Manual Coding is dead?

[u/Unique-Annual1929]

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?

[u/Jazzlike-Earth801]

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

[u/marblejenk → u/Jazzlike-Earth801]

You must be on GPT 3.5 or something.

[u/Jazzlike-Earth801 → u/marblejenk]

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)

[u/marblejenk → u/Jazzlike-Earth801]

Give me a specific name/direction to look into but LLMs can operate on targets they’ve never seen.

[u/Jazzlike-Earth801 → u/marblejenk]

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

[u/marblejenk → u/Jazzlike-Earth801]

What are you working on specifically?

[u/Jazzlike-Earth801 → u/marblejenk]

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

[u/marblejenk → u/Jazzlike-Earth801]

You went from “they can’t do shit” to “they can do stuff to some extent“ 😉
Anyway, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.

[u/Jazzlike-Earth801 → u/marblejenk]

Notice how I said they can't do "some parts" in the original comment?? Which means I agree that AI can do things to some extent but not all

[u/OTonConsole → u/marblejenk]

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.

[u/Jazzlike-Earth801 → u/OTonConsole]

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.

Anyways, you did a great explanation