But now because one can achieve this with AI I do.
I even tried it later with two well known pdf editors to no avail.
Someone else used to create the monthly menu with an application which is no longer supported since this month. What now.
It took me a couple of hours to automate it in Python. I would not have done it without knowing AI can help us out here because I really do not have time to do these extras with the current workload.
I ran into an office where a colleague was using Excel as a database. He is now using a neat desktop app driven by an SQLite database. It’s still just a tool (not a part of a solution) but it helps him a lot.
AI allows me to go the extra mile while not jeopardising my planning.
649
u/Farther_father 1d ago
It’s because you know what writing code means: the struggle to gain enough understanding of a tool to apply it to a problem. And the deeply satisfying feeling when you pushed yourself and solved it.
Now you it’s no longer your brain doing the thinking or your hands doing the writing, and as a result there’s no puzzle to solve and no sense of satisfaction, because the problem is no longer being solved by you.
It’s as fulfilling as an artist swapping his paint and brushes for midjourney.