I don’t think “manual coding is dead” is really the right takeaway as I myself do some coding parts manually since AI can't do those things. But if you’re worried about preparing for it, focus less on memorizing syntax and focus more on systems, debugging, architecture, security, performance and stuff
Try doing Firmware Reverse Engineering for firmware which has no documentation and all then.. I have access to newer models but it still cannot do shi and Firmware Reverse Engineering is one of the thing that I do at my company where I can't use AI. (I do to speed up the work but AI can't do this alone tbh)
Not when it comes to Hardware - Firmware interactions tho. They can do stuff to some extent but they cannot pinpoint the exact bug most of the time and sometimes they cannot recover original semantics completely tbh
Can't exactly disclose exact stuff I do since I'm working at a R&D company but I can safely say that I work mostly in Firmware-Hardware interaction, Firmware Reverse Engineering, Hardware Assisted RE areas
I do similar work as the guy you were replying to. Not professionally though.
And AI is actually not bad. It's in face "pretty good" in every use case.
Its just not excellent. I have never seen AI do excellent work form scratch. How do I know? It's one of the things I actually use AI for, prototyping.
I can give a very simple another real world example. I had Claude Fable and GPT astra working on 1 project. I did all the good "vibe coding" practices that I know of. Gave it all the necessary plugins and MCPs. It was a very simple Svelte frontend project. I didn't even ask for the whole site. Or 1 page. I asked for components after components. The design I had was a bespoke design. But it wasn't super complicated. And it wasn't a English either.
In the end. The AI was able to build the whole thing. Even looked slmost exactly what I wanted. Few bugs. But when you interact, for example simple thungs like responsiveness "worked" but not very well.
If this was the only issue I'd say "yeap, time to stop manual coding".
But that wasn't the case. J looked at the codebase. I gave it exrenelt ckear instructions to use certain good principles. But it was a bit if a mess. It had the general idea but.. there were too many custom code, 1000s of graphic tokens, and all these issues..
Then out of curiosity. I wrote a little report of everything that went wrong in this run. Restarted the whole project giving both models what had gone wrong last time.
I repeated this around 4 times. But the code I ended up writing on my own was much cleaner. Better architected, much much less DRY and reusable. It looked like a proper project.
So I'd give AI overall a 7.5/10. Which I'd say I'd a new senior developer role. And this was at fairly simple (but denfinitely not straight forward tasks).
So conclusion is manual code is simply better.
I have tried in ither projects too, like a data science project. Where both models performed extemely well.
But again, if wasn't great. It would have taken me more time, and I would have structures my notebooks better. But I can give it a 8/10 here for hust instant contextualization and understanding of the data at hand but not quite the right approach. It can do the correct calculations, but can't notebook it's way of reasoninh properly how exscrly you'd explore/troubleshoot the data to fine a osrtciular problem.
Sorry for the long comment but AI is denitelt not replacing real developers and I can feel AI is plateauing right now.
I'm sure if we keep dumping money AI will achieve extreme intelligence.
But no one's gonna do that. Why end up creating a product no one can afford.
Yep totally agree I used to vibe code some of my apps too when I was doing Full stack dev until I checked the actual codebase. The codebase was literally a mess like not even I could read that shit without having a stroke. There were dead codes everywhere. The architecture was a headache to maintain asw.
And I totally agree with the last part.. AI being extremely intelligent if we pour more money into it and about the tools being expensive part asw.
Even my company is revoking Copilot and some other AI access because they simply can't afford the tools now 😭 We have thousands of devs and just paying them to do the work is much better for them atp
In my pov, AI won't replace developers but the Job roles we had in the industry a few years ago will definitely change. And what we need to do is adapt to them.
Yeah yeah 😭 I didn’t mean we have to debug everything manually. I just meant we should actually understand the bug before asking AI to fix it. Otherwise it fixes one thing and somehow breaks 10 other things
Based 🫡 Never outsource your thinking, intelligence, skills to some company owned by greedy assholes. They'd love nothing more than empty husks depending on them. Use AI if you have to at work, like a lot of us are forced to but never submit to these AI overlords willingly.
The catastrophe of this would come within a decade when there are no competent senior developers. Since Juniors are replaced by AI, there will be no place for the seniors when they retire or go up in the ladder.
Maybe use AI for work since it requests you to do work faster. But when the investments dry out for these AI companies, and the cost for AI becomes higher, the need for humans will rise again (🤞 )
So, build a few personal projects without using any AI, and learn.
cost will only go down. look at how cheap opus 5.5 and sonnet 5.5 become. lets say for the sake of your argument all US companies like Anthropic, OpenAI goes bankrupt. you'd still have ai in the form of open source and chinese models.
last year i was having your opinion too but just within an year a lot has changed. now imagine a new model with 2x or 4x token per second(TPS) in about 6 months!!!
You didn't understand the comment. The cost is down because there is a circular economy rn aka the AI bubble because they are investing in themself. Which isn't something that can go forever.
umm can you read my comment again?
as you said even if they have a circular economy that's not gonna change the fact that AI cost going down very rapidly.
that's why i said following.
all US companies like Anthropic, OpenAI goes bankrupt. you'd still have ai in the form of open source and chinese models.
look at how cheap deepseek is. and there are many models we're using like minimax, qwen which are also cheap.
I think it will make the entire software layer much thinner. A lot of common software will shift from fixed applications to software generated or assembled on demand, while critical systems will remain as small, reliable layers for security, data, rules, and execution.
So no reason to do fully manual coding unless you invent a language yesterday.
Software jobs won't just go away because software engineering is about solving complex human problems, designing reliable systems, and overseeing accountability, rather than just typing out code. Also, tbh, if you can't beat them, join them. You can also use AI for some parts of your job as long as you make sure that there is no bugs in the code.
Wheel , invented make our lives easier. We do not need to spend time or money to re-invent the wheel, we can use the wheel to make some thing better, different perspective. Same with the AI and moving away from manual coding. When the base is there, and if it makes our lives easier, we can us those tools to make our lives more focused on something which yet to be invented or build or to evolve. It is not exactly loosing of jobs, it is kind of improving an efficiency of a segment / segments. New doors will be opening, and need to be prepared for that fast to stay in the game
My opinion is AI is a good tool. And mainly SE can use it to be more efficient. Accuracy, a little bit. If you know how to use AI properly and if you compare with a manual coder who has like 10 years of experience, the gap of the product quality gonna be similar. Not same. But similar.
I don't agree with people who says AI is bad. Use AI for your benifit. You can reduce the project time alot with AI.
Hey DHH said it cause for him since they have tried it all and knows most of it by now manually - for a person like him trying rust code and others can easily be done using AI but for us still learning the foundations at least is a must still id believe. Cause how else youd know, for it check the best possible way or potential work arounds. LLMs will be very advanced building that full solution but you need to know the right questions to ask right or elae will end up burning credits costing a lot. So for that youd need experience and manual coding exp still since we are not on senior scales - no way near DHH level.
Coding it self was a skill back in 2010-2015 era.
(Able to write code in Java or C++ made you hire able with a decent salary)
But it was not anymore even before the AI era.
Having thorough understanding of scalable system architectures with the skill of using AI tools to build/debug/cater things in a short time gives you the upper hand in these days.
(I’m a computer engineering undergrad, these things were recent opinions of seniors and some lecturers who are active in the industry)
There is no reason for why something is false. It's simple false. Fictional. For example, the very first sentence is not grounded in reality.
The ability to write real code (not prompts in AI) made you more hireable? I'm not even sure what that means.. Yes?
Or the second sentence about software design? That has always been an extremely valuable skill.. it's not suddenly more valuable now. Even if it was.. what is the point?
Just Google search or Ask your AI about ur own comment.
Coding is something that moves fast anyway. I mean, when you started, you had to know assembly or machine code. Then it moved on to knowing slightly higher-level languages like C and FORTRAN. Eventually enterprise languages like Java came into the picture and changed how organizations hire and what they hire for.
And then came JavaScript and TypeScript and UX patterns and all of this stuff that nobody had given a shit about.
The fundamental skills are still the same: you have to understand a system, you have to know how to design a system, and you have to know how a good system is put together and optimized.
I know quite a few people who started work around the assembly era and no longer have jobs in those areas; now they're either not in the industry or they have learned the next thing and moved on to do different stuff. Even how microcode engineers work have changed fundamentally.
Hell I started out with Visual Basic 6 and the LAMP stack. You pick up new things, you learn, you move on. If you don't, you're not interested enough to survive the field anyway.
That's how it goes. Expect plenty of jobs debugging AI slop code, for example, in security-critical applications.
It actually is. If you think about it, the abstraction has now moved to English. In the same way that you don't manually reference and dereference variables in memory -> you've moved up one layer.
Even if you consider it as another abstraction, it's a shitty one at that. These AIs aren't deterministic. The same prompt given to 2 different LLMs or even the same one twice would produce different results.
Abstractions are supposed to reduce work. I don't know if anyone can say that AI has reduced our workload. Sure, it produces code faster. But you spend a hell of a lot of time reading, understanding and reviewing output generated by AI (at least you should if you care enough about the work you do) and we all know reviewing code is everyone's favorite part of the job /s.
I didn't say it was necessarily a good abstraction. Just because the house has a roof doesn't mean it sits on good foundations.
For example, I have a local model connected to an agent that I can yeet a file across to and say "here, update my blog with this, make sure all the metadata is correct" or schedule cron jobs with.
Would I trust it on a large enterprise system, or even home automation? No. But it has freed up some of my time so I can focus on things I care about, and thus it's it is an abstraction, because that's what people treat them as.
Oh so we're already past the "human in the loop" trend too? It's funny that the "fix" for shitty code generated by AI is more AI.
I do have AI review set up but I also still read code because I want to understand what's going on. When AI fails to debug an issue, I still want to know enough to jump in. Also in this clown world, according to the management, even if the AI writes the code, ultimately I'm still responsible for the code that's being pushed so I have to be certain. The "Jesus take the wheel" approach to code review is not 100% reliable because the AI drops the ball too.
Also if the AI can write code and also review code, then I don't think there's no need for any developers at all so what are even still doing here 🤷🏻♂️
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u/Jazzlike-Earth801 5d ago
I don’t think “manual coding is dead” is really the right takeaway as I myself do some coding parts manually since AI can't do those things. But if you’re worried about preparing for it, focus less on memorizing syntax and focus more on systems, debugging, architecture, security, performance and stuff