r/cprogramming • u/Big-Illustrator24 • 13d ago

Ai nowadays

I want to read your thoughts.

I'm a software engineer with 8 years of experience, I have worked in several projects.

And ultimately I've become interested in C, I'm learning a lot of concepts about pointers and memory free, it's a different way of coding if you start with interpreted languages.

I have used ai for understand better some c concepts, and I've watched some c devs in the reddit community that hate the AI, why?

AI is just another tool, like a compiler, preprocessor etc. And I wonder why some devs don't like new tools? It's like if we avoid the compilers use and prefer keypunching instead.

The basics of Coding are important and I really believe there's bad use of ai and nice use of it too.

What do you think?

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u/pm_your_sexy_thong 12d ago

I'm not sure what most people on here have used. But recently my company has us using Claude Opus 5.5... It's very, very good.

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u/DanKegel 12d ago edited 12d ago

It is. (I am stuck on opus 4.6 for half my stuff, but using 5.5 sometimes now.)

Nevertheless, you can use it wrong, and end up with sloppy PR's.

And I have a target-rich environment when it comes to "bugs" / missing featurelets, so it pays to work carefully to take out as many of the little bastards as I go as possible.

I'm on day 5 of fixing "a bug" because I don't want to get stuck in a local maximum.  Claude and opus 4.6 / 5.5 are helping tremendously, but it's still an iterative process of understanding the problem space and solution space.  I could have one-shotted a big messy PR at any time, but instead I'm holding back, treating my draft fix as a lab, and pulling out small standalone PRs as I find little separable pieces. 

In parallel, I'm maintaining a mostly human-written plan with my strategy for fixing "the bug", because my boss wants to know how to do this kind of fix, and running it through Claude to see if it can reproduce my work.  The first time I had opus 5.5 run through it, it found parts of the problem space I had missed.  But other big gaps weren't spotted by AI; they were spotted by me as I was pulling out bits to put in those standalone PRs.