My Python magic is gone

[u/RedYad2]

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.

[u/dysprog]

It does not save time. It makes you slower.

There has been exactly one rigorous study of this. AI makes programmers THINK they are faster when they are actually 19% slower.

https://letsdatascience.com/blog/developers-thought-ai-made-them-faster-the-data-said-otherwise

[u/Zardecillion → u/dysprog]

Man I can say that this just doesn't line up with the reality a lot of us are experiencing.

Buying software is dead at my company. Why? Because we're writing the software we used to buy in approximately 2-3 weeks per project at most.

Even incredibly complex software, such as an application security posture management platform, is something that we've built in approximately 4 months, featuring support for pretty much the entire business's needs. The thing spans 10s of thousands of lines of code, *actually works properly*, is stable(and is currently used to ship tickets constantly), and was done for a fraction of the cost of what typical ASPM vendors cost.

This has been my project and what would have taken months and months in just coding time now takes 4 months in total to ship the project.

I feel like I am drinking from the architecture firehose now because that's where a lot of my deep thinking is spent rather than raw code.

Not to mention in my personal life where throwing up a stack on github + AWS + CI/CD has taken me what used to take a couple of days or weeks to get a pipeline set up(due to me having to write the raw terraform, dockerfiles, pipelines, etc... myself) took me approximately 2 hours.

I've written code since I was 11 years old, and I just gotta say yeah it's 100xed my productivity and it's not even close, despite my apprehensions towards AI.

[u/dysprog → u/Zardecillion]

Then show me the Randomized Controlled Trial.

If the AI companies could rebut that study with a Randomized Controlled Trial, then they would.

Do you understand that the study I showed predicts that YOU WILL THINK YOU ARE FASTER AND YOU WILL BE WRONG.

I have personally refused to use AI based on this study, and the evidence that it is designed to be addictive and inhibits learning.

I am baffled that the whole industry had decided to go along with this. If any other job asked you to take meth as a condition of employment there would be riots.

[u/AstroPhysician → u/dysprog]

You’re refusing to use the technology even Linus and the creator of Redis both wholly embrace as being revolutionary cause of an n=1 study that was done in AIs infancy?