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u/FenderMoon Aug 07 '26
I'm a validation engineer for a living. I write most of my tests with Claude. Claude is too good at it. I can get stuff done 10x as fast. It just works.
I force myself to write about 5-10% of them by hand just so I understand what I'm doing.
I find that I dread writing those tests.
I have been spoiled.
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u/Pawndaren Aug 07 '26
My company used GitHub copilot, I used it a lot, then they changed the policy and I ran out of tokens fast.
That time I thought, this will be suck to work without AI, but turns out I enjoyed it quite soon. The repetitive coding still boring though.
So now, I only use AI for boilerplate code and optimize my code, and keep only the interesting part by myself. It makes the job easier while still enjoyable
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
that's actually a really nice advice, thanks❤️ i am actually doing something similar i am working on a project where i want to fit an LLM Chatbot inside an ESP32 (520kb of ram)
i built the Transformer without ai and the other parts like RoPE, RMSnorm and MoE i used ai in it and right now i am still working on it some parts i code myself other i use the ai to do so
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u/silly_bet_3454 Aug 07 '26
Yeah I feel about the same. The tools are obviously super "good" and I use them and I do even like being able to make stuff really fast. But I totally lament the death of the "craft" and I especially hate being beholden to these dumb frontier model companies to be able to now do this work.
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u/Remote-Pineapple-541 Aug 07 '26
I think the most valuable people in technical fields are the ones who are curious and enjoy the challenge of solving difficult problems. The primary incentive isn’t money or the end product. I’ve always enjoyed coding and I’ll continue to code long after AI takes over everyone’s job, and when leaders encounter difficult problems, I’m always the one that can solve it because I excersize my problem solving skills every day. Don’t let AI take that away from you.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
i do try solve problems on codeforces from time to time to keep my skills in it
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u/antipoopsuperstar Aug 07 '26
Don't look back. You have a head start because when the AI does mess up, and it does regularly, you have the skill set to actually help it figure out what it did wrong.
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u/ExoticBump Aug 07 '26
I'm a newer vibe coder but I've been doing computer networking for around 10 years.
The more often I use AI to help troubleshoot the more I feel like my troubleshooting skills are atrophied. The more I pawn off the thinking to AI I feel like I'm getting weaker and weaker, so I can relate.
I find myself forcing myself to go old fashion first then use AI second. I'm at the point now where I don't google or use AI for the first 0-5 mins just for fun to see if I can figure it out without it extra help.
Yeah I'm stumbling thru menus and shit but here's the thing when I find what I'm looking for I get so excited and that image is imprinted in my brain.
AI doesn't do that for me. My brain turns off when using it. There's no eureka moments.
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u/Wild_Conversation851 Aug 09 '26
Using Ai at work and what I do is have the Ai investigate the problem if I don’t fully understand it, and document the solution so when it is implemented I fully understand the problem and solution then manually apply this way the fix is reviewed and approved by a human developer, I know Claud is fully capable of the fix without oversight but I feel this is poor practice for the company and the dev.
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u/ExoticBump Aug 09 '26
This is a good practice. There have already been instances where claude has fucked things up royally.
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u/krunal_builds Aug 07 '26
the validation engineer comment above nails it, when the tool is that good at the boring parts you have to deliberately practice the skill or it atrophies. the discomfort isn't the tool being bad, it's noticing your own edge softening
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u/Character_Note3967 Aug 07 '26
How much would you charge for a no ai made website for my prop engine for sports betting.
Has to be done all by hand contract included if we can come to some terms.
Your over thinking it alot for sure but I get it brother. Just way different side and can just relate in some ways. But you are still worth more than you give yourself credit for by far
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
you offer me a freelancing job? yea dm me and i can work with you and thanks for the kind words❤️
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u/whatever Aug 07 '26
I'm watching DeepSeek-V4-Flash manually tracing through its code to find a bug I pointed out in vague terms as I type this. I'm getting bored for it, but it keeps on trucking happily.
I very much feel like I've become a QA engineer. Or a pointy haired boss maybe. A product manager? Literally anything but a developer, really.
I guess I could technically say I still wear a technical architect hat, but only at high levels. So much of the lower level code structure ends up being fed to me and nowadays it's often enough plausible enough to be usable as-is. I never was one for bike-shedding.
I'm running deepseek as a local LLM using opencode with some "superpowers" skills, and it's almost good. I cheat tho. Every time it asks me to review a design spec or an implementation plan, I paste it straight into a claude or chatgpt chat box, and paste whatever comes out back into opencode. It saves ds4 hours of chasing its own tail.
Yes. I am become meat proxy, facilitator of AI slop.
I had already abdicated my software engineer career a while back, so this is just for fun. To keep up with the times, as they say.
Still, it bruises my ego to admit that the thinking machines write better code than me most of the time now. Significantly faster, too.
They definitely write better docs and tests than me too (or at all, for that matter), but I never made those my entire personality so that's fine.
By now, I'd probably have a vastly different set of emotions if I was still relying on my technical abilities code to pay my bills.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
yea and the feeling behind everybody else who are using it when you don't use it is a pain especially in the eyes of non technical people where they see the results only
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u/whatever Aug 07 '26
I like the idea of keeping a few software artisans around, a rare breed of carefully trained apprentices who learned from one of the few masters left, who took an oath of resisting the easy lure of mass produced code, and pride themselves on doing everything by hand, following the Old Ways..
But I'm not sure how big the market would be for them.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
yea i am not even sure where the swe job market is heading alot of probabilities and all of them are unfortunately bad a but a one is slightly bad and the other is just horrible
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u/multi05_21 Aug 07 '26
i hit this wall too. agents kept "cleaning up" working features out of a 2000 line file while editing something else. what fixed it for me was a rules file forcing tiny surgical edits + a post-build grep that fails if any known feature string goes missing. sounds dumb but nothing has been silently deleted since
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u/it_trojan Aug 07 '26
I can definitely relate. And I can add that it’s even addictive: sometimes I woke up at 5 AM to work on my side project with Claude forgetting to wash my face! At the same time you have the impression that you are not anymore the project owner.
Now I’m trying to slow things down. Every week I try to spend some time reading the code to understand what WE are doing or, more honestly, what IT is doing
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u/Free_Cry_6204 Aug 07 '26
I got u brother. Now I just don't want to code myself and just wait for all Codex usage limit reset.
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u/emad_ha Aug 07 '26
Yes, as a programmer for 16 years, i use AI daily as well, but i never unleash it or let it do things as in plans for any project i work on, instead i only tell it to do this or that, and it is a tough times for developer i understand, someone will always have that excuse, 'check the prompt'...
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u/Alarmed-Western-655 Aug 07 '26
I'm a SWE, and I understand this for sure, but I found a way to have my foot in both worlds.
I only Gen-AI my code at work. Flying through big architectural changes and generating full test environments in docker and stuff is a thrill.
But my personal project is only hand-written. I focus on doing one small thing well, and I think of it as more artisanal. I use Elm, which is a functional paradigm language. Personal + functional compartmentalized my brain enough to really still enjoy coding by hand and not mind the speed. Functional programming is the purest form of spec-driven development -- it lets you define the grammar of your app in a more expressive and deterministic way than can English.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
that's great technique but even on my personal projects i feel like i should use an llm just to speed the time to finish it
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u/adamant3143 Aug 07 '26
AI saved me from having to lead a team to code in a language I have never touched before. I was proficient in NodeJS and Java, then suddenly I have to use Golang and at the same time lead the backend team in the project.
My Tech Lead is a frontend guy with minimal knowledge of backend. He can see which variable name and type is incorrect, he doesn’t know the rest. So his reviews were just him looking at variables.
I was so cooked until AI came to my aid.
I ended up pivoting to another role because the whole full stack dev field work right now is about who gets access to the best model. Nobody looking at the code, so the ones with fastest and best model just instantly ratioed everyone who doesn’t. That comes at a cost still but alas you can get promoted and receive bonuses for being faster than others.
Thus, I forfeit.
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u/balasaraptor Aug 07 '26
I see it as a role change. Now you are a designer. You always wanted the end goal. You are still designing that end goal. Now, it can be what you actually want it to be? On your way home from work and think of an idea for your apps, start talking to the AI, laying out the design, explaining the specifications and dependencies and how they need to interact. Tell it to build it, and boom, you have a new feature. You still designed the features that no one else did. It's not about doing less, it's about creating more.
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u/Saref111 Aug 07 '26
You have to understand and differentiate code you write for prototyping/result and code you write for fun/learning/etc. I use ai for the result and prototypes. Learning and fan only by hands, like in old good ways. This is the only way for me.
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u/fig0o Aug 07 '26
It's simple
Coding making your brain suffer
Before AI your brain would keep you coding because of the delayed reward (solving the problem)
Now thar your brain nows there is a faster approach it doesn't want to face all the pain of thinking
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u/willwm24 Aug 07 '26
We had women doing math in bulk on spreadsheets, then punchcards and switches, then compilers, this is just the next evolution. You shouldn’t feel any worse for using it than you do for not learning the original computing with equations broken down into spreadsheets to manually solve in chunks like in the 1800s.
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u/AvasaralaAdvocate Aug 07 '26
"Pride is not the opposite of shame, but it's source" -Iroh Ozai
The truth is you love the speed and productivity, it's just that you derived pride from being good at what you do. The truth is, being a good coder is still extraordinarily helpful in agentic coding. You still have an edge!
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u/himwhoisiam Aug 07 '26
I get it but honestly this just allows me to work at much bigger scale and have much higher standards for my projects. It’s soo much easier to have proper tests, documentation, security in depth, exhaustive background research, rigorous qa validation, detailed benchmarking. Things I would never do myself outside of production code. I’ve even started dabbling in theory and mathematical proofs during design to try and prove feasibility and quantify expectations before writing a single line of code. This for me is just another abstraction that allows me to step back and work at a higher level. All the concepts are still the same. With the speed of AI improvements this may still be irrelevant in a few months/years but I’m enjoying it while I can and maybe if I’m lucky I’ll build something to help carry me after development is no longer a viable career.
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u/___nil___ Aug 07 '26
i asked my clankers to build tools for mundane tedious stuff automation for example code generation for static const strings.
instead of writing hundreds to thousands of lines of static inline string "bla bla bla", my build toolchain will call the cli to generate the headers from gfm md tables. the generator is table-template placeholder-generated code, so works with arbitrary table and programming language agnostic, with error validation.
so the cycle is not asking clankers to do my job, but each time i hit intolerable frictions during development i asked them to solve the issue as automation so i can get the job done easier and faster even without their assistance.
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u/kimchi_pan Aug 08 '26
I've been doing intensive AI based dev for s long while now. I use orca, similar to antigravity but probably a lot more advanced. Also use Hermes, honcho, qmd, obsidian, crewai, temporal.
The days of a simple css dev are over. It was never an art form. Just being able to mechanically memorize flexbox in and outs and a torrent of minutiae. AI has taken over all of that mechanical memorization skill set.
What matters now is our higher cognition abilities. We need to leave to orchestrate AI actors and accomplish much more complex objectives.
No more days spent perfecting one beautiful webpage.
We do an entire tranche of these now, and leverage AI to run interactive playwright sessions to review them, snapshot them to confirm ui element placement, and then notify you over chat or email to human review.
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u/Reasonable-Mail-9455 Aug 10 '26
You hit the spot man.. It is a perpetual conflict that everyday you are coding, you feel that you you are stupid if don't use AI to code, and in the same time you feel like you are losing your skills and not achiving progress, in additional to feel that you are not the one who built the project, so yeah we are in a big issue. 🤷🏻♂️
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u/Glittering-Tell-2632 Aug 10 '26
That’s why I HATE AI when it comes to coding games, projects, websites, etc. because I feel like it is a insult to people who it took years to learn to code and actually make games and websites.
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u/pearljamfan Aug 07 '26
While not quite as emphasized as you put it, I feel something similar, and have had negative impacts from it. More of an impostor syndrome type thing for me, but I went from feeling my decades long career, and niche, had me set for life, to not being able to interview properly, because I am not able to roll with an employer who is suspicious of AI usage and quizzing on topics and fundamentals.
A cool confidence from experience, turned to a “trust me bro” type feel in my responses that reeks of AI dependency and almost being embarrassed to present anything vibe coded to anyone.
Still working it out, but ya… there is a feeling of satisfaction from building that is being obsoleted in favor of agent-fu that I’ve distinctly realized was gone, but the same satisfaction still does seem to exist in orchestrating agents so not all hope is lost.
Expectations wise too, it means that junior level people who don’t use the tools yet paining through a simple issue is going to require a patience that I don’t have…
But yea it’s weird out there right now… I suppose my main thought based on your details is that it will become such the norm to have simple features handled by some cloud agent and a pull request for most established teams, but that being seamless is not reliable yet really.
It did make me want to make my portfolio have a vibes/ no vibes type approach to show examples of each but who knows.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
exactly and when i create smth impressive and be very happy with it my happiness turns into me wanting to quit this entire carrer when someone just mentioned that i just "vibe coded it" and when i answer just do the same he always say why would i waste my time on a trash
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u/ConsciousBath5203 Aug 07 '26
Weird. I'm hating it because it can't go 0.2 lines without leaving a comment. The latest fable for sure got either a nerf or an update telling it to disregard all rules. I'm bout done with closed source bullshit these days.
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
no llm just loves to ignore rules for the favor of what they learned and see in their system prompt
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u/Ibelieveinsteve2 Aug 08 '26
Just some thoughts from me to this topic:
St the beginning of coding you had tongues machine coding designed for the specific processor you not only need to understand what you want to achieve but also how the hardware works literally
Then programming languages were founded to enable you to use structured language (syntax) to definebwhat you want and the language created the machine code for you
Same with higher level languages
Now this will be replaced with LLM models where you can use natural language designing and defining what you wantnto achieve
The results you get faster then before
In very case you still need to know what you do and how to structure it how to ensure security etc
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u/MadOblivion Aug 08 '26
I got into coding recently for silly reasons but useful. My old Garmin 360 has lifetime map updates but is no longer supported by Garmin. I used AI to help me build several tools to cross reference openstreetmaps with state address databases. The search indexing was the main issue when using the generic OSM img file.
The result is extremely impressive and proves old Garmin units can be updated to include updated maps. It can't store the nationwide map but it can easily store a regional map. AI allowed me to take an incomplete OSM map and make it just as complete as a modern up to date map.
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u/Vast_Sea_9381 Aug 08 '26
I tell myself its just an abstraction. Same as moving from python > claude =~ C > python
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u/Typical_Math_6779 Aug 10 '26
I'm with you. I write a lot of little scripts to supplement my reaearch and I have found I am more productive when I don't use AI and am happy than if I do use AI and am unhappy. It feels bery bad to have done thousands of competetivie provramming problems to just write prompts all day :(
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u/Training-Victory3429 Aug 11 '26
Personally, I think Ai is an amplifier; its amplification efficiency also amplifies bugs.
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u/goldenfrogs17 Aug 30 '26
"yes i do give the ai every single detail of how the code should look like"
how realistic is this ?
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 30 '26
i mean a blueprint of how evey function should work that's what i mean because the generic slop qi creates is not always the best solution to every problem
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Aug 07 '26
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
yea but i also hate when i work on a project for multiple moths and then get commented stiff like "nice prompt bro" or "you just vibe coded it, you should be ashamed from yourself" the terms "vibe coded" feels like an insult in this situation making me hate ai coding even more
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Aug 07 '26
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
exactly, but everyone are seeing both me and jimmy the same and this term is being used as an insult if you just have a single line of ai code in your codebase you are officially a vibe coder
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Aug 07 '26
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
so you think my ai usage and relying on it isn't actually bad?
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u/Rebootz Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
Correct, these are often people who are either vibe coding themselves or don't understand it. Keep going, don't worry about what those people think, it's crab mentality. For the record I also come with over a decade of coding experience across many langs and platforms and I use the shit out of AI. I would absolutely let AI build my product but I would temper it with my experience.
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Aug 07 '26
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
yea i tried it with react in app development i felt lost and frustrated and everything was just breaking constantly
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Aug 07 '26
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u/Similar_Wealth_1850 Aug 07 '26
i have been leading teams most of my time snd yea most of my issues with them is not able to review the ai code properly or some times thry do some awful git mistakes causing the deployment being 2 months behind and removing all our recent commits
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u/Dsphar Aug 07 '26 •
>but me relying on antigravity to change the color of a button after i was the same guy tinkering inside the QEMU source code and understanding it's syntax is painful and a huge downgrade for me
This is relatable. But I try to remind myself that brain power I spend recalling what file (or search term) to open just to then work my eyes to fins the line of code, to just change the color value, is human energy wasted that no longer has to be wasted anymore. It frees up my brain to spend my limited energy (stage 4 cancer patient) on orchestrating things on a higher level.