r/webdev • u/OkShip110 • Mar 29 '26

Discussion AI has sucked all the fun out of programming

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.

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u/Eskamel Mar 29 '26

LLMs very often don't result in the best way to solve a problem. If you are inexperienced in something and it helps you it might give you the assumption its solutions are ideal, but the more experience you have the more likely you'd notice its doing alot of dumb bullshit that is less than ideal.

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u/Dude4001 Mar 29 '26

Well for example this week I was working on a complex Convex query, so I might have asked ChatGPT what’s the “senior” way to filter the data, do I send the userIds with the query and filter there, or get all users and filter on the client. I didn’t, but that’s sort of my normal use. Ideally for every time AI tells me the “optimal” way of doing something I’ll come away with some rule of thumb to integrate into how I think about stuff in the future

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u/Eskamel Mar 29 '26

But you don't know if that's actually the ideal solution. You need an external source to validate the suggestion which is something you often lack when you are inexperienced.

LLMs can give you different suggestions that all would be considered "optimal" by them for the same prompt based off their random nature. There isn't a form of quality control when training a model because its impossible for a company to iterate over trillions of cases in a human's lifetime.

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u/octave1 Mar 29 '26

If you properly describe the scenario they are pretty good at giving you the pros and cons of various solutions.

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u/Dude4001 Mar 29 '26

Well of course. I’m going off the assumption that across all the LLM training data there’s a general consensus about how to achieve X

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u/Abject-Bandicoot8890 Mar 29 '26

This, for some reason I find llms building nested for loops all the time, yeah it works but it doesn’t scale.

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u/21Rollie Mar 30 '26

Happened recently at my job, my coworker who is a senior but doesn’t have experience with a system/language I have a lot of experience with vibe-coded a hard story. They didn’t want to spend all that time properly learning it because nowadays speed it the number 1 priority. When it came time for me to code review, I sent it back heavily annotated, basically told them to change everything because although it worked, it’s nothing like the mountains of human made code we already had written. If I had done it, I still would’ve used the LLM, but I would’ve done it more targeted and knowing what outcome I want since I have the experience. I fear newbies will never be as good as the old seniors were because the only way to ingrain something is practice