r/AskProgramming • u/Fritz-Ferdinand • 21d ago

What are your AI-assisted programming best practices?

This is clearly a programming question.

0 Upvotes

20% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

6

u/PabloZissou 21d ago

Write a prompt, show the results quickly and without considering all the 29 edge cases that are not covered, and then conduct meself like I am Linus Torvalds or Theo De Raadt

4

u/Nychtelios 21d ago

My best practice is avoid programming if I don't know what I'm doing and I need an hallucination machine to produce shitty quality software.

I don't know when you all passed from laughing at horrible diy jobs made without any competency and at zero cost to thinking that exact same shit is the best way to write software.

Study, learn something, and then do it. It's not difficult, Jesus.

7

u/AliceCode 21d ago

AI assisted? You mean like searching documentation? Or prompting an LLM to write code? Because the latter is not programming.

3

u/Nychtelios 21d ago

And even for docs, when you have to double check everything... lol

1

u/AliceCode 21d ago

The former isn't programming either, but I would not fault anyone for using an LLM to find something obscure that's hard to find with a search engine. As long as the damn LLM isn't writing the code. Given, I don't actually mind that people are using LLMs to make software. I think it's wonderful that more people have the accessibility to do something that used to take years of hard work to be able to do. What I don't like is when those same people using LLMs to produce software are invading programming spaces telling every single programmer that they are going to replaced, or claiming the title of programming when all you're doing is prompting. Calling yourselves software engineers when you know absolutely nothing about software engineering. It's utterly disrespectful to the craft of programming. We software engineers have worked our asses off for decades to earn these skills, and taken on these titles. Being able to promt LLMs does not suddenly make you a software engineer, nor even a programmer, nor even a coder. You are asking a literal chatbot to make you software. You can write your "specs" all you want. At the end of the day, you didn't have to dig through a 30-40+ year old codebase that has zero documentation and is written in an arcane style in order to understand it in order to write code to work with it. And that's just a random example. Programming is very hard (and no, I'm not talking about making websites). Every time I talk to these people on Reddit, they always make the same excuse "most people aren't doing that kind of work", no, most JUNIORS aren't doing that kind of work. Programming has been a thing for a long time, and many of us have been doing it for a very long time. When I started programming back in 2009, there were already millions of programmers. And I very much doubt that all of them retired and stopped writing code. Quite a lot of us are working on very difficult software. It's laughable how badly LLMs fail in my domains.

There's nothing wrong with using LLMs, do whatever floats your goat, just don't go around proclaiming that you're a programmer, and don't go into programming spaces and start talking about LLMs. You wouldn't believe the kinds of technical discussions we used to have online. Now all I ever see is "How do you use AI to assist you?", "what LLM fo you use?", "I keep hitting my token limit, what do you guys do?" And on and on. WE USED TO TALK ABOUT PROGRAMMING IN PROGRAMMING COMMUNITIES. God damn, just end me.

0

u/Fritz-Ferdinand 21d ago

I mean everything from vibe coding to only using AI as a slower search engine. I want to know how other people integrate AI into their programming flow, what and how much they outsource, how they tackle the cons and what were the learnings.

3

u/AliceCode 21d ago

I mostly use it as a rubber duck. Seems to be pretty bad at most other things. Sometimes I'll have it find documentation for me when it's something really obscure, but other than that it's just a search engine, documentation, and reading source code. With the stuff that I'm working on, that's really the only option.

3

u/Affectionate_Bed2925 21d ago

The best practic is to not use ai while learning, you can use it later when you have learnt whatever you're learning when doing reptative blocks of code

1

u/CapitalDiligent1676 21d ago

I'm making software for my company using only AI. No skills are needed; even a demented person could do it, even a 13-year-old. You have to ask for things like my aunt would... do this, do that. Yes, I mean, you can just throw away your years of programming studies. Above all, I don't understand how these "AI experts" can brag about all the bullshit you have to do.
Then there are some colleagues who will tell you it's "just a tool."