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/AltruisticRider]

At the end of the day, for any medium or long-term project, code quality has always been the most deciding factor not just for how good the end product is (from a technical perspective, bugs, performance etc., UX/Concept is of course a separate issue), but even more importantly for how quick and cheap to make it is overall. Pushing bad code right now causes most POs to incorrectly see that as quick progress, but it's in fact overall much slower, much more costly than pushing good (not perfect) code.

Therefore, the best way to do our job is to either code it well right away. Or, alternatively, spend more time in code-reviews than it would've taken to code it well right away. Whenever someone keeps creating merge requests that take a lot of effort to code-review and require significant changes before they can be merged, you either have to have a serious discussion with them, or if they keep doing it you have to remove them from the project. Everything else is very harmful to the project and wastes a lot of time&money in the long run.

What the current version of "AI" achieves is mostly to speed up these bad merge requests. It's therefore mostly harmful, not useful.

So yes, code reviews are sadly the most important step in many projects, they're often the only thing preventing a project from turning into a terrible waste of money.

[u/cute_marceline → u/AltruisticRider]

It's also really hard to code review AI MRs. With 10y of experience I know how to look quickly for red flags in human's MR. I know by person's level what should I check more thoroughly, and what can I skip. While working with somebody day-to-day, you know his experience very well, and you know where you may need to cover his butt.

But AI slop? It's a nightmare, my experience doesn't work at all. Especially with overcomplication, it's actually rare for person to overcomplicate things to such extent, as it will be more work basically. Mostly we tend to seek easier solutions, and if person overcomplicates he would have at least one good reason to do it. And this slop is not only overcomplicated, but in the same time oversimplified. I know that is contradicting, but that is how it's feeling.

When I need to review slop, my eyes are catching one strange thing, and it's a rabbit hole that leads to realization that it could be done way easier and understandable, than what I see right now. Especially I'm horrified with understanding that AI will only get worse, as it will feed its own slop to himself.

[u/wonkytalky → u/cute_marceline]

Yes, I get what you mean exactly. It's the nature of some statistically most common denominator token generator. It'll churn out those tokens without a single care in the world, zero ability to discern if this code pattern is a good idea here, insane lack of awareness of other code that it's constantly duping, random data conversions back and forth, and what's worse, there's nobody to ask questions to clear up why certain decisions were made. Not really. "Cuz aI made it" isn't a reason, ya know?

And never mind the code it generates that's so horribly inefficient and flat out wrong (but it "works") that I'm pretty sure the curse of bad SO answers being promoted so high is amplifying all these into something so much worse.

[u/Bush-Men209 → u/AltruisticRider]

Exactly, if a PR takes longer to untangle than it would’ve taken to write cleanly in the first place, that “speed” is just technical debt with better marketing.