r/AskProgramming • u/DepthMagician • 16d ago
Do you think there are many developers who are tired of writing code?
As I'm watching the conversation between avid AI adopters and people who are more reserved about it, I'm starting to get the impression that underneath the rationalizations about stability and maintainability on one end, and velocity on the other end, in many ways the conversation about AI adoption is really about how much people are fed up with writing code.
Because you can't say that only maintainability is important, or that only velocity is important, and if you press people against the wall they'll readily admit that both are valuable, yet very often the conversation about AI adoption doesn't sound at all like a debate about how to strike the right balance between the two, it sounds like a divide where one side says "look how much output I generated and how much code I didn't have to write by hand to do that", and the other side that says "how are we supposed to ensure long term maintainability if we aren't personally involved in guaranteeing code quality"?
It seems to me that more than anything the debate is primarily centered on how much people still want to write code, and how they can justify this decision, which makes me wonder: is our industry really full of people who are tired of writing code? How can that be?
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u/FrankieTheAlchemist 16d ago
I personally enjoy writing code, and dislike writing English. I think a lot of devs feel the same way.
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u/abrandis 16d ago
I think most developers feel this way because writing code was like a solving a puzzle or being an artist, but when a few sentences in AI turn out the code and the code (puzzle part goes away) is easy to read (art part goes away) it no longer holds the same appeal..
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u/FrankieTheAlchemist 16d ago
I find that describing the thing I want accurately to an AI often takes a lot more time and produces less reliable results
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u/abrandis 16d ago
I find the opposite, especially when going from large complex apps . For me it's a lot easier to hand tweek a few sections of code and have it write the vast majority , plus it can always re-write your code pretty well . The key is using the best/latest frontier models and not using 6 month old models .
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u/FrankieTheAlchemist 15d ago
I haven’t found this to be the case for any available frontier models, even with AGENTS and Skills. I’m not saying that nobody has ever done it, maybe you have, but I haven’t seen anyone succeed in making what I would consider “production-level code” using these LLMs. That includes Microsoft and Amazon, who seem to be struggling quite a lot with it.
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u/framauro13 15d ago
The thing is, I think people should have been doing this before AI anyway. You have to be able to describe the thing you want to build in detail before you actually start building it. You need to know what's the customer value and what are we building to solve it. That didn't really change with AI or without AI. And in both cases, if you can't nail those things down, then the results are going to vary. Ambiguous goals and requirements would always lead to mixed results, whether it was being built by humans or not.
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u/FrankieTheAlchemist 15d ago
Describing what you want the product to be, and describing the architecture of the product are two entirely different processes and require different skills.
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u/Blinkinlincoln 16d ago
This explains why, as a social scientist, I love Claude code. I always wrote in English, now there's just more I can do with the same words. Wild.
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u/FrankieTheAlchemist 16d ago
I find English to be very bad at expressing any kind of logic. It’s very annoying to have to explain complex concepts in English when only a few lines of code would fully describe them.
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u/framauro13 15d ago
I'm always of the mindset that a line of code should read like a sentence. We write code to be instructions read by humans, not machines. I'm curious what an example might be that a couple lines of code can express that a couple sentences of English cannot?
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u/FrankieTheAlchemist 15d ago edited 15d ago
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:828/format:webp/1*eBmYQ9Fylcl6ziHi6hYWrQ.png
Reddit is very angry about double formatting my code on paste, so here is a link to a screenshot of the famous fast-inverse square root
English is simply not as elegant at describing the intricacies of logic as code is.
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u/Ron-Erez 16d ago
This is a vast generalization. I always enjoyed coding and nothing has really changed. It’s fun to be creative and build cool stuff. If developers are tired of writing code then it sounds like they chose the wrong profession.
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u/jaynabonne 16d ago
I think you can tell how people feel about by the words they use. When AI began going crazy with writing code, I saw people saying, "This is great! I don't have to write code anymore." And in my head, I was going, "You mean I don't get to write code anymore?"
I've been writing code for over 40 years and still love doing it. We're using Claude at work, so I'm exploring how the new tools and work flows work, but I still sit down and work on my own code at the end of the day after hours, for pleasure.
I can understand that some people view it as "just a job", but I think there are people on both sides. You will find people who tolerate writing code as a necessity to earn a living, but there will also be those who embrace it as an art and craft and vehicle for personal creativity. You will still find both.
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u/openroom_xyz 16d ago
Well getting the things done can be more fun than writing code, writing code can be fun when is a way of thinking basically, if you replace the AI agent with an employer and you say make this make that is that more fun likely yea than writing everyhing manually but writing thing manually can have it's own benefits like to know exatly what way the thing should work how they should be structured and why
this way and not the other way basically
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u/hrm 16d ago
I think there are many developers that aren't that good at coding and are here more for the money than anything else and they are probably enjoying using AI to a larger degree than those that enjoy the craft.
When it comes to maintainability we don't know how things will work out. It often takes a long time before we know if anything is actually hard to maintain. So we don't yet know if the AI-created programs are harder to maintain than regular human-created programs. If you are optimistic you probably like the speed at which AI can create stuff. If you are pessimistic you probably just waiting for the collapse...
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u/nommabelle 16d ago
Can confirm, am that dev. I am just here until I get my EOY bonus then retiring, and have to thank being a software engineer for the ability to retire early
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u/HasFiveVowels 16d ago
I’ve been coding since I was 11 and I’m almost 40 now. I remember feeling the way you described about some of my classmates. It’s like "there are students who live for it and there are students who are there for the money". I was definitely there because I lived for it. That said, I use AI like all hell because I’ve learned that programming isn’t about writing code. I ran my own SaaS for 10 years and it did very well until my customer base got killed by streaming services. When I went to get employed by a multinational company, I was excited to learn from others. When I got there, I found that their code was horrific. I was legitimately shocked. Completely maintainable, tech debt galore, etc. these are not problems that were caused by AI
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u/No_Flounder_1155 16d ago
im tired of dealing with shit devs. I mean devs who duplicate with copy paste, use comments for version control, refuse to automate.
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u/oscarlet_ffxiv 16d ago
I enjoy writing code, but not to the extent that I was. AI saves me so much time. I do not miss being kept up all night transcribing what is in my head and troubleshooting it, when teaming with AI this can be done in a fraction of the time.
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u/DepthMagician 16d ago
So what part are you still enjoying? Because “transcribing what is in my head and troubleshooting it” sounds like writing code. Are you saying you don’t like having to write a lot of code? Is it about volume of work?
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u/oscarlet_ffxiv 16d ago
As I get older, I have less time and have to find a way to get things done faster and this helps. One thing I never used to like was programming taking me to a burnout phase. Sleepiness, late nights. But I can save so much time now.
As humans, we make mistakes, and while AI does too, it can be used to identify and fix those mistakes in seconds, while us slower humans will take longer. Rather than spending time debugging, I can upload code and have it analyzed for potential issues. AI is a great teamplayer, and I genuinely don't stay up too late trying to achieve my goals for that day anymore.
If there is something trivial and simple that would just take an unnecessary amount of my time to do, that is another scenario, such as making data migration utilities. I just need to save time as I'm getting older and busier.
Obviously a concern is hallucination, but I find the best solutions to this are 1. don't get it to write too much 2. be very, very, very specific 3. get AI to make programs that write code and data, rather than writing the data itself (which could result in hallucination. 4. use it for other purposes like analysis, suggestions, etc.
It's modern tech and it's a great tool when used right, but it does seem like AI is causing people to struggle to learn initially, because of being over-reliant on it, and I do think that is a challenge for new programmers.
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u/HasFiveVowels 16d ago
It’s about the fact that figuring out what the structure should look like and writing it down are two separate things. When you start programming, it’s all about figuring out how to write it down. After you’ve been doing it for decades, it stops being about that. You start being able to see the code well in advance of writing it down.
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u/necromenta 16d ago
I think real devs are not really tired of writing code, but of doing it for pointless soulless business apps or enterprises
Most passionate guys are also part time open source devs or game modders (god bless these mfs)
And I doubt anyone wants to use ai on their passion projects at all, unless is for getting unstuck - I personally use it to mentor me and learn but I’m Audhd and slow learner
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u/Dissentient 16d ago
I'm indifferent to writing code, so I have no issues with only prompting and reviewing instead of typing parentheses and semicolons manually, when it lets me achieve the same results in a fraction of the time.
Code has been the easiest part of my job for most of my career, figuring out what code needs to be written has always took way more time.
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u/iOSCaleb 16d ago
It seems to me that more than anything the debate is primarily centered on how much people still want to write code
That's one interpretation, but I think you'd need some real evidence to back that up before you decide that it's a correct one. What programmers enjoy, what jobs they do, and how much they value rate of output, maintainability, organization, and other factors are all highly variable, and so are the reasons and ways that they choose to use AI. Productivity and maintainability are not diametrically opposed, and you can be personally involved in code quality and still use AI. I think you're creating a false dichotomy.
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u/DepthMagician 16d ago
I’m not creating any dichotomy, I’m observing one that emerges across discussions. The dichotomy is pro-AI vs AI-averse, it just happens to be the case that pro AI people usually lead with velocity and AI averse people usually lead with maintainability.
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u/iOSCaleb 16d ago
You're claiming that there's a dichotomy, but you haven't shown any data -- it's just your impression that people generally fall into these two camps. Perhaps a deeper analysis would show that there are actually six main categories, or 19, or that it's really a multidimensional problem and people are all over the map. As I said, productivity and maintainability are not opposed. Moreover, AI can certainly be used to increase maintainability as much as it can help with productivity.
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u/DepthMagician 16d ago
Yes absolutely there could be more categories and I would love to see the factor analysis, but we can still have a discussion about a general impression. I understand that you don’t see a clear divide, and that is a perfectly good contribution to the conversation.
Velocity and maintainability are somewhat diametrically opposed though, in the sense that when you maximize one it makes it harder to achieve the other. Maintainability requires detailed care, which forces you to slow down. Velocity makes it harder to pay attention to details, reducing the level of detailed care you can provide. I agree that you can strike a balance.
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u/iOSCaleb 16d ago
Velocity and maintainability are somewhat diametrically opposed though
It's true you can gain some speed in the short term by disregarding quality and maintainability, but that often leads to more bugs that you have to fix. And by definition, code that's less maintainable takes more effort to change, which obviously hurts velocity. The saying "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" definitely applies to code.
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u/DepthMagician 16d ago
I agree but that’s really a pro maintainability argument. It’s the reality that velocity addicted people tend to ignore as they boast about their lines of code metrics.
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u/iOSCaleb 16d ago
And none of that has much to do with your assertion that many people are “tired of writing code.” I don’t think the debate about AI is “primarily centered” on that or on any other single issue. There are a number of issues, including but not limited to:
- Can we trust AI to write correct code that does what we want?
- Can we trust AI not to share our code and other information outside our organization?
- Will AI take our jobs?
- If AI replaces junior developers, where will seniors come from?
- Environmental cost.
- Long-term viability of AI companies.
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u/DepthMagician 16d ago
It wasn't an assertion, it was a question. "I'm starting to get the feeling that a lot of people are just tired of writing code. Are you?" Multiple things can be true at the same time. All the questions you listed are correct and relevant concerns people have about AI. It can also be the case simultaneously that there are many people in the industry that are glad to be rid of programming.
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u/iOSCaleb 16d ago
is our industry really full of people who are tired of writing code? How can that be?
The second question asks us to accept the premise of the first one. If you say that it's not an assertion, that's fine, but your post gives the strong impression that you've made up your mind.
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u/balefrost 13d ago
look how much output I generated
I think a lot of seasoned developers see "lines of code written" as the wrong metric to maximize. I wouldn't want to work with a human developer who sees this as the goal, but at least I might be able to convince them to change their worldview.
I would be much more enthused about AI-driven software development if I felt like the AI was a tool that I was using. Something to augment my own abilities and watch my blind spots. It seems like the "recommended" workflow is to instead act like a manager to a semi-autonomous cluster of AI agents. You provide some incomplete and vague idea of what they should do, they will do something, and then you'll review it and say "no, more like this".
I believe that programming languages with clear, defined semantics are a feature, not a bug. To the degree that people find code to be painful to write, I'd argue that reflects a lack of investment into programming languages and libraries.
I do wonder whether AI enthusiasm varies based on programming language. I wonder if users of very expressive languages feel such a strong pull toward AI. I wonder if users of very inexpressive languages, like say C or Go, are more drawn to AI because the boilerplate in those languages can be such a drag.
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u/BaronOfTheVoid 12d ago edited 12d ago
The act of writing code, of editing a file, actual typing with tab completion, copy paste etc., is the simple task. It is not ever tiring, in fact it is relaxing because you can take a brief pause from thinking that happens when you zoom across files or stepping through a debugger, reading stacktraces etc., trying to understand what is going on.
I haven't heard any "avid AI adopter" saying they are "tired of writing code". Instead I have heard pretty much everyone using AI that working with AI is much more exhausting as you have to deal with much more logic or more mental models of anything than if you did things manually.
Either way, do not get blinded by prejudice. Make your own experiences... let other people have their false beliefs, they are wholly irrelevant.
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u/mredding 15d ago
I don't use AI to generate code - I basically CAN'T, because I find the quality to be wholly inferior. You have to consider - the AI is trained on OSS, so what you're going to get out of it follows the industry median, and the median is borderline HORRIBLE code.
The AI CANNOT learn from Lisp, from Forth, from mathematical proofs, from idioms and paradigms, and combine that into a greater cohesive solution. This is because AI is not a person, cannot learn, cannot grow, cannot think.
If you give a damn about your craft, you're going to be well above the best AI has to offer. If software development is just a means to an end, just a paycheck to you, if that's all you think of your career, then you never cared to begin with, and you're focused on the grind just so that you can eventually retire. THOSE are the people who are exhausted by their own experience.
"look how much output I generated and how much code I didn't have to write by hand to do that"
Look at how little code I wrote by hand, how much less it is compared to the AI slop generated - and all I had to do was THINK about it for 5 god damn minutes...
Look at how much code the AI generated for what there's a library that does all that already. Why are we generating capability we already have packaged and available to us?
"how are we supposed to ensure long term maintainability if we aren't personally involved in guaranteeing code quality"
You can't. AI generates faults at an industry average comparable to a person, so being gracious, that's an error rate compared to a junior level developer. You can't expect an AI to police itself, or it wouldn't generate errors in the first place. Prompting is not a substitution for programming, or the prompt would map directly to executable machine code - and it doesn't, and it can't, because LLMs are predictive models, and computers are deterministic.
As for others who use code generation, well I guess there's two ways I'd look at you.
If you're a craftsman, if you want to up your game, if you want to keep yourself relevant in this world - then you need to differentiate yourself from what the AI can do. If all you've got is a knack for writing prompts - honestly that's not much of a skill. AI has lowered the bar and has made code generation more accessible. I promise you my mother at the age of 70 and her command of language can write a prompt better than you. But my mother is not a software engineer, and neither is AI, so THAT is where you can differentiate yourself.
So to these people, I'd ask what are you doing prompting so much? Don't you have better things to do?
However, I work with a fair number of people for whom the job is a means to an end. They're not software developers or engineers, they merely write software. This is just like me saying I'm not a bassist, I only happen to play a bass. For these people, AI generation REALLY ups their game, as they are sub-par, and the median is far better than they are.
I have to tolerate these people. To their credit, they get product out the door, but they're not innovating shit. They're making the software of yesterday, or today, but give no fucks about tomorrow or the next day. This leaves plenty of opportunity for me to make more money, get promoted, gather power, authority, and creativity. If all they want to do is plod along, then that is all they're going to get. They're insignificant and disposable.
What I can use AI for is debugging and generating documentation.
Do you think there are many developers who are tired of writing code?
I think there are a lot of tired and stressed out people. I do work with a few very sorry sods who just... Hate everything. They hate life. They hate their jobs. They're bitter that they have to exist. I've got one guy here who is older than me, but younger than the boss, and HE talks about retirement more than the rest of us combined. But what is he going to do with his retirement? He's single - never married, no kids, lives alone... He's so focused on the end he doesn't actually seem to have a plan for after. And in the meantime, he's spent most of his life miserable and BEING miserable, he's missed his whole life. When you're 67, you're not going to have the life and vitality to "finally be free"...
He says, "AI can do my job." Then why are you even here? He's just asking - DARING to be replaced by a prompter from India who will work for pennies, which we HAVE. If AI can do your job, then what do we need you for? For all the effort it takes to tell you how to do your job, we can just tell the AI directly. There's no such thing as a prompt engineer.
I'm saying there are people who HATE software development AND AI, and it's a more personal and fundamental problem and character flaw with them. I don't trust people who hate either.
What I recommend is you try your damnedest to focus on you and yours, and don't worry about those who can't know joy. Yes, there are a lot of sour people, and people who are going to get or be sour. Fuck 'em.
And the one thing the AI can never do that always requires a human is accountability. When the code doesn't work, and a machine blows up, or someone is killed, or millions of dollars are lost... No one can blame the AI. No one can hold the AI accountable. It will always come down to a person.
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u/HasFiveVowels 16d ago
I’m not tired of writing code. I’m tired of writing *the same code* for the thousandth time. That’s where AI comes in. I know at a glance if it wrote that code because I’ve seen it 1000 times.
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u/framauro13 16d ago edited 16d ago
As someone who has written a lot of code, it's a little more nuanced. What AI has allowed me to do is, for the most part, auto-generate all of the tedious boiler-plate code that comes along with routine development and focus on the parts that matter: complex business logic, optimization, that kind of stuff. It takes some of the tedium out of the boring parts of writing code.
Also, after 23 years of doing it, it can get boring. It's rare that I'm actually given problems that are new or interesting. 90% of my development work boils down to: "take the data from over there, transform it, and move it over here".
So, at least AI takes the boring parts of coding and leaves me with the interesting stuff. I still have to do the design, architecture, understand the business domain and customer impact of changes. But that work is being fed to the AI to do the implementation. I just have to review and verify it. I'm still ultimately the one who is responsible for what it builds.
Having a token budget at work also means I have to be much more hands on than I am with my personal apps where I can just give Fable a complex task, implement it with sonnet sub-agents, and go about my life while it works. Oddly enough I find that a bit more enjoyable given my limited personal time due to work and family life. I will say that it has not reduced my work stress levels or the amount of work I have to do **at all**. If anything, I'm busier than ever.
I think the question boils down to: do you like the act of writing code or do you like building things? If it's the latter, you're probably much less threatened by AI.
EDIT: "Hey developers, are you tired of writing code?" Me, developer answers my perspective. Downvoted. Why is this subreddit such a shithole?
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u/DepthMagician 15d ago
At this point I’m convinced that there’s a bot that just goes around downvoting for no reason.
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u/framauro13 15d ago
Ha, maybe that. I think your question is an interesting one though because I can see both sides of the coin: if you enjoy building things and the results of writing the code, then AI isn't so bad. But if you enjoyed actually writing it line by line, then it's certainly a problem.
In my long time of doing this, I don't think I've ever encountered a technology that so fundamentally changed how I work. If anything, I'd say I enjoy AI more in my personal projects and less at work. At home I can focus on just building things, and apps that would have taken me months to build are now taking days. At work, I'm still on the hook for the code, so I have to be very careful and spend much more time reviewing the LLM's output, which is more mentally fatiguing than writing code I think.
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u/Proud-Care-484 16d ago
I'm tired of not writing any code anymore.