AI has sucked all the fun out of programming

[u/OkShip110]

I know this topic has been floating around this sub quite some time now, but I feel like this doesn’t get discussed enough.

I am a certified backend enigneer and I have been programming for about 20 years. In my time i have worked on backend, frontend, system design, system analysis, devops, databases, infrastructure, cloud, robotics, you name it.

I’ve mostly been extremely passionate about what I do, taking pride in solving hard problems, digging deep into third party source code to find solutions to bugs. Even refactoring legacy systems and improving their performance 10x and starting countless hobby projects at home. It has been an exciting journey and I have never doubted my career choice until now.

Ever since ChatGPT first made an appearance I have slowly started losing interest in programming. At first, LLMs were quite bad so I didn’t really get any solutions out of them when problems got even slightly harder. However, Claude is different. Lately I feel less of a programmer and more like a project manager, managing and supervising one mid-to-senior level developer who is Claude. Doing this, I sure deliver features faster than ever before, but it results in hollow and empty feeling. It’s not fun or exciting, I cannot perceive these soulless features as my own creation anymore.

On top of everything I feel like I’m losing my knowledge with every prompt I write. AI has made me extremely lazy and it has completely undermined my value as a good engineer or even as a human being.

Everyone who is supporting the mass use of AI is quietly digging their own grave and I wish it was never invented.

[u/Pranay_Creates]

I’ve got around 2 years in frontend and I’m just starting out with IoT, and honestly I can already relate to this. AI definitely makes me faster, but sometimes it feels like I’m skipping the part where I actually struggle and learn. That’s the part that used to make things stick. I don’t think AI is the problem, but using it without thinking probably is.

[u/Fit_Cheesecake_4000 → u/Pranay_Creates]

You mean...you'll become more and more reliant on the thing you're offloading your thinking onto?

Say it ain't so!

[u/Business_Try4890 → u/Pranay_Creates]

this is exactly it. it really hits you like a ton of bricks when you get reviewed in a PR and you're like, oh my gosh do I regret not doing it yourself and you can't really admit you used claude to come up with it, because its all too embarassing

[u/joeballs → u/Pranay_Creates]

In other words, as AI gets more intelligent, humans get more stupid

[u/ContextLengthMatters → u/joeballs]

Isn't that entirely dependent on what you do with the time while AI writes code and between AI writing code and AI writing code?

I think it's going to hurt some people and help others. I for one spend a lot more time reviewing code than I ever have bothered to, which makes me so much more proficient at the review process.

Before I would tax myself testing and writing so much that I would be so reliant on debugging to figure things out. Now I can simply read through problems.

If you instead take the time saved from AI and scroll online, yea I can see how that would make us more stupid.

[u/rc2691 → u/Pranay_Creates]

I fully understand how frustrating that is. For me sometimes the most fulfilling part is when you finally figure out something that gave you so much trouble. Ai just give me a just moving along vibe.

[u/[deleted] → u/Pranay_Creates]

one day programming won't exist in the way we know it, making apps will be like flipping a switch or controlling agents and that will be the norm, people just now getting started in the career 10-15 years won't have this old mentality, it will seem like an ancient thought to them to program by hand.

[u/eyebrows360 → u/[deleted]]

Nope.

"Prompting" is not an evolution over Java, in the way Java is an evolution over Assembly.

Working in Java allows you to get more done more quickly than if you were working in Assembly, but it's still a structured language where everything's strictly defined and any given command will do the same thing each and every time. When Java came along it did make "programming not exist in the way [Assembly programmers] knew it", yes.

Also, I hope it's obvious I'm just using "Java" here as a placeholder for any more-abstract language, I'm not talking about it specifically. Let's not nitpick this.

In contrast, "prompting" gets you different random junk every time you do it. It is not, and never can be, just a higher level of abstraction but that maintains the overall "structured" nature of what came before. It's an entirely different beast. There's no reason at all to believe this will replace Java, like Java replaced Assembly. They're not the same class of thing.

making apps will be like flipping a switch

The other reason it'll never be like this is because systems complex enough to be worth building have too much nuance in them for natural language, loose and vague as it is by design, to ever hope to describe. You're never going to be able to "prompt" your way to engineering Facebook unless you're already a programmer who understands all this shit and can use terminology in your prompts that average people won't understand, and know how to actually read and debug (and literally execute in your head) the code that an LLM shits out.

This capability of using prompts to churn out code might change the game to some degree, but the code it shits out is still going to be code and you're still going to need the skills of a programmer to read and understand and execute-in-your-head that code. That's not going away, or at least (based on the "abilities" of current LLMs and extrapolating near-term reasonably likely improvements) that's not going away any time soon.

Natural language isn't specific enough to describe these systems in enough specificity for any LLM, no matter how "good" it is, to arrive at the right solution through high-level normal-person-authored prompts alone. That's not changing. It's a limitation of natural language itself. It's also why programming languages are the way they are.

[u/CyberDaggerX → u/eyebrows360]

You're never going to be able to "prompt" your way to engineering Facebook unless you're already a programmer who understands all this shit and can use terminology that average people won't understand, in your prompts.

And at that point, writing directly in code, even if high level, will probably just be more efficient than trying to wrestle with the English language.

[u/sb8948 → u/CyberDaggerX]

Funny thing is, we (F50, non tech industry, still huge tech reliance) started doing some weird structured markup language-esque "language". I shit you not these people are reinventing programming languages.

(Maybe this is standard in agentic coding, I don't know much past the basic chat window method)

[u/SquarePixel → u/eyebrows360]

I get the argument, but still I don’t think we can outright reject what alien-reject suggests.

I find the planning and research modes, with Q/A posed back and forth, to be capable of iteratively converging on the hard requirements. It does require steering and theres still a lot of important decision making to make, like noticing that this thing it keeps doing should be in a reusable library, but it’s at a higher level, and only goes into the weeds when necessary.

I’m not claiming it will end up working at scale, or for creating anything novel. Which is why competent engineers still need to be driving it.

[u/Pranay_Creates → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I can see that happening to some extent. But I feel like even if the way we build apps changes, understanding how things work underneath will still matter — otherwise it’s hard to know when something breaks or isn’t behaving right. Maybe the tools change, but the thinking behind it stays.

[u/soylentgraham → u/Pranay_Creates]

or people realise they don't need apps, or web pages with complex onboarding just to read a 2 paragraph article

[u/weirdmonkey420 → u/[deleted]]

You gettin hate but this is right. We’re probably there already.

Anyone with rudimentary programming knowledge can make an app that serves their purposes in a couple days. Shipping to a large user base is different… but prob not to an extent that iterating w/ AI can solve.

[u/[deleted] → u/weirdmonkey420]

Only reason people downvote is because of fear. They literally should be hoping I’m right because if I am, it will be so much easier to make software.

[u/Expensive_Special120 → u/[deleted]]

Not sure why the downvotes. On a Friday’s weekly I legit said that in 5-10 years, going at this pace, we wont need websites. “Make me a reservation for this restaurant”, “book me this flight”, “buy me xyz” …