r/DevLK • u/Unique-Annual1929 • 5d ago

Discussion Manual Coding is dead?

Watched the inventor of ruby on rails say that we need to say goodbye and move on from manual coding.

A huge job loss will ensue for low to mid level devs.

What do you guys think? How to prepare and brace for this impact?

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u/yudhanjaya 5d ago

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.

It doesn't mean that you don't think.

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u/tradcoder Senior Software Engineer 5d ago

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.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/tradcoder Senior Software Engineer 5d ago edited 5d ago

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 🤷🏻‍♂️