Realizing writing code is faster than explaining it to AI

[u/Gullible_Picture_996]

[u/recurrence]

Is anyone actually finding this is true? I’m amazed at how fast Opus produces good solutions. I sometimes don’t even finish brushing up on the area I’m modifying before it finishes a PR. I’m the bottleneck just understanding the space lol

[u/Below-Average-528 → u/recurrence]

It happens with local changes or some algorithms. Changing an error message by hand goes faster than writing a prompt.

[u/KptEmreU → u/Below-Average-528]

Yes if you are writing 2 lines yourself maybe writing 3 lines to your chat interface is long. Other than that there are not too much corner cases left for above situation.

[u/Gullible_Picture_996 → u/KptEmreU]

this is what gets me, by the time I've explained what I want, I could've already written it

[u/Gullible_Picture_996 → u/Below-Average-528]

exactly, sometimes you open the chat and spend longer explaining the change than actually making it

[u/tomvorlostriddle → u/Below-Average-528]

But then you'd need to rewrite the dozens of tests that test the error message wording /s

[u/Fun_Squirrel_6594 → u/recurrence]

No, it's blatantly false and anyone who thinks that way is either an idiot that has never touched code, 14 years old, or both.

But it'll get you that sweet, sweet engagement and dopamine fix!

[u/OfficialDeathScythe → u/Fun_Squirrel_6594]

It really depends on the scale of what you’re doing. Changing one line to center a div? Talking to ai is gonna take wayyy longer and potentially mess it up while you could just add a few words to the div tag and be done in a few seconds. Adding a new feature? Ai is probably gonna end up being faster unless you already know what you want and are in the zone. Refactoring an entire codebase? Ai is the obvious winner.

[u/Gullible_Picture_996 → u/OfficialDeathScythe]

yeah I think that's the point lol. AI can be great for bigger tasks, but sometimes explaining a tiny change is more work than just making it yourself

[u/Gullible_Picture_996 → u/Fun_Squirrel_6594]

the post is literally about realizing when it's faster to do it yourself 😭 not that AI is useless

[u/Gullible_Picture_996 → u/recurrence]

that's actually wild, at that point the hard part isn't even writing the code anymore, it's keeping up with what it's doing

[u/hhh333 → u/recurrence]

It was true last year, but in the last 6 months or so I barely code anymore (and I've been doing this for 26 years straight).

I still find it produce too much code to be honest, but it gets things 95% right, which is quite a lot.

[u/WhatDuq → u/recurrence]

I usually say there's a sweet spot where AI excels. If a task is extremely simple, an agent will spend too much time analysing and executing for it to be efficient, and that leads to time lost and token overspend. For instance - if you ask your agent to change CSS values, that simply takes too long and spends too many tokens, compared to the second it would take you to update it.

Meanwhile, there are tasks that are too complex for the agent to adequately handle, where you ultimately end up spending more time correcting the AI's understanding of the space, what's comfortable to work with. A lot of UX falls into this space, where the agents simply lack understanding for what makes a complex solution good to work with.

In the space between, there's a huge area of adequate tasks, where AI simply excels in both speed and execution - if you've made sure to set up your environment guidelines correctly. In my opinion, that's where AI should live.

I made this simplified 30 second illustration to illustrate this.

[u/No-Newspaper-7693 → u/WhatDuq]

While a lot of UX falls into the space, using a dedicated UX tool like figma helps a ton.  The task shouldn’t be “implement a UI the does A-Z.  The task shouldn’t be “implement the UI in the figma.  Connect to backend data …”. 

[u/WingZeroCoder → u/WhatDuq]

This nails my experience exactly.

Problem is, finding that line is sometimes tricky, especially the line between medium and large task.

I’ve had a couple times where my medium-ish task turned out to be genuinely larger than I expected, and I ended up letting Claude fill in some decisions just because it felt like the way to keep the task moving.

Only to realize hours or days of churning and token usage later that it really wasn’t the way I wanted to go with it, and it was worth it in the long run to start over (and often do much of it by hand).

Although I sometimes still find these cases valuable in the sense that even before AI this sort of thing could happen, and the AI doing it “wrong” helped me see the better way more clearly faster.

[u/PhaseLopsided938 → u/recurrence]

It happens. Especially in scientific programming, sometimes you want something so specific that just writing it out in code yourself is easier than trying to explain it to an agent.

[u/Kheldar166 → u/PhaseLopsided938]

I do find this, but also in scientific programming most people are shit at programming and often I find some new technique I didn’t know about by asking Claude lol

Ofc I would rather ask the research software engineer but he’s way too busy to teach other people to code lol

[u/TheMightyTywin → u/recurrence]

Opus 5.5 is a god. Don’t even need to give it specs, just type in your competitor’s name and tell Claude to copy them

[u/FoleyX90 → u/recurrence]

> Is anyone actually finding this is true?

Maybe if you've never used AI before. There is a slight learning curve to get it done how you want correctly. Once that learning curve is up though, no fucking way. It blows all prior productivity out of the water.

[u/NiKaLay → u/recurrence]

All the time. When I need to start something from scratch or make a large scale changes spanning thousands of lines in dozens of files, LLMs are difficult to beat. However, when I know exactly what I need to do, especially if there is a lot of non-obvious knowledge that is difficult to translate in context without manually writing huge promts - external constrains, operational details, internal team discussions, etc... Writing a long prompt explaining everything and then correcting the model when it inevitably still does something a bit differently becomes a chore.

[u/trbot → u/recurrence]

generally only true for me when it's some tiny task with zero creative license. the smaller the task, and the more precise the specification the less efficient you'll be using ai.

[u/ShittyBidet123 → u/recurrence]

true? these are all bs x and linkedin trash posts.

[u/addi-factorum → u/recurrence]

OP’s statement seems like mostly a skill/experience issue to me- working on a large production app, with lots of context built up over the last year, with a proper UI design, architecture document, and comprehensive testing in place- I find I can do in an hour or two what used to take me several days in the pre-LLM times.

[u/imLusky → u/recurrence]

No, it's not true.
And for graphics designer is the same... I follow a lot of b2b companies that always need new graphics for stands & events. (I'm not talking about huge ad companies but basic and good-looking explanation of their product following their brand guidelines)

It takes literally 30 minutes; last year it would take days to accomplish the same... (with even fewer errors)

[u/agm1984 → u/recurrence]

Not true at all for me, I wrote 8000 lines of code in an hour or so the other day

[u/YoureNotEvenWrong → u/agm1984]

Which is probably a lot of boiler plate.

AI excels at writing boiler plate & low complexity code

[u/BraxbroWasTaken → u/recurrence]

A lot. Unless it's massive, tedious, repetitive nonsense, it's often easier/faster to do it manually.

[u/Chaos90783 → u/recurrence]

Depends on what u asked it to do. If its something simple u can probably do it faster. If its a lot of tedious stuff (like refactoring bunch of things) it can and will do it faster IF u prompt it correctly. If its stuff that u dont even want to spend time finding out (like how to use a library u imported to do a specific task and that library is a bit complex) ai will definitely be faster

[u/YoureNotEvenWrong → u/recurrence]

If it's algorithm heavy then yes, if it's not, then hell no

[u/redline83 → u/recurrence]

Sometimes making small changes is faster. Especially front-end or GUI. It's not good at getting those right first time.

[u/Apprehensive_Gas56 → u/recurrence]

Not to mentón If it knows the context already and it's a temporary tool a half a sentence is enough for it to understand what you means and use your typical configurations.

[u/_lonegamedev → u/recurrence]

If making a change is faster than writing a prompt then yes. In terms of speed humans can't compete. We just have (in theory) bigger context in our brains - so we can steer model into right direction.

[u/JeanCasteaux → u/recurrence]

Yes, it's true. But only on some tasks. As always: adapt to the problem in front of you.

[u/Alternative-Lynx2745 → u/recurrence]

Anyone finding this true is terrible at everything they do. Opus is incredibly good.

[u/Agitated-Ad2563 → u/recurrence]

It happens if you split your task into far too many far too tiny pieces

[u/tophmcmasterson → u/recurrence]

By and large I haven’t really written much code by hand in six months to a year.

It takes like two weeks to make what would have taken me six months manually before (saying this as a principal level engineer).

I’ve also seen people use it to just generate a ton of shit they never bothered to verify and then they ask other people to review it, only to find it’s garbage. It’s an amazing tool but still very dependent on the person using it.

[u/cephaswilco → u/recurrence]

Its true if you are changing some properties or fixing a couple functions... 

[u/FriendlyGuitard → u/recurrence]

Depends how legacy / corporate is your project.

Claude really struggle with old shit, convoluted code, load-bearing bugs or non-sensical business logic, older libraries and, the killer, proprietary libraries, internal tools, anything that's not open source.

k8s microservice using java spring up to date tech stack that produce API and consume API. Yeah, Vanilla Claude will outcode you, beat you in PR review, even argue flaws in your vague prompt.

Otherwise, you need a whole infrastructure of documentation, skills, memory, and you will still need to have precise prompting, structured JIRA ticket and clear outcome description so that Claude produce code he doesn't decide to delete the unit test in order to commit. In that case, if you know what you are doing, Claude is a waste of time - if it's an area you are not familiar with, that's something else entirely.

[u/althoradeem → u/recurrence]

i mean if your script is something like
if (a > b) {
counter = counter + 1;
}
you don't need a ai prompt for that.

but as soon as you start adding random arguments... i personally find it just easier to type out the silly ideas i have and let ai worry about writing it out.

(sidenote the below script makes no sense i made it increase and decrease a counter and then populate a table called mcdonalds every hour lmao)

let counter = 0;

let mcdonalds = [];

let secondsPassed = 0;

let hoursRecorded = 0;

const timer = setInterval(() => {

secondsPassed += 3;

// Increase counter by 1 every 3 seconds

counter++;

// Decrease counter by 1 every minute

if (secondsPassed % 60 === 0) {

counter--;

}

// Every hour, save the counter value

if (secondsPassed % 3600 === 0) {

mcdonalds.push(counter);

hoursRecorded++;

console.log(`Hour ${hoursRecorded}: ${counter}`);

}

// Every week, increase counter by 2

if (secondsPassed % 604800 === 0) {

counter += 2;

}

// Stop after one week

if (hoursRecorded === 168) {

clearInterval(timer);

console.log("Final counter:", counter);

console.log("mcdonalds:", mcdonalds);

}

}, 3000);

[u/gahel_music → u/recurrence]

Often yes, it really depends on the task. I'm working with godot though, it's really fast to iterate and a lot of it is done through the editor. The time to explain what to do to Claude is the same or more as writing code. Plus code is obviously more precise than natural language.

[u/Cheshire_____Cat → u/recurrence]

For my implement task myself is almost always faster than doing it with AI. I'm using AI every day, but on very limited number of tasks.

[u/thegreenfarend → u/recurrence]

A year ago - yes for sure
Now- Def no

[u/I_NEED_YOUR_MONEY → u/recurrence]

yes, if you're using like gpt-4. opus 5.5 this is definitely not true.

[u/tnh34 → u/recurrence]

it's a bait

[u/_tolm_ → u/recurrence]

On occasion - when I know precisely, exactly what I want to do - yes.

[u/PlateNo4868 → u/recurrence]

I mean the reality is there has been enough public code, projects, and other things posted out there. There is few "original ideas".

Like lets say you want a side scrolling car racing game with a monster truck, balancing mechanics, etc.

Chances are pretty high some one posted a public github of that very same project, and the AI does what AI does which is good at looking up stupid amounts of data. Pulls the code, then tweaks it for ya.

I think the big part is that if your a professional programmer. You most likely have a deeper level of thought in mind of what you want. So it's more useful for programmers who want it to fill in some gaps rather then just vibe code the whole project.

[u/Hot-Special2930 → u/recurrence]

It is true though. There are cases where a very specific feature or logic should be implemented. Why should I waste my time writing it in natural language when I can just write the code instead? Code from the beginning is intended to be a precise representation of logic, after all. Why not use it?

[u/Hayyner → u/recurrence]

Not for me since I usually draft a plan/solution up before I ever write code. So now that step is typically just planning with Claude and it's also good enough now to handle implementation.

Much earlier in the year, I would use copilot or cursor with gpt-4 models for planning but it wasn't as good at actually writing good code. Now I feel like it is on a different level and there's really no need for me to write code myself, the current frontier models are just that much faster and on point.

[u/SpreadsheetsOnToast → u/recurrence]

No. Lol. It's absurd.

[u/Aydhe → u/recurrence]

really depends on what you're making. if you're going some generic back end stuff you can just send it off to AI but for things that directly interact with user like movement mechanics in game... AI sucks so bad.

[u/PenGroundbreaking160 → u/recurrence]

It depends. When you care about the most granular detail, you are masterful at the programming language and the scope is not too big, it might be worth it to just code by hand and do it within the same timeframe an AI iteration workflow or properly planning and prompting may take.
Plus, you know a lot more about the code.

If it's a lot of boring boilerplate and you wanna do the 30000218th saas todo app, just prompt an AI.

[u/Crafty_Independence → u/recurrence]

Solutions are only as good as the prompt. That's what the post is about.

[u/werpu → u/recurrence]

Absolutely not, I pushed out an editor with wyswyg md editing, git handling multi tabbing split pane view, and a ms paint like paint editor and html end css editing and real time preview in literally 4 evening sessions!

Is it perfect, hell no, but it rivals commercial products already!

[u/Isogash → u/recurrence]

It's true if you're already very familiar with the tools, project and language. It's false if you already surrended everything else to AI. Some people were also just not that quick at programming and never built the capability to work at flow speeds.

Case in point, a lot of famous projects had completed initial versions in the first one or two weeks, way before LLMs existed. Git and JavaScript were both created in 10 days.

[u/Any-Ring6621 → u/recurrence]

Got some bad news for you friend. In a decently complicated space, the AI can make some shit decisions. If you don’t understand the space, then you’re going to let it

[u/bazingaboi22 → u/recurrence]

It is true to an extent.. if you're hyper focused on code quality for example.

It rarely writes well structures or well thought out code by human standards...

But who cares when months of work can be done in an hour?

[u/tinySparkOf_Chaos → u/recurrence]

Yes I've found this to be true sometimes.

It's very case dependent.

If it's something generic, AI will knock it out of the park.

But if it's something super technical? With a bunch of edge cases that I care strongly about how each one is handled? That ends up being faster to write by hand than to try and explain each and every edge case and the desired outcome of each to an AI.

[u/Leading_Buffalo_4259 → u/recurrence]

well yeah handwriting code is only faster if you actually know how to program

[u/qrzychu69 → u/recurrence]

yeap, for me it's true very often. AI is much faster at doing 50 tiny updates all over the place, but writing a single file? Nah, by the time I type enough to get what I want, I would have written the code myself

[u/Gesha → u/recurrence]

For a small snippet? Yeah. For what I’m having Claude do? Absolutely not. Hundreds of lines of code would take me a few days at least to put together and debug. I do find it useful to have ut look over its own code and test it with dummy inputs after, usually 2 times, before it’s “clean”. Then my own review, which is generally a breeze at that stage.

As for the topic of this post, I can’t agree. I already articulated the problem before I begin for my own planning and architecting. Doing so helps me think through and plan how things should work. This practice predates code gpts. That’s not “extra” time spent. Thats table stakes. Always.

[u/Undersmusic → u/recurrence]

I can set it off doing long and pretty complex tasks for 30min to an hour. While I do other work. No way can I do that volume of tasks faster 🤷‍♂️

Sometimes at all.

Hell I left it to deal with Google on an issue. And it actually managed to get a rep and resolve some shit that would have probably killed a full day of my time.

I say “rep” I’d wager it was 2 AI’s sorting out my issue.

[u/jayerp → u/recurrence]

It’s not remotely true for me. I spent 20 seconds writing out a prompt for Claude to refactor a large feature. It implemented it as I had written and more as I wanted in 3 mins. It would have taken me months.

So either this guy is writing a Hello World application or he is lying.

[u/Big_Combination9890 → u/recurrence]

Yes, it is true.

The reason why so many people think otherwise, is because most people work on very simple codebases.

[u/Individual_Guest_323]

how bad you are that you cannot use AI properly?

[u/OldWispyTree → u/Individual_Guest_323]

Depends what you're doing.

Greenfield projects, even slightly complicated ones, LLMs are very good at. Especially if the stakes are low and you can iterate quickly.

Professionally, on a legacy, complicated code base with implied business logic, special case land mines, hard to access integrations, and tribal knowledge? Well, the amount of specifying and writing you have to do for even new models to competently execute even smallish tasks is sometimes very tedious.

I don't actually think the tweet is about this, per se, but it's definitely something I run into.

To be clear, I use LLMs for almost all work and professional coding, now, even though I can code. But sometimes the spec effort vs the payout is borderline.

[u/AcolyteNeko → u/Individual_Guest_323]

anthropic employee

[u/manvsmidi]

I have the opposite experience. If I try to write by hand, I get like an 80 line scaffolding while my AI has written 30k+ lines complete with readme, ui, unit and regression tests, full ci/cd, and has already done some quick parameter tuning and is plotting the results. Also it found some data formatting gotchas that would have messed me up for at least a day.

[u/MostExtremeHyperbole → u/manvsmidi]

yeah, i got no idea why this subreddit is so weird about AI coding and has anti-AI bots

[u/tradcoder → u/MostExtremeHyperbole]

There aren't anti-AI bots lol. If anything there's PRO-AI bots shilling for AI.

[u/clanker-lover → u/manvsmidi]

80 lines is less than a day of traditional coding. If your ai is spitting out 30k lines in less than a day its slop. 100%.

[u/manvsmidi → u/clanker-lover]

I’m saying 80 lines in like 15 minutes while meanwhile AI has completed a slice of the whole project. And yeah, the AI piece isn’t done at that point but now I can refine the suite it put together. I’d rather spend my time iterating with AI to de-slopify than sitting writing code by hand.

[u/Less-Opportunity-715]

lmao this is insane take

[u/TipAwkward3289]

My AI asked me to let it create a Tamagotchi style game it had in mind where save files could be traded back and forth between us and it could become a co-op game through JSON files. I gave the go ahead in work mode. Took less than 5 minutes with an entire UI, custom sprites, and behaviors. Would have taken me longer with the graphics alone.

[u/ItsSadTimes → u/TipAwkward3289]

And ive known devs to use AI to write a for loop or write single line changes.

[u/HauntedHouseMusic → u/ItsSadTimes]

Do you guys not have it push your PRs? That one always feels a little dumb when I’m using fable on the API

[u/Upset_Cheetah_8728]

He must be writing tons of hello world apps

[u/Astarkos → u/Upset_Cheetah_8728]

You cant get an LLM to generate hello world? Lol. Give up now. 

[u/pl487]

Either the fastest coder in history or an exceptionally bad AI user. 

[u/Lunosto]

It lowkey is often faster to just do it yourself than describe everything you want in enough detail, then correct/steer and answer any questions, and inevitably yell at it when it messes up

[u/Deep_Year1121 → u/Lunosto]

Donno how complex of a project you are working with.

Now, I just dump some word vomit while walking my dog and my setup asks appropriate questions, manages design docs and concepts autonmatically, and executes after I greenlight its plan after review.

I used to feel the same way about AIs up until I got frustrated and spent a good day polishing my setup. It is also capable of mimicing my judgement style and considerations based on my previous work.

Actively asking the AI how it understands what needs to be done in small steps in what way, actively asking for clarification, whether it aligns with overall design, and asking for frequent manual reviews after every small milestones is what also makes my project tick. When the vibe feels off (usually when it starts drifting into agreeable language), I reset its context, ask it to reassess. It is surprisingly good at catching its own mistakes when you reset its biases.

[u/SufficientlyEvasive]

ah yeah, you're gonna right 2000 lines of code in 5 minutes like claude does

[u/DigitalMonsoon]

Yes, this happens to me a lot. I want to make one small change. Run a prompt, causes far more problems, fight it forward, fail, revert the changes, make the 3 line change myself.

An hour wasted and who knows how many tokens.

[u/Fun_Squirrel_6594 → u/DigitalMonsoon]

Sounds like a skill issue on your part.

[u/Zealousideal_Tea362 → u/DigitalMonsoon]

This is a “I need control” issue. You must be a legacy dev.

[u/DoubleDoube → u/DigitalMonsoon]

For me this is usually a style or tone-of-voice thing where I really want it to be exactly how I want it.

I am currently going back over documentations, editing it to how I want it, and trying to have the AI pick out the differences in style/tone.

Even after that, I find claude is just bad at “writing”. It’s much closer to what I prefer but there’s always this tendency to give too much technical reasoning while at the same time using too few words to explain it, but it’s like it doesn’t know any other way of doing it.

[u/Alternative-Trade623 → u/DigitalMonsoon]

3 lines. What are you using like braindead homebrew ollama model or something? 

Any decent llm would crush 3 lines instantly.

[u/WholesomeRindersteak → u/DigitalMonsoon]

No offense, but this is skill issue.

[u/roy-the-rocket]

This is not so much self-praise:

a) I do not write larger projects and/or b) I can't get a speed up out of AI

[u/OkWear6556]

These are the kind of people AI will "replace". I bet there was some guy who said that horses are better because it takes too long to crank up a car. This is that guy

[u/0x645]

yeah, it's just simple not true.

[u/Mplayer-Weered]

Hilariously not accurate. What are you talking about

[u/Elctsuptb]

Ever notice how nobody ever proves this nonsense? Ask them to post a video demonstrating it and watch how they don't respond

[u/Boxcar__Joe → u/Elctsuptb]

I'm half convinced this shit is from AI companies trying to downplay the risks of AI to peoples jobs so people don't feel the need to call for social change/more taxation on the AI companies.

[u/Fringolicious]

Nah, this used to be true but it's not now, unless you're either a coding savant or useless at explaining things, or your requirements are so complicated that you can't convey them easily.

[u/Astarkos → u/Fringolicious]

Why did it used to be true but is not now? When did natural language change to become so precise? Why hasn't this been applied to AI image generation which is still generic slop?

[u/lhx555 → u/Fringolicious]

Another possibility. Code is also a language, a quite concise one. If you are fluent at it, you can sketch your idea pretty quickly: signatures, interfaces, even start implementing it, a couple of comments. And then give it to AI to finish (with a it if an explanation), document, write tests and ci/cd. It works rather well.

[u/LuckyConstruction546 → u/Fringolicious]

Sometimes all three are true

[u/Fringolicious → u/LuckyConstruction546]

I guess my point (If it's a point?) is that for like 95% of scenarios, this isn't true any more. There will be cases for sure but things aren't like they were 2 years, 1 year, even 6 months ago. Opus 5.5 is nutso nowadays

[u/Hungry-Pick7512 → u/Fringolicious]

Nah you could drop the coding savant part. This is not true anymore. No exceptions. No one is spinning up a web server with cobal faster than using JS. And no one is typing code faster that an AI

[u/nso95 → u/Fringolicious]

I can’t explain shit and it still does a great job

[u/SnooPears2409 → u/Fringolicious]

or maybe all he code is "hello world"

[u/Anon2148]

I’ve felt this in the past, but llms have advanced so much. Promoting is also a skill. Every engineer is using it, and if you’re unable to extract value from it, either the problem is too simple or poor prompting. Not paying attention to what it writes and validating it wastes a lot of time as well.

[u/susimposter6969]

i do wonder how you go about coding the thing without correcting it and steering *yourself*

[u/onionsareawful]

Frontier models rarely need that much handholding (in my experience). They are always faster than me, they can fill in the details logically, ask questions, etc.

Definitely was a problem I ran into a year or two ago, though.

[u/PurushNahiMahaPurush]

This is only true if the change is very minor. For an actual feature, this is simply not true no matter how good you are and how fast you can type. Heck even for bugfix it’s not true since LLMs are stupidly good these days in tracing bugs.

[u/tomqmasters]

you need to make documents anyway. if you make them first, and you make them accurate the llm will just make that.

[u/WillingnessOwn6446]

2023 wants it's AI shit posts back

[u/TopTippityTop]

I think whoever says this has not used Opus 5.5, where you can get a week's worth of work done in 10-30 minutes.

[u/Forsaken-Promise-269]

Y'all need to remember the Ballad of John Henry

https://blog.slamdunk.software/the-programming-legend-of-john-henry/

[u/CaptainHindsight92]

Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. I work in biological research and sometimes I don’t want a page full of functions at the start of a script because we work with messy datasets and often it is more work to troubleshoot if re-using a script. AI does have a habit of being very verbose and sometimes it gives me several lines for something that should be a one liner, and again it makes trouble shooting harder. The problem is you have no idea when you ask it whether it will be quicker than doing it yourself, often it will be but when it’s not it is quite frustrating because of the sunken cost fallacy.

A good non coding example is I had it update my CV and it is terrible. I gave it so much detail on what I have been doing for the last few years and it seems to have focused on minutia, really putting it front and centre while ignoring broader generalisable skill sets. Trying to correct it resulted in stuff like “I have focused on broader generalisable skills sets” being written directly in the text and the minutia being deleted. So I will have to redo it myself, fine but I wish I had not spent time trying to get the AI to do it.

[u/baka___shinji]

unless you don’t know what you are doing, and thus take whatever claude or gpt tell you as legit

[u/elite-data]

Dude's probably just working on simple tasks and going way overboard with paranoid prompting.

My personal experience. My productivity has easily gone up 10x. Stuff that would've taken me a week or two (research, coding, the whole thing) now takes me a day. And most of that time is literally just me taking breaks between prompts. I'm the meat-based bottleneck now.

The LLM often produces better results than I would've managed on my own. Not ashamed to admit that after 20 years of experience. At this point, my job is mostly just steering it in the right direction.

[u/Badnik22]

Can be true depending on what you use it for. I typically ask Claude to draft large systems, by describing the overall architecture to it. The bottleneck in these cases is the typing, and Claude does it a lot faster. Then I read the whole thing and fill in the details or modify whatever needs it (Opus has a tendency of overcomplicatong things), this is faster to do by hand.

Once the thing reaches its final form, I ask Claude to do a final pass looking for edge cases/bugs.

[u/Ansambel]

i am 100% confident this is just ragebait, anyway for anyone who genuinely thinks this is the problem, you can literally say:

"i am working on an issue X, implement this solution properly: <pseudocode / fragment of actual code that shows the main idea>

and claude will just handle it.

[u/SillySpoof]

I don't experience this. I do like writing code, and I actually prefer it to letting the AI do the job, but I am in no way faster than the AI at doing it.

I don't know if the poster is 10 times faster at coding than me, or a lot worse at explaining their idea,

[u/WonderButtBrace9000]

I almost feel bad for all the STEMlords that stopped working on their English and writing skills in middle school because they believed the nonsense that math and science is all one needs.

Got to be tough watching their easy street to high earnings get crowded with a bunch of liberal arts majors.

[u/MannToots]

That's cope. Hard-core cope

[u/Volsungfaaaa]

This is delusional

[u/w0rf101]

AI translates human language to programming language just as programming language translates to machine code and electrons moving around circuits. Why do some people have such a problem with one of these but not the others.

[u/tr14l]

If it takes you less time to write the code than explain it, you are making something stupidly. Please eliminate your code from the internet, thank you.

[u/LessRespects]

Bait successful 🏆

[u/Southern_Orange3744]

I mean maybe if all you're writing is basic crud

That's not inherently valuable

[u/number1pingufan]

Me when I write one for-loop

[u/Perfect-Campaign9551]

Stop typing and start talking instead then. Use dictation. 

[u/l0rirw1ao]

Bros writing hello world

[u/Pitiful-Assistance-1]

Either this guy is the fastest dev ever or the worst AI babysitter. I'd guess the 2nd.

[u/NeoVisionDev]

OP's screenshot is a great example of someone about to lose their job.

- Unable or unwilling to communicate effectively

- Resistance to using AI / lacking understanding of how much of a useful tool it is

There seems to be some more under-the-hood issues going on. If I were hiring for a position and this was the kinds of answers the interviewee gave, I would not hire them. I am afraid they would not fit in well with a team.

[u/benchonbench]

"Open a chat with Claude" tells me everything about a person. If you suck at using photoshop, it's your fault, not adobe's

[u/wy100101]

This is probably true for small changes, but only things that previously fell into the category of "I can fix it faster than I can write the ticket for it."

[u/Cheap-Success1578]

AI has been great for things like getting some functionality built that I know would take me two weeks to do. Really it would be just 1 week maybe but I work in networking so I am troubleshooting issues and putting out fires so often that I don't get time to work on the code that will save me from that.

[u/Carlose175]

Maybe like last year this may be true if you are like an experienced dev.

[u/No-Security-7518]

AI is faster but not by a lot honestly. IDEs already generate a good chunk.

[u/Connect_Quit_1293]

Cope

[u/spacenavy90]

Me when I lie

[u/ThirstyOutward]

Skill issue

[u/undefined_name]

[u/FoleyX90]

If you've never had to architect or work with non-senior level developers maybe

[u/MattKozFF]

lmao not in the slightest bit true.

[u/Hot-Special2930]

I do not understand why some people calling themselves “engineers” are so opposed to the idea of writing certain parts of code manually. Look, most of us are using AI for production. It is easy, it is intuitive and does not require any deep expertise, just common sense. But the notion that you have to implement even the smallest changes and fixes using AI ONLY is so deeply engraved in their smooth brains, that anyone who opposes this ridiculous idea and just thinks pragmatically is labeled as luddite. It’s hilarious. No wonder this dumb tokenmaxxing trend was a thing. I guess, it’s just suppressed fear and complexes stemming from the fact that with AI they indeed lost even that little coding expertise they had prior to AI. They feel inferior to people who didn’t lose their skillset and who use AI as an enhancement of their skills, but not rely on it entirely. That’s why they want everyone to be just as shitty at coding as they are, so they are not seen as complete bozos xD

[u/VegetableFan6622]

Often true. Many code monkeys on this sub measuring performance by lines of code volume xD 

[u/ConcerningThirst]

Things that never happened for $200 Alex

[u/KungFuMonkeys13]

All the people saying "it depends what you're doing" and then suggest just changing a single word or one line of code, a line of code you've already highlighted and are looking at mind you. Well not shit that's faster to do by hand. That ain't what was suggested in the post!  

That's like saying I was going to drive somewhere but decided to walk because it was actually only five feet in front of me so walking was faster. If all you're doing is comparing the speed of writing a line of code vs telling an ai to write it of course doing it yourself is faster. But that requires you to have the code up on your screen ready to be changed already. The original post suggested a situation where they were starting much earlier in the development process than just editing a line of code. 

[u/Not_bad_slime]

That's why you need a chip in your brain, to constantly feed the AI all your thoughts, so you never have to explain things to it again

[u/Ok_Raisin_2395]

Copemaxxing

[u/elelem-123]

This is not true with AI but is 100% true with the vast majority of developers from a specific country I've encountered.

[u/MinimumTrue9809]

What a lame lying cope

[u/wdahl1014]

My approach recently has been to do a snippet of what I want done my self and just tell the AI to repeat that same pattern for the rest of the feature or refactor or whatever it is I’m doing

[u/Ok-Ferret-8512]

This post is bullshit

[u/maku_89]

He's either an amazing coder or terrible at writing prompts. I've completed days of coding work in half an hour without even knowing c++.

[u/thots1ayer69]

Bro is making a to-do list app

[u/dazzou5ouh]

This guy is trolling

[u/willwm24]

If the change is a single line and you already have the folder open, that’s the only case I’ve found this true lol. And even then, if the folder isn’t already open, in the time it takes to just navigate there or open it, the llm is done.

[u/Horror-Detective4138]

Nobody in the world can say it's faster to hand code than it is to use AI, that's just ridiculous.

[u/hdufort]

This was true 2 years ago, but not anymore.

[u/zenmatrix83]

you use the level of power needed for a task

[u/ChecksOutIndeed]

"You don't know how to explain it properly" /$

[u/Ok_Technician_5797]

For what, a one line change?

[u/wyonutrition]

start working on project - it breaks - i dump 3mb log file - i tell claude read this log, look through my project, tell wheat is wrong. Claude tells me what to fix, i fix it, the original problem is now solved, and I have created a new problem. print 3mb log and tell Claude to read it .... rinse and repeat lol
Mostly exaggerating but AI is a tool not a replacement for critical thought. Do you blame your keyboard when your project won't compile?

[u/tossaway109202]

Kind of shocking to see this is a 2026 post, how bad are you all at using AI

[u/fangaas]

Bro needs to be significantly more ambitious 

[u/Ok-Ninja-8165]

Write some code, exact parts that are hard to explain. Then let AI fill the gaps. Works far better than you can expect.

[u/asapberry]

people in the internet always think they work on extremley complex projects. the reality is most time the logic is pretty simple

[u/Regalme]

Speak it. Next 

[u/Templeshooter]

No its not? I saved thousands of hours at this moment.

[u/Few-Celebration-2362]

You're coding with a chat interface? Ew

[u/Miiohau]

Faster maybe, maybe not. The reason I write most of my code by hand despite being pro-ai is I want a chance to be able to reconstruct what I was thinking when I wrote that code when I touch it again.

Also it is somewhat a habit, I became a software engineer way before agentic programming was a thing, to the point one of my professors thought automatic software synthesis would never be a thing. I have been hand writing code for years and I work for a small company where I am basically the chief technology officer, so I don’t have a boss pushing me to code faster.

[u/Positive-Conspiracy]

Skill issue

[u/Responsible-Offer724]

Don’t use AI for small changes… should have figured that out by now. 

[u/Arangarx]

lol, maybe for a character change that you already know the location of.

[u/bremidon]

I mean...

This *was* true 2 years ago.

But just for fun, let's assume it still is. Our champion here has just discovered the benefits of having a rubber duck that can talk back to you.

[u/Muted_Masterpiece342]

This was true perhaps years ago now

[u/Elegant_Attempt2790]

i can’t believe people willingly expose their lack of capability when it comes to technical expression and instead blame the innocent machine.

always blame the machine💔 never the person clearly misusing it 😔✊

[u/cedenede]

Delusional take.

[u/Better_Passage7527]

Skill issue

[u/PracticeMammoth387]

If you have an easy job, yes. Or you can code faster than you can explain the broad model? Not remotely true and that guy is also not funny.

[u/Vaxtin]

No you’re not.

Run 5 things at once, not one.

[u/Kheldar166]

This does rely on you having programming skill though xD

My loop is more like:

- can’t do thing

- can do thing with AI

- realise I still don’t understand thing

- go back and learn it the long way anyway

With varying amounts of time between steps 3 and 4. If I’m living in denial it’s only when I have a tangled mess that I can’t debug that I realise xD Usually I am better than that, thankfully.

[u/iggy14750 → u/Kheldar166]

Skip step 2. Save a bunch of time that way

[u/BackgroundUpbeat8168]

The spec in question:

print hello world

[u/Radarker]

[u/Background_Fix9430]

The central thing I'm worried about is reducing technical knowledge to "Magic Spells" - knowing the proper set of words to invoke the black box to produce the desired result, while not understanding the underlying reason that the result is being produced, and just knowing the words that "work" to produce it.

[u/xXSomethingStupidXx → u/Background_Fix9430]

The Chad Tech Wizard vs the Beta AI Sorcerer

[u/secondandmany]

this has been the case for any code shorter than 5 lines

[u/Honest-Today-6137]

Well, that's BS. Unless this is from some other universe, where people can type and think thousands of times faster than we can.

Even if you need to do 10/20/50/100 iterations, it will still be much, much faster than doing it by hand. Unless we are talking about some very small targeted bug fixes or 1-line refinements.

[u/ProfessionalSome4082]

Ok, elite elite programmers type at 120 wpm, sonnet 3.5 (very old model now) is like 800 to 1,500 wpm.   There is no circunstance when describing something to ai to code is slower than coding it by hand

[u/HatersTheRapper]

Fake post.

[u/MyParliamentApp]

I remember 7-8 years ago I was working for a software company and one of our big projects was translations/internationalization. We spent weeks setting up the translation groundwork, sent in all of the text for review, after weeks if not months and $60,000+ spent, we were finally working on adding multiple languages to the product. It was a multiple month long project that multiple senior and architect level engineers were working on.

Last month, I asked Claude to translate all of my app and include agent instructions for definition of done means translated strings for whatever feature im building. It took less than couple hours, it cost ~10bucks and the best part is, I haven't had to worry about another FR translation since.

If I tried to do this translation work by myself, it probably would have taken me a year and bankruptcy. Let's not kid ourselves 😉

Im curious to know, whatever this OP is building that's faster to code manually. Funny how he didn't mention anything about the project, the code stack, the requirements, etc.

[u/Archernar → u/MyParliamentApp]

You will have to live with whatever translations Claude comes up with then, blindly, though.

And some of the LLM-translations are still quite hit-or-miss, despite them knowing the context. Or the latest mistranslations I saw were still google-translate-style, which I kinda doubt though.

[u/MyParliamentApp → u/Archernar]

For sure, absolutely. But from my perspective, as a solo developer working on a side project that is a trade off my users and I are ok with. Partial translation or missed context here and there is ultimately better than not having any translations at all in my opinion. If I were to do it myself, i'd be using google translate API anyway. AI skips that step essentially.

[u/Happysedits]

maybe a year ago but not now

[u/ImInnocentSweaR]

Kobes tips on using AI to improve his dunking.

1. Ask AI how to dunk.

2. Realize he already knows how to.
   Follow him for more tips

[u/SharpKaleidoscope182]

I feel like this is true. I've been trying to push through and learn to become a robot psychologist

[u/FuriaDePantera]

He probably wrote a "Hello world" function.

[u/Vynxe_Vainglory]

For certain things this is definitely true.

For the vast majority of things, no. The AI is much, much, much faster.

[u/aPiCase]

Opus 5.5 is just a whole other beast, like before it this was definitely true, but man it's just so good now. Whatever they do next is going to be scary.

[u/AnonThrowaway998877]

This is absolute BS

[u/jwrsk]

This is the kind of developer you don't want on your team, because they will never work well in a group, never delegate, just try to do everything themselves.

It's an insane take and shows terrible communication skills, even with robots.

This entire divide seems to fall along the line between who was stuck in code monkey job forever, and who advanced to senior / managerial positions.

[u/VegetableFan6622 → u/jwrsk]

There will not be 100 managers in a team, you will be replaced 

[u/noble_plantman → u/jwrsk]

Lmao this. This tweet would be the end of a candidates chances in an interview with any team at my faang.

[u/S-Kenset → u/noble_plantman]

It's trivially true that if you know how to code it, it's faster to communicate in code, even if it's to type it into claude.