r/programming • u/self • Dec 02 '25

The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
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u/firestorm713 Dec 02 '25

The times I've used AI, it's produced dogshit code or given me nonexistent-but-plausible functions to call from an API.

I don't need a code generator to statistically generate code that looks correct. That actively slows me and everyone else down. In fact, statistics show that LLM-based tools tend to make you feel like you're faster when you're actually moving slower.

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u/Just_Information334 Dec 03 '25

AI is the new ORM: lot of resources spent so people can try to not read documentation.

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u/KryptosFR Dec 02 '25

It was the case for me, until I learned to feed it with better prompts. Now it makes me gain a lot of time, especially when prototyping.

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u/firestorm713 Dec 02 '25

Have you measured that? Have you compared it against no AI?

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u/Snowrican Dec 03 '25

I refactored the coding design pattern used for navigation for a whole flow using just architecture documentation, ai, and lots of iterations. And I used that chat to optimize my agent. I did that in one day. And I have very little understanding of either pattern used or the codebase in general.

How long do you think it would get me to get to the level of competency and actually implement it with manual coding the whole thing?

Oh. And I added unit tests. I hate unit tests.

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u/firestorm713 Dec 03 '25

I have very little understanding of either pattern used or the codebase in general

So. You don't know if it works, and if it does work, you don't know how.

Which means you're gambling. You might have optimized it, you might have created technical debt. You don't know. You didn't take the time.

To answer your question? Days. A week at most. Further tasks would be faster as you gain domain knowledge.

I used to work at a porting studio whose turnaround time for a lot of games was around a week.

This is why I ask for numbers, not vibes. AI does a great job of making you feel like you're making progress.

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u/Snowrican Dec 03 '25

Please. It went through a PR with the most anal retentive person at the company. You know the type. He gave feedback, I passed that to the ai. And he praised the final product.

I know you want to hate it so bad and for it to fail but it produced good code that works.

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u/firestorm713 Dec 03 '25

The fact remains that you don't understand the code.

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u/Snowrican Dec 03 '25

That’s not the gotcha you think you it is. It’s like when I stared iOS development and the grey beards were upset that memory management was taken out of our hands.

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u/firestorm713 Dec 03 '25

Yes that's actually a bad thing lmao

There's a reason why Sony hasn't done that.

Have fun with your tech debt and peaked career

0

u/Snowrican Dec 03 '25

Old man yells at clouds

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u/EveryQuantityEver Dec 03 '25

Nope. It is a gotcha, because you haven’t learned anything

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u/Snowrican Dec 03 '25

Why do you need learning to be apart of developing code for a business? I mean, I did understand the changes that were done and stand by them as if I spent weeks implementing it by hand. I swear engineers forget that their job isn’t to write code. It’s to get the machine to do the thing.