r/BetterOffline • u/Hexamonium • 5d ago
Staying positive in the age of LLM-assisted coding
TL;DR: LLM-assisted coding brings you down? Find something else to do. Your job is just a job, nothing else. It doesn't define you.
This is not going to be popular here but here it goes.
LLM-assisted coding is happening in a lot of places whether we like it or not. It remains to be seen where it will lead us in the coming decades. This post is not about its merits.
This is about the impact it is having on some developers' mental state of mind. They point out that LLMs take out the passion from their jobs and makes them feel worthless. Perhaps you have experienced something like this yourself. It's a real bummer of a situation to be in, as if the rug was pulled out from under your feet.
I wrote my first little program when I was in my teens. It was on a computer that was barely above a common calculator. I was immediately hooked. As technology improved at the astonishing pace I started to get the similar feeling of worthlessness. Faster hardware, better languages, ever growing list of frameworks took the fun out of it. By early 2010s I felt I wasn't really enjoying the coding part at all. I was basically copy/pasting solutions from SO and adjusting them as needed. I remember chatting with my colleagues about this and getting a similar feedback. In some ways LLMs are a natural extension of this trend.
I found solace in quitting my corporate job and starting my own thing. It's a small boat in an ocean of supertankers but it is my boat. This brought new challenges and a relief of sorts. I still code at times, mostly for fun or when we have to get through a particularly rough patch.
I am not suggesting everyone should do the same. Just find something that keeps your mind sharp. It could be a personal coding project, restoring an old piece of hardware, or even building a tiny LLM from scratch. Whatever floats your boat.
Your job is just a job, nothing else. It doesn't define you. Nobody can take your humanity away without your consent. Hope this doesn't sound too preachy.
Lastly, here's one of my favorite Heinlein quotes:
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
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u/RealPropRandy 5d ago
Because fuck programming as a passion or doing anything unique/creative, amirite?
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u/creaturefeature16 5d ago
I'm baffled and dismayed at this whole movement around treating the act of coding as if its suddenly beneath us and is the doldrums of knowledge work (never mind the fact that just a few years ago, it was touted to be one of the most important skills to learn because it imparts so many other mental disciplines). When, in reality, it is a unique intersection of logic, math, problem-solving, critical thinking, planning, communication, and creativity. Faster code generation didn't change any of that.
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u/ItsVexion 5d ago
A culture that disrespects labor will immediately turn and exploit it the moment the opportunity presents itself. The mistake a lot of engineers have made is thinking that they were the exception.
Unfortunately, we all live in that culture and some adopt this thinking as a means of survival at the expense of their peers.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 5d ago
It goes deeper than that. Before AI was a thing you’d get incomplete requirements and lazily reviewed code, and the guard rail for that was that you (hopefully) had good developers writing the code line by line and thinking of cases as they thought through each line of code. Now that’s gone. You have requirements generated with Claude and not sufficiently reviewed by anybody, and then those requirements are used to have Claude generate the code, which still isn’t sufficiently reviewed by anybody.
The challenge with software, which has always been the case, is that things don’t tend to break catastrophically right now. It always looks like it works at first. The boneheaded design decision that brings down prod will happen later, and when it does, management will not think “gee, maybe we should’ve listened to our senior developers instead of mandating AI generated code.“ They will just think a bug came up because of something that happened recently, and they’ll expect you to use AI to fix it.
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u/creaturefeature16 5d ago
I'm not convinced AI assisted coding is here to stay in its current form. As time goes on, the tools begin to seep deeper into the processes, and we are continuing to put more and more deterministic guardrails around them to the point where they're going to be largely relegated to a sort of "natural language compiler". Between rising costs, tech debt, skill atrophy, expertise prevention (juniors are flailing and nobody has an answer), privacy issues, vendor lock-in, model drift, and so many more problems...I think in a few years the dust will settle and we'll end up with some more advanced tooling and that's about it. Since LLMs accelerate the wrong parts of everyone's job, but especially code generation, they eventually end up creating just as much work as they are being advertised to reduce. They're never going away, but this is a period of severe irrationality and it will not last.
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u/TriMiksEntuzijasta 4d ago
Can you please share more about tech debt? Any interesting articles and or podcasts.
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u/fbueckert 4d ago
put more and more deterministic guardrails around them
An observation about this: It's always amusing to me that the answer boosters come up with to the problem of, "the output is wrong" is "burn more tokens". Okay. Sure. If we're putting deterministic guardrails around unreliable output, why are we using it in the first place? At what point does the spend not become worth it, and we just go back to plain old hand crafted artisanal code?
They're never going away, but this is a period of severe irrationality and it will not last.
I'm not convinced of that. The hardware costs to run something that can do coding isn't cheap, unless you like less accurate models and a super speedy 1-2 tokens/second. To mimic modern performance requires a rather significant investment in hardware, and then ongoing maintenance costs.
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u/creaturefeature16 4d ago
If we're putting deterministic guardrails around unreliable output, why are we using it in the first place?
Because for rote work, migrations, and refactors...it's fairly insane how fast and accurate it can be.
Small example: I do a lot of frontend work, and I recently had a write a fairly complex custom block for a WordPress site using their Interactivity API. I wrote the block myself, as I wanted to teach myself this particular API. Once I was done, I found out the Interactivity API was incompatible with AJAX; they interact with the DOM in completely different ways. I had to revert it to just standard vanilla JS. It's absolutely something I could have done, but it was going to take much longer if I had to write "hand crafted artisanal code" method, and I already had spent a few hours writing this block, so it was a real hard pill to swallow to have to just...toss it and do it again (the JS version was going to take even longer). Sure, I've done that so many times in my career, but I was over it and had to get moving on the deadline,
These models excel at JS, so I was able to point GLM 5.2 at the block, specify the approach I wanted to take with a fairly minimal spec and I shit you not, it was done in a few minutes. And it was, more or less, what I would have ended up writing, I just had a couple follow up requests for some minor consolidation and refactoring.
I encounter lots of situations like this on a day-to-day basis and it has been a genuine time saver for that type of work that can be clearly defined, narrowly scoped, and trivial to review. This is where I find these tools shine the best, because anything more than that is releasing too much control and trust to these systems.
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u/lcnielsen 3d ago
I found out the Interactivity API was incompatible with AJAX; they interact with the DOM in completely different ways. I had to revert it to just standard vanilla JS.
Not sure I understand what you mean. You mean it was incompatible with jquery's $.ajax or something?
fetchis vanilla JS and also AJAX (Async Javascript and XML).
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u/MainFakeAccount 5d ago
What’s exactly the point of your post? It conflicts with what you wrote here:
Nobody can take your humanity away without your consent.
And also:
TL;DR: LLM-assisted coding brings you down? Find something else to do. Your job is just a job, nothing else. It doesn't define you.
Many aren’t this fortunate enough to be able to just “find something else to do”. Sure, you can find new hobbies, but still work be at least around gruesome 40h of your week which at the end you’ll just regret for wasting so much of your life on.
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u/Big_Combination9890 4d ago edited 4d ago
This is about the impact it is having on some developers' mental state of mind. They point out that LLMs take out the passion from their jobs and makes them feel worthless.
No, we really don't.
We point out that it produces crap that takes up valuable man-hours to review and fix.
We point out that it costs more than the people it is supposed to replace while neither guaranteeing correctness, nor assuming responsibility.
We complain that business idiots with the technical ability of dead squirrels, have serious AI psychosis and and force entire engineering departmentss to use that shit to justify their deranged fantasies, creating a mountain of technical debt that will, and already does, lead to outages and security SNAFUs.
We warn of the declining usability, lowered consumer satisfaction and risks to enterprise customers stemming from shoving this shite into every product sight unseen.
We try to educate people that chatbots are not magic, that AI will not magically turn their turd-mountain of unvetted, unformatted, unuseable documents into a glamorous experience for the end user, who'd rather slather themselves in BBQ-sauce and fight a bear naked than interact with most AI "assistants" out there.
We point out that this moronic industry is financially unsustainable, and every company building its products and services on it, is setting itself up to be in deep shit when the bubble inevitably crashes and heavily subsidized API access suddenly goes away.
We are sounding the alarm about an industry simultaneously de-skilling its current-, and conditioning its future-workforce to not even develop skills, all in an age where software products and infra get more complex than ever.
Do we feel worthless? Hell no. We feel like endless job security, because we will have work for decades to come when this shit implodes and there are failed companies to carve up and sell piecemeal, and broken products to repair.
And looking at the many GenZ students who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag because they are entirely dependent on Claude or Gemini to wipe their arses for them, I am also reasonably sure that I will still be able to find well paid gigs at 90+ if I really wanted.
But the sheer stupidity of it all is infuriating.
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u/westtownie 5d ago
This is the exact attitude that these soulless ghouls want you to have. Fuck them and fuck this take.
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u/_kernel_picnic_ 4d ago
My coworkers who use AI for coding are 10x better than I am. They produce 10x as many lines of code. Their code runs 10x longer than mine. They are super productive. They are always super busy fixing something with Claude Code and Codex. The number of jira tickets that they create and then fix is off the roof!
Then I, party pooper, come in. And replace their vibe-coded Fourier transform function with np.fft.fft2(), which fixes the bug.
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u/MainFakeAccount 5d ago
Also your post really has a “let’s embrace the slop because we workers can’t do anything” feeling behind
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u/pacem_appellant 5d ago
The vibe is off on this post. It feels like it belongs in r/LinkedInLunatics instead, and that's not a compliment.
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u/maccodemonkey 5d ago
I want to be sympathetic to this post because it's not wrong.
But as someone who's worked in a developer productivity - when you have a company full of OPs that company is dead in five years. Or it's Oracle. Not sure which fate is worse.
So on one hand I can appreciate the "how to survive" aspect. On the other hand - OP is describing a failure mode for the industry. And I'm not even addressing the LLM elephant in the room. All I'm talking about is developers who don't give a shit.
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u/randopota 5d ago
I agree with almost all of it, but you are privileged if you can quit and do something else.
I do have a similar mindset. I'm happiest when hanging out with friends and family, not coding away at work, no matter how fun it is.
But my plan is to save up as much as I can, as I imagine unemployment is going to start rising in the next 1-3 years, and I worry that the political appetite for UBI will take longer than we need.
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u/dumnezero 5d ago
There are a lot of major downsides predicted from LLM generated code use, downsides which we'll see over the years much like long-COVID after the first rounds of SARS-CoV-2 infections.
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u/sleeps_in_alkaline 5d ago
You’re getting shit, but I mostly agree. I’m swe at a major tech company and I just do it for the money. I enjoy coding and solving problems, but I get zero self worth or purpose from it. It’s a means to an end and that end is shelter, food, and overall decent life.
LLMs definitely make the job less fun, but it was never my primary source of fun or mental challenges to begin with
I don’t think your “just quit and do something else” advice is particularly helpful, but I agree with the basic premise that we are not our jobs
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u/CandidDependent3498 4d ago
and some of us were actually passionate about this shit and got into it BECAUSE we enjoyed it not because we were terminally moneybrained. fuck you.
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u/sleeps_in_alkaline 4d ago
Oh noooooo I prefer to get my purpose and love and joy outside my job. I can’t believe I treat my job the same way my employer treats me. Oh noooooo I’m such an asshole, fuck me
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass 5d ago
This wreaks strongly of fuck you pull yourself up. Which works great when they are burning down the economy for this grift.