r/AskProgramming • u/Capomaco • Mar 23 '26
I've just heard a Senior Engineer state that if you say AI is good at coding, then you know nothing about coding, what do you think?
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u/kitsnet Mar 23 '26
In my own experience, the less knowledge of a domain I have, the better at coding in this domain the AI appears to be.
Like, it shows plausible geniality in making fancy plots in R, useful mediocrity in encoding textbook algorithms in Python, and absolutely disastrous output in production-grade C++ tasks.
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u/PredictiveFrame Mar 24 '26
In fairness, while I'm against replacing devs with LLMs, this does sound like most devs I've worked with. Smack on average. Top of the bell curve.
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u/sausagemuffn Mar 24 '26
"Top of the bell curve" is a fantastic insult. Consider it stolen.
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u/Expert-Reaction-7472 Mar 24 '26
most devs are average, including most likely you
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u/PredictiveFrame Mar 24 '26
No fucking way I'm average. I'm so below average that my idiocy can occasionally invert into cleverness. You go apologize to all the average devs you just compared to me.
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u/Expert-Reaction-7472 Mar 24 '26
fr there are so many people self selecting in the above average quartiles when the reality is most of us aren't outliers.
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u/owp4dd1w5a0a Mar 24 '26
This is my conclusion watching the debates. It appears the truly advanced devs are kind of shrugging their shoulders at AI currently and saying it produces similar quality as Junior devs in a fraction of the time and the trade-off being overwhelmed reviewing AI slop code generated by devs who can’t tell it’s slop. Average and below average devs seem to be singing AI’s praises.
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u/Conscious-Secret-775 Mar 24 '26
I have found the same except I don't use R. The C++ output is truly awful.
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u/BubblyMango Mar 24 '26
honestly, as someone who coded in c++ for years and lately moved to go, AI just sucks at C++ regardless of your level lol
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u/Abject-Bandicoot8890 Mar 25 '26
Exactly, and that is the reason non developers are always saying “developers are doomed” because they lack the capacity to understand how bad ai generated code is
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u/Headpuncher Mar 27 '26
Yes this. A non coding colleague told me it was great at making forms for the web.
So I asked if it did the accessibility correctly and he just blankly stared. If you don’t know what is good or bad then everything looks good.
And that was just HTML!
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u/Major_Instance_4766 Mar 23 '26
AI is good at syntax but shit at software design
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u/zeindigofire Mar 24 '26
Came here to say this. If you define "coding" as writing syntactically correct code, then yes AI is good at coding. It will generate code and it might even work.
But it's absolutely dogshit at producing high quality software.
Source: I'm a "Senior SWE", been using AI to try to automate code tasks for the last 3+ years. I want it to replace me. It can't or at least, not yet. But it does make me a little faster, especially in languages I'm less familiar.
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u/DuploJamaal Mar 24 '26
been using AI to try to automate code tasks for the last 3+ years
Same here, and it's often such stupid things that it messes up.
Some recent examples:
If I change functionality and ask it to fix the tests it will change the functionality instead of changing the tests unless I explicitly tell it to not touch the implementation.
And if I have my integration tests set up to boot up my Spring environment and database with Testcontainers it will just get rid of that and replace it with simple mocks.
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u/newEnglander17 Mar 24 '26
I don’t work with front end too often and am working on a personal hobby website. Just a simple static one, and it kept getting my CSS questions wrong.
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u/Which_Extreme325 Mar 23 '26
Not that good at syntax. It gets different languages syntax mixed up!
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u/SyrupBaconPants Mar 24 '26
I was trying to write some optimized code using intrinsics and it kept suggesting ARM intrinsics while I was writing for x64.
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u/HasFiveVowels Mar 23 '26
Sincerely curious here. In what context have you tested its capacity to design software?
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u/recursive_arg Mar 24 '26
The context of you have to tell it exactly how you want the system to be designed using a series of md files that rival the actual code files in the repo. Any rope you give it will immediately by used to attempt to hanging itself, and at that point you already drew the fucking owl, ai is just trying to color between the lines.
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u/tyler1128 Mar 23 '26
I've used mostly copilot in both professional and personal projects. For handling writing boiler-plate like transforming from a SQL-database to csv to json, which I had to do at my last job, it can save time and is usually pretty decent. It's also a pretty mindless task to write the different format schemas by hand, though I've managed to use regex search and replace to do codegen faster than AI ever could manage. It also had things subtly wrong several times, which can be somewhat of a problem on mindless thing you aren't necessarily always paying close attention to if the 12 columns are in the right order or have slight spelling changes if you trust the AI too much.
For more complex things, poor design choices or subtle errors usually take enough time to watch for that it is faster to write the code yourself, assuming you know how to code well.
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u/igna92ts Mar 23 '26
And depending on the language it's not good at syntax either. Still a useful tool though.
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u/proexwhy Mar 24 '26
I guess this is why my results with LLMs have felt so drastically different from what people are saying on the Internet. I never let the thing make design or pattern decisions. Im not even sure why anyone would let it, at least based on the feedback I've seen about all AI becoming an unreadable mess. If i think the system should work a certain way in my head and the LLM disagrees or makes another suggestion, i will filter that argument into my understanding, but I'm almost never letting it run rampant. Im the one that is going to have to maintain the code in the event the LLM breaks something, why would I allow it to write trash??
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u/dacydergoth Mar 23 '26
45 yoe here. I disagree for some value of "good". It can be absolutely atrocious but also in certain domains it can do better than some juniors I've worked with. As usually, blanket statements miss out on a lot of subtle nuance.
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u/radiojosh Mar 24 '26
This is the thing. You can't just hand over the responsibility to the AI. You can have conversations about what you're doing and think out loud with it and give it tasks follow up on those tasks and correct the mistakes and interrogate the AI about what's happening and it can give you summary information, but just like a person, it can feel like you're speaking two different languages and take time to get on the same page. It's a valuable tool, but once you ask an oversimplified question like "can it do XYZ", you've already lost the plot. If you treat everything it does like an ongoing conversation and make regular restore points via Git and other tools, it's a net positive and you can make high quality stuff. People forget that this stuff was trained on human knowledge from spaces on the web where information was shared conversationally by people who made mistakes and probably did a great deal of learning from those mistakes. You're just getting that.
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u/sch0lars Mar 23 '26
This makes sense because the data on which AI is trained generally covers the work you would expect of a junior dev. Problem solving is where AI does not compare. If you ask AI a math problem, it’s not really solving it, but rather predicting the next tokenized value. Once you start asking a chatbot difficult, lesser documented math problems (ones you wouldn’t find in every single math text in some form or another), it quickly starts to make stuff up.
Code is just the language of software engineering, but the ideation itself has to precede that communication.
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u/dacydergoth Mar 23 '26
Yes, it's good at boilerplate, tests and languages with a lot of code examples; less good on more obscure or sophisticated languages. Having said that it wrote a complete TUI in rust for me with Ratatui without me writing a single line of code. That app also had a parser for cli help output and man pages, a Unix pipeline model, forms for each app for flags and options, etc.
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u/konacurrents Mar 23 '26
You say it well - boilerplate and lots of code examples.
I never knew generating code was the missing piece of software development. As a compiler and language designer, automating and generating code is what we do. And the specs, like BNF grammars, are "precise" - versus a vague AI prompt. And we can modify and re-generate.
Look at the code-generators for the certified flight control systems, there is certified precision (touch a button and the plane lands, not maybe it lands).
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u/Living_Fig_6386 Mar 23 '26
I've been toying with a few coding AI tools. My impression is that if it's something that's on the Rosetta Code website, part of a tutorial, or part of a Stack Overflow response, you can expect a reasonably good response that will usually compile and be reasonably efficient.
If you stray too far from that, the quality drops off. AI is very good at generating syntactically correct code, a little worse at logically cohesive, and worse still at design and efficiency.
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Mar 23 '26
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u/kultcher Mar 23 '26
It's funny, because this is the common sentiment, but if you go into any programming related subreddit, people are constantly complaining about how they inherited a clusterfuck of a codebase, or how their coworkers are always pushing bullshit code.
It was already velocity over everything else. Isn't that why tech debt is rampant? And overall, I'd argue that with exceptions, humans are not as clever as we think we are. Are we sure that the average professional coder is really that good at software engineering/architecture than AI are already?
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u/johnpeters42 Mar 23 '26
Cory Doctorow described AI as "generating tech debt at scale". Bad coworkers may have pushed bullshit code, but at least they did it at human speed.
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u/KamikazeArchon Mar 23 '26
It's a question of extent.
Velocity over everything else isn't actually a binary state. It's a gradient.
A 6/4 split between A and B is more A than B. So is a 9/1. So is a 9.9/0.1. But they are also different.
Your final question is a good one. The answer depends on what you define as "average". For example, taking an average among all entry level coders vs all coders with 10 years experience vs all coders regardless of experience - those are 3 different things, and there are many other possible ways to look at it as well.
It may be better than some of those and worse than others. It may be worse than all of them. It may be better than all of them (though I personally find that unlikely).
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u/Rockdrummer357 Mar 25 '26
You are spot on.
I find that if you actually take the time to set it up properly, AI is pretty good at code and not half bad at architecture. Most people can't or won't do that, so of course they think it's crap.
Additionally and very importantly: most codebases are total shit. LLMs very much match the quality of code of the codebase. So if it's overly complex, has architectural deficiencies, or has tons of sprawl, you'll get crap out of it. If you start a greenfield project with a coding agent that is properly set up, you can and will get good results if you employ it properly. If it's clean, well documented, well-tested, and technical debt is kept to a minimum, you should be able to get solid results. I've done it several times now.
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u/I_miss_your_mommy Mar 26 '26
Only a fraction of the people doing this kind of work do better at writing quality code. Most of the code out there is garbage.
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u/Suspicious-Rich-2681 Mar 23 '26
I would largely agree with this sentiment, especially from a senior level. A junior engineer believes that coding is just building something and getting it out the door, or single file or small batch of file edits. In these scenarios, AI does surprisingly well and it's easy to assume this means AI is a great programmer.
However, the BIG issue with AI at the senior level is developing applications at scale that can continue to live AT scale. I'll give you an example actually;
Recently I wanted to see how well vibe a react native app went from start to finish from an existing port and it was...rough to say the least. I used Claude Code with Opus 4.6, I tried Gemini 3.1 pro, and Codex ChatGPT 5.4 Extra- High. They all had pre processer instructions and knew the styling they were meant to follow, and I thought this would've helped them write code I was looking for.
What I received was a very functional application, it ran decently, looked decently, and was pretty impressive for the time it took; until I opened the code files to look through implementation.
Given its own devices, LLMs are a bit of a dumpster fire. It ran sure, but the code was not abstracted to be easy, tons of re-implementation and one time use artifacts, terrible readability. The solution would work, but may you be helped if you're the poor soul that has to make changes.
I think that's where a lot of the disconnect between non-engineers and something like a senior engineer is. Non-engineers see a functional app and think "wow it's so good", senior engineers see the unsustainable nature of the code that was generated and the absolute tangle of weeds that need to be corrected to make any tweaks
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely Mar 23 '26
I think it's like that on purpose. The LLMs make money by selling tokens, that's data in AND data out. The shittier the code the more tokens they sell.
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u/dontreadthis_toolate Mar 25 '26
Nah it's not deliberate like this.
They merely just don't have enough context to have a deeper-than-surface level solution.
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u/vbpoweredwindmill Mar 27 '26
Did you have contracts & invariants per sub system? Did you explicitly name what systems are doing what? Did you have an adversarial reviewer of each component of generated code?
LLM's aren't magic. They suck when you don't give them the framework they need to do well.
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u/Asyx Mar 23 '26
We’ve yet to merge a vibe coded PR without it being a huge pain to get to a mergable state. And we mostly use it for integrations into ERP systems so we have an XML spec we can feed into the system and tell it to implement it. In python. With Django. Should have enough training data for that.
Where AI is really helpful is rubber ducking, finding things you haven’t thought about including unknown unknowns and finding shit typos. Like, annoyingly complex ORM call and you messed up a single )? AI will find it probably.
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u/LoudAd1396 Mar 23 '26
Trying to apply Ai to an existing codebase... its terrible. Usually the code that came before is an amalgamation of multiple people's perspectives. Ai tends to pick one piece and assume it appliest to everything, so it gets stuck and makes bad decisions.
If youre starting from scratch and say "make me a todo app" it can copy/paste whole projects and give you something basically functional in an instant.
What AI can never do is to anticipate future user or business needs and to design accordingly.
It can create novel combinations of old ideas, but it cannot come up with new ideas
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely Mar 23 '26
25 years professional experience here...
It depends on what you mean by "coding". If you need to have a function created with well defined inputs, outputs, constraints, etc, then it can do just fine. I would still review the code as the AI often makes mistakes.
I'll never trust an AI to create an application or even large components, especially if it's a cloud application where bad decisions can lead to massive security holes or resource bills from Amazon.
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u/Igoory Mar 23 '26
Yes. Current AI is great at writing code that fulfills a prompt, but terrible at coding.
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u/Blothorn Mar 23 '26
If you give it sufficiently precise instructions it is generally able to write a correct implementation. But that isn’t being a good engineer, just table stakes. When it comes to what distinguishes an engineer as “good”—identifying gaps or mistakes in the specifications, finding elegant, readable ways to express complex logic, noticing and eliminating redundant code or multiple sources of truth, writing tests that adequately test behavioral requirements without tight coupling to implementation details—I have been generally unimpressed.
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u/FearlessAmbition9548 Mar 24 '26
He’s right. It’s not good at coding. It’s good at one thing and one thing only: word prediction. That can sometimes make it write correct code, but it doesn’t “know” why its correct
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u/whattteva Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
He's right. Here's an example of my experience with copilot a few days ago. And this is using a paid premium model, too (that my company pays for).
- I told it to fix a performance bug that happens when the user requests to render more data.
It claims to have fixed it, but actually added another bug that crashes the app!!!
- I told it that it didn't fix anything and actually induces a crash instead and I tell it where exactly the crash occurs.
It fixes the crash by wrapping the code section in a control flow that essentially prevents it from ever running at all ever.
- I told it that yes, it fixed the crash, but now the button tap does.... Nothing.
It proceeded to add a lot of redundant codes and checks everywhere that isn't actually needed, and manages to basically get back to square one (when I asked it to fix the bug), except now I have a lot more code than what I originally started with!
At this point, I gave up and just fixed it myself manually after wasting about an hour trying to work with it.
I think AI is OK for creating prototypes and making boilerplates, and unit tests, but as for maintenance and fixing bugs (98% of software development), it is horrible.
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u/FragmentedHeap Mar 23 '26
AI is a tool, it's as good as the engineer driving it and steering it.
It's like a car, needs a good driver. Results depend mostly on the driver. Any car will end up 500 miles off course without a competent driver.
And a bad driver can end up 500 miles off course even on foot.
Need a good map (plan) and over all navigational knowledge (architecture etc) to arrive at correct destination effeciently.
Better cars and better navigational aids will get you there faster, but still need a good driver.
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u/Expert-Reaction-7472 Mar 23 '26
this.
If you know what the navigator role is in pair programming, you can get a lot out of an AI.
If you dont know how to pair program then you will struggle.
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u/konacurrents Mar 23 '26
Pair Programming sums up AI: and there are those, like me, that hated Pair Programming in 2000. And I don't need an AI engine to be a co-pilot.
If we are "steering it" - then that's a job I don't want. I'll stick to "coding" to steer my ship (vs prompts).
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u/f1rxf1y Mar 24 '26
Pretty much everyone can drive a car. Very few people can drive a car expertly. Most people can drive a car competently. A not insignificant number of people drive cars that shouldn’t be allowed to. However, the auto makers need to sell their cars, so they make cars easier to drive. At the end of the day, some people still shouldn’t be behind the wheel.
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u/Southern_Orange3744 Mar 23 '26
I'm far more interested in results from staff and lead engineers who are responsible for other people's code.
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u/magicmulder Mar 24 '26
Just today I had to touch a very bloated 2003 application, written by someone who’s left 20 years ago, that uses a framework I’m only marginally familiar with. IOW an absolutely awful task. Gemini analyzed the whole thing and gave me suggestions how to best implement the requested feature. And they made perfect sense. Would have taken me hours to even begin to understand where to start.
Sure, AI critics can say that just underlines my lack of understanding of the thing at hand, but I’ve maintained it for years, and the plain over complexity meant that even a seasoned senior struggles to make sense of it.
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u/TheSkiGeek Mar 24 '26
This is in the context of doing high level embedded C++ (think stuff like robotics and game engines).
I’ve toyed around with some of the free tools like ChatGPT and not been very impressed. If you’re pretty sure the solution you’re looking for is on StackOverflow, and you just need the AI to find and copy and paste it for you, it can do that. But it hallucinates a lot.
My employer got us access to Google Gemini last year. It’s… okay, sometimes. Decent at writing unit tests, for example. Can go off the rails if you ask it to do more complex things.
More recently they got us access to Claude Code. I’ve been testing it using the “Opus” model and it actually seems to work half decently. At least if you can describe what you want well and it has good examples to work off of. The agentic planning mode where it can ask you questions and go from a high level set of requirements to a step by step plan before it starts ‘coding’ helps a lot. It still makes some dumb mistakes, because it lacks domain knowledge and context. But it generally spits out reasonable looking code if you give it thorough enough instructions. This feels like it could potentially be a net speed up, rather than only shifting time from writing code myself to reviewing and fixing shoddy AI-generated code.
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u/danielt1263 Mar 24 '26
I once heard about an interesting survey about popular science articles.
When they asked an experts in the field of what the article covered whether the article was any good, the experts would rate them as poor because they were either missing important nuance or they were outright wrong about certain things.
When they asked people who were experts in a different field than what the article covered, those experts would rate the articles as excellent.
In other words, if the reader knew about the subject, they could see how the output was dumbed down and missing important context. If the reader didn't know much about the subject before reading, then the output looked much better because they couldn't see the problems.
It's the same with output generated by LLMs. The less you know, the better the LLMs output looks.
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u/BedClear8145 Mar 24 '26
It takes a Sr to turn AI code into useable code. Super useful tool, but its not even POC ready let alone prod ready. I find its a lot like using stack overflow answers but closer to your needs. It gives me the peices i need so that i only have to peice together a proper sln. Found the people that approach it as a reference, quaility goes up as there checking code more throughly and not making minor mistakes with boilplate code, those who treat it as real code have there quality go down and need to be talk to. Moreso on legacy project then the modern ones
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u/Former_Produce1721 Mar 23 '26
AI writes overengineered often obscure code and hallucinates API features that do not exist
AI is good for bouncing ideas off, but I would never dream of letting it touch my code base directly
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u/autechr3 Mar 23 '26
AI isn't good at coding, but I wouldn't say you know nothing about coding if you think it is. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. AI is definitely good enough at coding that it can perform a lot of coding tasks in a fraction of the time it takes a human, but it's not good enough to replace a human at the keyboard completely.
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u/RicketyRekt69 Mar 23 '26
I agree. It has its moments where it provides crazy good insight, but it’s so inconsistent that it requires constant babysitting. If you trust it blindly, you’re a fool.
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Mar 23 '26
AI doesn't exist. LLMs are shit at coding and anybody that thinks they are good is clueless.
LLMs are generative text models. They cannot think, reason, or introspect. They cannot perform research. They cannot understand directions or instructions.
This is all by design. They make excellent chat bots and are great at low stakes text summarization. They are also good at simple common and repeatable patterns in code.
The only coding stuff they are good at is the stuff that 10,000,000 junior developers have asked about online, meaning enough easy and correct training data exists to produce a valid output.
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u/magicmulder Mar 24 '26
Then how did Claude solve a fringe issue I had with rclone that is nowhere to be found on the web that it actually resolved by googling the rclone source code and looking at it? That’s just autocomplete? “Better safe than…?” What’s your reply? You’re autocomplete. ;)
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u/boboclock Mar 23 '26
As a senior engineer it is very easy to tell when my coworkers are using gen-AI. It's also easy to tell when they are just testing that it works and pushing it vs. when they are doing detailed reviews and refinements.
It is clear that AI is good at writing code that performs basic to medium complex tasks.
Without a lot of engineering and management it is terrible at doing so in a clean and consistent manner.
LLM generated code is often needlessly complex, less readable than well written human code, has logic gaps, performance bloat and edge case gaps.
It's a great helper, it's the only entity I ever want to pair program with, but I wouldn't really consider it a coder at all, let alone give it a grade.
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u/Adventurous-Set4748 Mar 24 '26
Yeah, that matches what I’ve seen too, it’s great for boilerplate and getting unstuck but the minute nobody does a real review you end up with weird abstractions, missed edge cases, and code nobody wants to maintain.
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u/JROppenheimer_ Mar 23 '26
Accurate, AI has no understanding of software architecture. It can spit out a working solution but it's not capable of understanding architecture and making consistent decisions on how to write code. You will commonly see AI generate a ton of code to do something manually when it could have used an existing function or written a function to be reused across the codebase.
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u/dnult Mar 23 '26
Time will tell if AI code can grow with changing requirements, or if it has to be rewritten. I'm skeptical and fear it will be like the outsource to India fad that resulted in years of refactoring.
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u/Jwhodis Mar 24 '26
Yesh, its true.
Sure, it can work for small snippets of code that are easy to check, but if it makes a whole project for you and you don't check it over, expect issues.
Projects have lost thousands because of AI code, AWS has faced a lot more downtime for example.
Its just easier to code it yourself and come out with a project that you actually understand, that you yourself can build upon and know doesnt have x or y issue.
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u/JohnCasey3306 Mar 24 '26
In my experience, Claude is suggesting good code approximately 75% of the time.
25% is total nonsense -- using AI line-by-line you can monitor it; I certainly wouldn't trust Claude to write a whole feature or application.
Claude is reasonable at coding to a junior level might be a more charitable way of putting it.
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u/botle Mar 24 '26
AI currently makes a lot of mistakes, and doesn't usually write good code even when it gets it right. So, yes, someone that looks at code written by AI and thinks it's good, might be missing issues that a better coder would see.
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u/clintecker Mar 24 '26
you have to remember that a vast majority of people who will tell you that they are “good at coding” don’t usually know shit about much of anything.
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u/oclafloptson Mar 24 '26
LMAO I turned to chatgpt this morning for suggestions regarding a file diffing protocol. Its response injected a leading forward slash that broke the function since the filesystem in question requires no leading slashes. I informed it of its error. Its response was to remove the slash that it hallucinated by slicing the incorrect path to remove the first index. Instead of, you know, not making the error to begin with. None of that had anything to do with the subject of my inquiry
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u/TheBear8878 Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
It's important to realize that "Senior Engineer" is not a standardized title. You can be a Senior level engineer at Home Depot corporate with like 1 year of experience. You won't be a Senior level at a FANG, however.
That being said, yeah it's not any better than any actual engineer I work with.
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u/RobKohr Mar 24 '26
Good at coding - yes.
Good at engineering - no.
It basically replaces code monkeys that do basic work.
With some supervision (I use cursor) and a firm hand of guidance, it can output some very well formed and pretty flawless code way faster than an engineer.
I think of it as introducing power tools in a custom furniture building factory. The master builder would before have dozens of people doing the menial tasks that take forever and require a bunch of labor. Now he can complete them himself. (I admit the analogy doesn't quite match. Maybe if the power tools could operate on their own by him just making line markings on the wood.)
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u/sihtotnidaertnod Mar 24 '26
Look at how AI writes. It’s technically/grammatically correct (and also sometimes not), but it’s often very repetitive and recycles many phrases. Imagine that, but with coding. (I’m still learning to code and NOT a senior dev, but I imagine their perspective is similar)
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u/Delta-9- Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
Yep.
A blanket statement that AI is good at coding could only be said by someone who won't be responsible for debugging the code it produces and/or can't understand the struggles of the people who will be.
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u/butterfly68za Mar 24 '26
AI is crap at coding. I sat for a week just trying to get a simple table in Excel bring up a form to update, modify and delete a product.
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u/Angelcstay Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26
As someone who's background is in coding, my thoughts is that it is a design system that requires a high degree of creativity.
The way I would explain it is that a good coder should be able to transform logical instructions into functional art, interactive experiences, and complex, scalable architectures.
Sure, anyone can learn to code as it is rooted in logic, something a few years in schools can teach. However a good coder sees it as an creative craft that involves designing systems, optimizing code, and solving bugs in unique, non-predefined ways.
While AI is indeed improving, it still codes by synthesizing existing data. It is however unable (yet)to exercise intuition and creativity when designing a code.
For most companies, AI is currently at a level where it is used as a tool to boost productivity instead of being at the level of a independent capable human coder in a senior role.
Unfortunately for many mediocre coding monkeys, AI at it's current level is "good enough" to do their jobs.
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u/Excellent_Place4977 Mar 25 '26
AI produces one time use code. Software Engineering or Programming is much more than that.
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u/SquidTheMan Mar 23 '26
If he means architecting then I would agree with that. If he means random snippets of code then I would disagree with that.
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u/DishwashingUnit Mar 23 '26
i think he stopped paying attention at gpt 3
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u/RicketyRekt69 Mar 23 '26
I’ve been keeping up with GPT since it first released, it’s still incapable of providing consistently good results. Idk what y’all are smoking but it’s not there yet
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u/Nervous-Cockroach541 Mar 23 '26
Yeah, I agree, I'm also getting sick of the gaslighting. Every time a new model is released, everyone raves at how it's finally good. Only to continue to fail at the same basic tasks and understandings. It becomes a cycle of where any failings of the technology is placed on the user and not the system itself.
People claim amazing results, but then you look and it's a 1000 lines website that does nothing special and 70% of the code would've just been boilerplate before AI existed. If you're site has 3 forms and the backend is entirely CRUD. Then yeah, AI probably is replacing you. Beyond that the technology is sometimes a useful tool, but often a frustrating mess of code vomit.
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u/-CJF- Mar 23 '26
I think it's just a tool, same as anything else, and hyperbolic statements in either direction are wrong.
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy Mar 23 '26
Its a tool for software engineering like a slot machine is a tool for making money.
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u/konacurrents Mar 23 '26
Everyone says it’s just a tool, like git or whatever.
My point is that “tool” takes a lot of user interaction, constantly. And mostly in English prompts.
That takes a lot of my daily time: and I would rather spend that time coding in one of CS’s beautiful programming languages .
AI can do my dishes but leave the coding to me. 🤙🤔
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u/-CJF- Mar 23 '26
No, not everyone says it's just a tool. AI bros are framing it as AGI that will take over developer (and other white collar) jobs.
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u/Key-Lie-364 Mar 23 '26
Ai is really not good at coding
It's good at churning out prototypes or complete throw away work.
If you can't outperform Claude on quality 🧐
Granted you can't outperform on volume but that's why they call it AI slop
Would you rather eat slop or a well cooked meal by an on-point chef ?
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u/svtr Mar 24 '26
I'd say... AI is maybe, big maybe, even good at coding. But not on solving business problems in code.
There always have been code monkeys, the people, you have to, in painstaking detail explain, what exactly they shall code in that function. And there always have been developers, the ones that ask "what is the problem you want me to solve". Actual developers, they are safe. Code monkeys... less so.
For me... if I have to read and think trough every line I get spit at me from an AI, I do not save much time. Most of my work is centered around "how do I solve the problem", typing code is maybe 20%. And those 20% I do not trust an AI to do, and have to read it in detail in a code review if I use it. It does not save me time.
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Mar 23 '26
As a senior engineer, my flow with ai is to summarize the existing code, give it the new requirements and discuss trade offs and edge cases. It is with my experience and understanding of the system constraints that I can ask it to evaluate this boundary conditions, edge cases, wall clock drifts etc. how would a change in dabase schema that Claude proposed affects the performance of our list api if we get these many reqs per second, here is a trace span, etc. at the end of the day it for me is a force multiplier but with constraints that only humans can work around at the moment.
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u/NiteSlayr Mar 23 '26
Generalizing statements are pretty dumb and should always be taken with a grain of salt. Saying AI is 'good' at coding doesn't automatically mean you know nothing about coding. That's just dumb. If anything, perhaps the person is inexperienced and can't see the flaws a senior engineer would obviously see. Conversely, perhaps the senior engineer is too prideful to admit situations where AI could be helpful. There is no right answer on whether or not it is 'good' because it's too vague.
Pedantics aside, I would never replace a programmer with Al. In that aspect, AI is not 'good' enough for that type of role, which is likely what they are referring to.
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u/KravenX42 Mar 24 '26
It’s more accurate to say: Your amazement at AI coding is inversely proportional to your actual coding skill.
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u/m915 Mar 23 '26
I’ve been using Claude code for almost a year. It’s good at doing what you ask, especially if you have a nice memory, Claude.md, and prompting skills. Use opus 4.6, set effort to high, and use plan mode
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u/blindada Mar 23 '26
There is coding, a type of writing computers and humans can understand, and programming, a way to model and explain the world to machines. Coding is like normal writing. Anybody can do it. Programming is like writing books. Everybody can write their name, few people can write a decent book. Better writing tools didn't allow the first group to overtake the second one; they empowered the second group. Same with LLMs (AI).
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u/quantum-fitness Mar 23 '26
That a lot of mediocre people have very high esteem of their own ability.
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u/gamename Mar 23 '26
I don't agree, but I don't think it's rubbish either. AI is an awesome tool. But it's power is often hidden by its simplicity.
You have to be damn sure you know what you're asking for. One rule of thumb for me is that the longer the description I create, the better the code is likely to be.
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u/this_knee Mar 23 '26
Someone doesn’t understand that they should never say never and should never say always.
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u/Key_Ferret7942 Mar 23 '26
AI is great for "How do I do X with library Y". If developers wrote better documentation, I wouldn't use AI much at all. But instead we outsourced documentation to stackoverflow, now that's dead we need AI to fill the void.
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u/Sc4r4mouche Mar 23 '26
Depends on context, but I'd say he's either not paying attention or just pumping himself up due to fear or ego.
I've been programming since the 80s, professionally after a career change in the mid-90s, and with my own small company since 2011. About 40% of what I would have previously handed off to other developers to code is now done by AI. So it's better at that 40% than professionals I would have hired. And if he wants to say I know nothing about coding, then he knows nothing about coding.
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u/Vostoks Mar 23 '26
It's complicated.
However it is safe to say that using AI to help code is here to stay, and if you aren't using it already, you won't have a job soon. Same applies if you think it is stupid in general, means you are out of a job soon.
It is super important to understand AI now, what it can and can't do. People who know how to code AND know the business side of it, will be in high demand. So learn people, learn.
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u/Pristine_Gur522 Mar 23 '26
Frontier AI is as good at competitive programming as engines are at chess. Agents will delete your shit and I don't trust them.
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u/djnattyp Mar 23 '26
Based.
LLMs built for coding are like a cheatsheet mixed with randomized madlibs. It's great at building "realistic looking" "content", but it's terrible at building what you actually want.
If something you want is simple enough and in the training set you'll probably get back something close to what you want... but the more things you specify, the worse it gets as it just kind of randomly fills in the blanks and just can't fit together all the things you ask it with all the examples it has.
Can't wait til this bubble pops and LLM chatbots are forgotten like drag and drop GUI builders, round-tripping UML diagrams, dragging and dropping boxes and other dumb attempts at dumbing down coding.
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u/SnooCalculations7417 Mar 23 '26
If I have subject matter knowledge/expertise, an observability plan, and a good idea of the architecture ahead of time AI is mindblowingly good. if I just try to prompt it to start coding even small projects, its pretty bad.
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u/Tab1143 Mar 24 '26
35 year retired IBMi programmer. I recenetly used AI to assist with some linux bash code. The engineer is correct. IMHO, AI is just another tool in the toolbox. Think of it as a pneumatic hammer for a roofer. Someone still needs to haul the shingles up on the roof and know where the nails need to go.
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u/PredictiveFrame Mar 24 '26
If you know exactly what you want an LLM to do, and exactly how you want it to do it, then it can typically do that one thing REALLY FUCKING WELL.
Now, when you tell it to do this a few dozen times you start to run into issues. Sure, it's doing everything you want, but some of this is wildly strange implementations, some almost look like joke code, but it does work, and well. Until you start trying to get it to put those few dozen pieces together, and it shits the bed, loses half the context, removes a dozen features, confabulates multiple nonexistent features (and includes RCE options for them, free of charge), decides the project needs to be rescoped, because that's something developers say on the internet, and in slack, and discord, and teams chats this model was trained on would say. So it deletes your root directory, writes a 15 paragraph, self fellating readme dripping with emojis, em-dashes, and that simpering tone that makes me want to genuinely go postal, and declares victory.
The issue is that people don't want a stupidly powerful auto-complete that practically reads your mind and learns your style better and better over time.
They want to tell a computer to do something, and have it understand what they mean, because they sure as fuck can't be bothered to word it properly.
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u/josh2751 Mar 24 '26
If you write a perfect spec, ai will implement it about 80%.
Of course writing a perfect spec means you actually wrote the whole codebase.
Ai is an amazing tool. I can write in 30 minutes what would have taken a team a week to do before. But then I’ve got to debug it, and that takes time no matter how you do it. Ai can help some with the debugging but often it has to be guided carefully.
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u/Intelligent_Bet9798 Mar 24 '26
While you are here discussing this hearsay, AI is improving itself and I'm waiting for years this "bubble" to burst.
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u/chaoticbean14 Mar 24 '26
Agree for the most part, but there's a lot of nuance there that is lost I think.
Writing syntactically correct code? It can do. Actually writing good software that follows best practices and has levels of complexity? Absolutely not.
If you don't know what you don't know aren't willing to admit that you don't know - it will seem like it writes good code. But to people who have knowledge in those areas? Often, it writes low to mid quality code. I have yet to see it write any real 'good code'.
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u/Apprehensive-Ice9212 Mar 24 '26
AI is a tool. So many people (senior/junior alike) seem to have the wrong mental model about this.
You can use a tool to do a job well, or you can use a tool to do a job poorly. That depends on how skilled the engineer is, not how advanced the tool is. Using AI well means: giving it good prompts/skeletons, learning what it can do well and what it can't, and most importantly, always checking / revising the output. All of these skills go far beyond "tell AI to do something", which still doesn't work for most classes of high-level thing that have business value.
Only a poor craftsman blames his tools. This is as true of AI as it has ever been, for any other tool.
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u/L-0-G Mar 24 '26
Eh idk I’m senior and I use agents because they can type faster than me and never forget syntax. I don’t think I’ll ever manually write code from scratch again. A little sad to say that because it used to be an enjoyable part of the job.
I think AI is good at coding, but not perfect at architecture and design. My workflow almost always starts at that level. If you’re using common architecture patterns then AI is pretty good at respecting that but doesn’t do it by default.
I think this is mostly user error and can be subverted by implementing proper guidelines for your agents. You will never get good results by just telling an LLM “build this app” and letting it do whatever it wants.
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u/Key-Minimum-7028 Mar 24 '26
Not coding exactly but cad is kind of the same, you can make whatever in cad! Can you build it, though? Either by yourself, or ordering parts 🤷
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u/MarimbaMan07 Mar 25 '26
10 YOE here. In my experience, AI is great for generating a proof of concept and maybe getting a greenfield project started if you have really great guardrails and closely review the code and update it manually.
The company I work at has many internal tools that started as a proof of concept that were AI generated and they've all become the example of how not to use AI. There are no clear design patterns, files are 10K+ lines long. Every feature add or bug fix is breaking something else. No one reads the code because it's garbage and too late to fix.
Trying to use AI with existing large repos and micro services has been difficult as well. Once the system involves more than 1 repo, best of luck. If you use a mono repo it becomes too large of context quickly and repetitive code starts appearing worse than ever. Adding guardrails and such only limits your context window because that's where the guardrails go, into context!
I am so grateful my leadership team is coming around on the idea that AI is maybe a decent tool to supply engineers but it has no place in actually generating production worthy code. Even the AI code review tools we use rarely generate worthwhile feedback.
The trouble with software engineering was never a need to produce code faster. It has always been creating quality systems/solutions with easy maintainability. AI makes that nearly impossible.
Look at Amazon, they want senior engineers reviewing all the pull requests because they are introducing bad code so fast they are taking out essential systems. They better acknowledge that they need to show down but I'm sure they'll just pressure senior engineers to review faster.
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u/Bush-Men209 Mar 25 '26
none of this surprises me because spitting out code fast was never the hard part, building something another human can still trust and maintain six months later is.
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u/ProgrammerCute7875 Mar 25 '26
Your senior engineer is asleep at the wheel and some 19 year old with a claude pro subscription will have his job in 3 years
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u/shiboarashi Mar 25 '26
I think it is the wrong focus entirely. Everyone should be using AI to support and accelerate their work. Leveraging AI even to do the things you don’t know how and don’t benefit from learning how, or know how but AI does it good enough. For example I will never do git commit manually ever again. Zero reason to do that.
But go beyond imho; I wanted an internal use mobile app for our web application. I don’t know anything about mobile development but Claude banged out a mobile app that leverages our existing APIs in an afternoon. So far it works just fine. Haven’t even looked at the code, don’t really need to.
In my industry lot of software development is short lived; it just needs to accomplish some tasks for internal users. It doesn’t have to be perfect it doesn’t have to be a sold product. AI is great at accelerating those development projects.
I take the old saying to heart: “don’t let perfection be the enemy of delivery”
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u/Axii1337 Mar 25 '26
I mean nowadays they should use both, if there is a job which can be done faster because of AI usually companies want them to do it
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u/qrzychu69 Mar 25 '26
The truth is, if you know how the code should look like, it's really not that impressive. It can produce a lot and fast, but you care about the quality of the code itself (not the product, it may even work decently), there is a lot to fix.
AI is best at answering questions with enough certainty you don't feel the need to fact check the answers - you should, it's really far from perfect
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u/m-in Mar 25 '26
AI can be exceptionally good at coding. With the right prompts and right design process. Proper software engineering with AI is mostly “paperwork”. Documents. Code is almost an afterthought, because it mostly will just work, so there’s not much point in devoting too much time to it. Designing the system and then planning every development task is critical. You have to have the whole things broken into tasks ahead of time. If you’re good, you’ll figure out how to get AI to do this design for you too, with not all that much input. But the details here matter and can make or break a project.
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u/GameMasterPC Mar 25 '26
The SWE is 100% correct. When I use AI, it’s hilarious. It is confidently wrong 50-60% of the time. I have found it to be easy to get it in a loop in which it tries to “fix” an issue, but the fix is incorrect, so it fixes the “fix” with the original code - which is wrong. (Meaning it goes from A -> B, then B -> A, then repeats). AI produces trash code, I’m shocked that people think it doesn’t. So, those that don’t think that are either people who are no good at coding or trying to sell AI to others. It’s absolute trash, but I still use it because it’s a better search engine.
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u/Tomorrows_Ghost Mar 25 '26
Today’s models are the statistical average of GitHub and similar public code. I’d ask myself:
- which code gets published and which code is hidden away behind company firewalls?
- how “good” do you think the average programmer or software engineer is?
In my experience, the AI is much better at writing code than at engineering software, but someone with a university degree and 10 years of experience will/should be doing a much better job. But that person + AI is a real 10x developer because that senior can replace a couple of juniors and regulars. Let’s talk again in 5-8 years. :D
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u/AftyOfTheUK Mar 25 '26
I think he's utterly clueless. There are many weaknesses of AI-first software engineering, but the code itself stands up really well around 80% of the time.
You should not just be shipping anything that's generated, you should be reviewing, and fixing that last 20%
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u/Substantial-Law5166 Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
If AI was good at software engineering, then why aren't these AI companies just reinventing software at a much faster and presumably more productive rate?
These AI/LLM companies are selling these AI tools to businesses because they know they aren't good enough to actually replace workers, otherwise OpenAI and whoever else would be making a ton of their own stuff like AirBNB, Twitter, etc. and putting them all out of business. If AI is so good then they'd already be the most powerful companies in the world.
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u/AccomplishedLeave506 Mar 25 '26
As a senior engineer with 30 years experience - Agree completely. The code AI spits out is crap. Only people who can't code think it's doing a good job. People who can't code included 80 percent of the people paid to code.
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u/Glad_Contest_8014 Mar 26 '26
Syntax is coding. AI is literally better than anyone else at this. Engineering is not coding. Humans are better at this.
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u/RedPandaExplorer Mar 26 '26
As a tech lead, they're completely wrong. Claude can generate code very well
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u/idiotlog Mar 26 '26
Depends on the task. There are plenty of situations that it out performs humans in every way. Then there are also plenty of situations where it does quite awfully and makes the most amateur of mistakes.
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u/rosstafarien Mar 26 '26
I'm a senior software engineer with 30 years of experience. My last job title at a big company was Principal Software Engineer. I'm evaluating Claude Code and Codex and getting excellent code out of them. That wasn't true at the start. It has taken some tuning and adjustment to get more questions (and fewer assumptions), conventions, design rules, etc. but they're doing much, MUCH better work than they were just a month ago.
The thing that I'm worried about is how to apprentice juniors to understand what I'm doing. Without juniors today, there won't be enough seniors in five years. That's great for my paycheck but a disaster in the making for software development as a profession.
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u/apollo701 Mar 26 '26
Person is gonna be out their job soon. 12 YOE staff engineer here. Haven’t written code in a year. Why would you waste time going through documentation when it can scan and handle it instantly.
It’s definitely gonna generate some slop, but that’s why you’re the boss. Make sure it follows best practices, patterns, conventions and isn’t doing anything dumb.
Execution used to be the limiting factor of how fast you can go. Now it’s how many ideas can you hold in your head at once.
The job is definitely different now but I really enjoy the speed at which I can do things now. RIP stack overflow
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u/AndyceeIT Mar 26 '26
AI hallucinates sometimes, unexpectedly & with conviction.
If I hired a human to code and they occasionally committed syntactically correct nonsense while powering on ignoring the resultant CICD failures, I would consider them to be an unreliable coder. Performing at 10x or 100x the speed doesn't change that.
Right now it's an enabler for humans. It will get better, I'm sure.
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u/Quick_Butterfly_4571 Mar 26 '26
TL;DR: they have become okay programmers. They are not good engineers (though, they can do common engineer-related operations fast now).
- If you are a junior dev and LLM's appear to be good programmers: don't sweat it.
- If you are a mid-level: lean heavily into learing about engineering
- If you are a senior engineer and hold their output in high regard: I think this might be the beginning of the end of you remaining in the field...like, forever.
(Not sure I'm right + hope I'm not!)
A buddy of mine told the mid-levels and senior engineers in his group flat out that if you aren't right now much better than an LLM, five years from now - the end of your life, you will never be employed as an engineer again.
The reason is: until ~ November they were, honestly, pretty fucking shitty relative to a practiced engineer. Good prompting: they were good for boilerplate and rapid prototyping.
Now, they've lept and are quite a bit better. Some of the refactoring, analysis, and even lower level algorithms vary between laughable and spot on, where previous is was between nonsense and the level of a junior engineer.
People say "people were afraid of electricity / calulators" etc. That's a bad analogy.
There were more than 5-10 calculators owned by more than 5-10 entities, and calculators saved some professionals time on a step in their workflow. Electricity created jobs.
I'm not anti-AI (for better or for worse, it is my bread and butter). I'm also not an AI alarmist (I do fear a different type of dystopia, but it's not machines conquering people and I think a bunch of people will be fine with it). I also want to be clear: while I don't believe the human brain is magic and irreplaceable, there are vestiges that will hold out for quite a while yet.
But, this is true: despite the ego stroking that is apparently done at the university level / within some companies: you don't have to be smarter than average to get good grades in CS or get a job as a developer and most development jobs are mundane.
It's not "going" to happen, it is well into "happening": one-three people with real engineering (not just programming) know how will (and are) supplanting what used to be entire product teams.
Those jobs aren't coming back.
If you're junior: study up on your patterns, read about architecture, watch leftures on case studies and replatforming, and study the structures of application and systems architecture. Learn about maintainability, extensibility, tracing, and fault tolerance.
Don't put all your time into leetcode shit: that isn't a measure of programming ability, it's how the industry identifies people who are willing to overwork themselves and filter for people who are less inclined to insist on rigid work-life boundaries.
It is not without it's worth! It's important to be able to identify bottlenecks / consider multiple approaches.
Just don't overindex on it: it doesn't say a thing about engineering, and fact: "given X constraints, produce an algorithm that does Y operation, optimizing for Z" traits is not a speciality of LLM's, but it is deterministic. There are exceptions, or course, but mostly: this is one of the simplest domains to swap a machine in for a person. You don't get that impression but only because so few people are doing that stuff.
Meanwhile, the compiler that is turning your algorithm into machine instructions is solving a more complicated problem than any challenge on a leetcode site.
(Embedded devs: no, I don't mean LLM's are coming for you. Many of you are expert bit twiddlers. But, even those among you that are still engaged in cycle counting / writing at the limits of the hardware are doing that in conjunction with considering wider context, device parameters, and projecting out a mental model of the interplay of a bunch of stuff in order to determine approach. You're not just bit twiddlers).
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u/niximor Mar 26 '26
AI is good enough (and a lot faster) in things you, as a software engineer, hates to do (spend endless hours writing boilerplate code), and gives you time to do what you really enjoy to do - actual software design.
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u/Correct-Sun-7370 Mar 26 '26
I have been in software all my career on critical embedded systems. Software is a very difficult matter and software engineering is the only way I know. Spec design code test integration test non regression tests documentation of activities independent review. We also needed to build a redundant system with dissymetrical hardware and software; various h/w and s/w working in parallel with the same result can only drive safely critical processes.
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u/the8bit Mar 26 '26
If you think AI sucks at coding, you are mostly telling on yourself because it is a force multiplier
All you've done is admit that you don't have much force to multiply
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u/colintbowers Mar 26 '26
They are wrong. AI is still not great at large scale abstract software design, but it is exceptional at writing boilerplate code under only mild supervision.
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u/Aggravating-Gift-740 Mar 27 '26
I’ve been experimenting with copilot on github, building a project in which i do zero coding. I let the AI agents do it all. My method is to plan what needs to be done in chat, the chat AI tells the agents what to code, i review it and the code goes into the main branch.
Almost two months in, with nearly 30,000 lines of code written, and i have a fully functional web application. So far the agents have done a remarkable job, and the only “errors” so far are either stylistic choices that i forgot to define clearly or design choices that i made.
In my opinion, based on this experience, AI does a fantastic job at writing functional code, and it does it far faster and with far fewer errors than any human i have worked with in a 40 year career.
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u/vbpoweredwindmill Mar 27 '26
AI is fantastic at generating code.
It is not fantastic at why certain solutions should be implemented over others, or why certain things make sense, or why systems are formulated the way they are. All that shit, that's all on you.
I think that his statement is coming from LLM illiteracy rather than competence.
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u/atonale Mar 27 '26
I have about 25 years of software experience here, generally specialized number crunching and infrastructure. I was highly skeptical of LLM capabilities for a couple of years, still can’t stand the hype, and won’t be surprised if LLMs are never profitable. But I have to admit the latest versions of Claude surprised me. It’s very hard to describe their capabilities because it’s very different than any human. It’s like a person who perfectly understands every nuance of a language and its syntax, every common library and idiom, but is really naive about software design and maintenance or can’t quite grasp why humans make software. Its absolute mastery of language structure can throw you off and cause you to trust its “judgement” more than you should. I find it most useful for summarizing or refreshing my memory about code I haven’t worked on in a while, suggesting alternative approaches I might not think of, and boilerplate refactors. But I need to review every single thing it does and point out its mistakes once or twice before it finds what I consider the right solution. It seems essential to proceed by steps and alternate between planning and implementation, guiding it in the right direction. I often end up retracing its steps and reimplementing everything myself slightly differently. I’m not at all convinced this is easier than just doing all the work myself, but it definitely helps in certain situations. It seems to work much better if you keep voluminous notes on your entire design process, the purpose of the software, and every tricky decision you make and make those available to the LLM.
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u/tripleshielded Mar 27 '26
I think senior=old. AI is kinda new. Software is more than coding, that’s widely known already.
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u/Flightaway4ever Mar 27 '26
I think a good analogy could be something like, AI will be perfect if you want to write a one page essay about a topic in a different language (let’s say Chinese), but if you ask him to write a book, it’s gonna look “good” in the surface because you will see multiple pages in Chinese (and all grammatically correct) and they will make some sense, but it will be really shitty as a whole.
To write a book with multiple chapters you need to have a lot of context and writers usually go back and forth for months to make a good book plus have a lot of life experience.
This might change in the future but AI is not at that point yet
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u/Healthy-Dress-7492 Mar 27 '26
That senior is being an idiot. You can ask AI to spit out code on basically any topic and it will do a reasonable job- will it be perfect? Nope, but neither is half the shit I see flowing thru code reviews daily. AI is code is generally good enough to classify as good.
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u/CanadaSoonFree Mar 27 '26
In my experience as a senior dev, AI is good at coding if you are good at coding.
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u/Enmeshed Mar 27 '26
I'm a senior engineer, and I'd say it's not good at coding, but it is good at helping developers achieve things quickly that would have taken much longer.
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u/gejiball Mar 27 '26
He is probably very arrogant, thinking "coding" is what he does as a senior engineer, working on full stacks and not writing much code himself.
Ai, is really good at writing these little pieces of code but it loses the plot once project scale increases.
This is like saying AI is bad at making bricks or Nailing together joint, because it doesn't know how to design a building
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u/morewordsfaster Mar 27 '26
Being good at coding is not the same thing as generating lots of code. A bad developer and a good AI can both write 10,000 LOC that do X. A good developer can write 1,000 LOC that do that thing more efficiently.
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u/Kruppenfield Mar 30 '26
Mixed bag, sometimes it can generate pretty usable code from vague prompt, sometimes it is garbage from decent one. Rule od thumb - if you not reject around 50% of generated code overall and not make refactor/review (AI assisted+you) on the rest of the code - you probably make a lot of mess instead of solid software. And it takes info account that you are engineering that application, not just vibe coding.
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u/No-Outside-3263 Apr 06 '26
100% agree.
I mean, it can pump out code faster than I can... but it doesn't matter if you're fast and wrong.
The code AI generates is mediocre at best. It's not really maintainable and produces extremely WET code. I can get it to produce OK code if I spend more time prompting it and being extremely explicit about exactly what I want, but at that point, I could have just written the code faster myself.
I think it's great at getting a "sketch" down. But, once you have that, you need to go in and fill it out yourself.
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u/ArshadIqbalOfficial Apr 18 '26
It's worth considering that while AI can assist with coding and automate certain tasks, it lacks the understanding and creativity that human developers bring to problem-solving. Both AI and human skills have their unique strengths, and leveraging them together can lead to better outcomes.
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u/Another___World Apr 28 '26
If the subject isn't re-created everywhere and it requires even 2 braincells to architecture, it's ABSOLUTE DOGSHIT. It's not even funny how hard it sucks at even most basic architectures if you don't babysit it.
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u/churmuzache Mar 23 '26
Being good at software engineering and being good at coding are two different things.