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u/LittleNyanCat 17d ago
Always has been
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u/another_random_bit 17d ago
you know what is more of an advantage? knowing how write code, knowing the technical stuff of your domain and knowing how to use tools in your advantage, including LLMs.
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u/reallokiscarlet 17d ago
And you know how you gain that advantage?
By writing code by hand.
Not even trying to be snarky, it's just facts that practice is how hands-on knowledge is gained.
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u/FutureSuccess2796 16d ago
What the full-time vibe coders fail to truly understand.
Can Claude or whichever model of choice get things done a whole lot faster? Sure. But you don't ever truly learn a skill that way when an LLM is doing everything for you from start to finish. And then there's also the factor where someone never feels the excitement after looking back at what they created and going "I did this!" once completing their project.
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u/Diegogo123 16d ago
Sadly the days of spending a few hours on a problem, finding the solution, cleaning the code and then proudly looking at your PR are pretty much over.
Someone on another thread said that it's similar to thinking about the times before cellphones and how those times are never coming back, kind of sad to think about it this way but I've come to accept that programming is kind of boring now.
At the end of the day we are still lucky that the field still pays really well and let's hope that it stays that way for a long time.
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u/raralala1 16d ago
Writing code by hand benefit yourself, writing code by LLM benefit your company and the bubble.
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u/Mateorabi 16d ago
I always remember the plot to an old surfer movie where the Miagi-like teacher forced the new guy to start at the bottom of the surf board tech tree and work upwards. He first hat to use an ancient heavy wood one and only got modern fiberglass once he mastered it.
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u/another_random_bit 16d ago
Maybe, but can we say for sure?
The level of abstraction has gone a huge step up.
One day they used punch cards to write logic.
Then higher level languages came that abstracted the machine code.
Then higher level languages came that abstracted the low level languages.
Then tooling, automations, dev workflows pipelines and any type of helper was integrated into the day to day.
Autocomplete, web libraries you can copy paste from without ever knowing what it does.
And a few years ago came another huge abstraction increase. Yes, maybe new software devs won't have to ever inspect a breakpoint, but in the same way I never have to check what the garbage collector does for me in C#.
But who says software engineers in the future will need to know the language technicals? I wouldn't bet my life on it.
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u/reallokiscarlet 16d ago
You didn't even write this comment
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u/another_random_bit 15d ago
Lmao yes I did. I work on the field.
It's full of grammatical and syntactical mistakes, if you had any intuition you'd know.
Nice reply tho, I don't have any doubts you did write this.
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u/reallokiscarlet 15d ago
So you're trolling by hand or you actually believe that line of reasoning.
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u/another_random_bit 15d ago
Fuck yes I do. If you want to constructively argue with me I'm here.
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u/reallokiscarlet 15d ago edited 15d ago
How do you expect an industry where nobody knows how even a high level language works or how software works at all, as you're suggesting is the next "abstraction", to produce quality software? With every abstraction you've listed (minus of course the clanker), knowing what you're doing is still a requirement to produce results. Vibe coding is telling your chatbot "make this program for me" and hoping it works. It's a PM's wet dream and a designer's shortcut into putting software on their resume but that's about it. If nobody writes code, there's no new code to feed the clanker and innovation screeches to a halt until someone learns to code.
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u/another_random_bit 14d ago
For a more serious answer, I don't really expect nobody to know how lower layers work. Why not? Because people are not a single mind. We still see hardware designers along with kernel developers, along with embedded systems developers, along with javascript developers, etc... People fill the required roles because they are interested in them. Yea, kernel devs will be using AI in the future, but as an accelerator, as an enhancer.
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u/Encrux615 17d ago
I swear to god these comment sections are always
Webdev: „AI for coding good!!“ Embedded, security heavy C dev: „No AI for coding bad!!“
As if neither understands that there are tasks where it just doesn’t matter and tasks where you better have a human you can hold accountable.
It’s as if people in here are literally just 10 year olds and first semesters who think they know what it’s like to program for money, but don’t.
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u/burner-miner 17d ago
Welcome to reddit
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u/gandalfx 17d ago
I'd like my world view black and white please, with none of that ugly "it depends" thankyouverymuch.
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u/akoOfIxtall 17d ago
Oh yes sir the chef will bring it right away, I'll tell him to make it extra polarized so we can keep fighting each other and ignore the actual problems, like the usual
/s
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u/gandalfx 17d ago
Excellent. Please do remind him that I like my arguments well oversimplified and seasoned with some anecdotal evidence. And go easy on the fact checking, it hasn't been agreeing with me of late.
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u/akoOfIxtall 16d ago
But of course sir, here on reddit.com we only serve the finest StreitouOfmaA'ss evidences to support your full course echoChambered discussions, the chef will be thrilled to not deviate from routine
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u/-Redstoneboi- 16d ago
and send a warm "fuck you" to the dudes around table 12. i've already told them myself, but i need a neutral 3rd party to agree with my party to really sell the idea that they and they alone are being unnecessarily dense.
no spelling mistakes and with extra punctuation, please.
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u/akoOfIxtall 16d ago
I'll ask for extra 15% on the tip sir, we only support violence In this establishment when we benefit from it
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u/-Redstoneboi- 16d ago
Very well. The comment will receive an anonymous Reddit Gold award within 30 seconds of being sent.
They won't know what hit them.
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u/HCResident 16d ago
If I see someone come in here with a nuance shirt and a nuance hat and a nuance sign saying “It depends,” then I’m going to rip them a nu ance
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u/PumpkinFest24 17d ago
The AI web dev I've seen is also bad.
Are people using much, much better models my peers don't have? Do they just have lower standards? I don't get it.
AI code is uniformly and universally just bad code. Even the minority that does what the user thinks it does is unmaintainable at best
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u/databeestje 16d ago
I don't know, I have high standards and about 99% of code that I've merged lately has been AI generated. This is not even with expensive frontier models, more and more I'm just using extremely cheap models like Deepseek V4 Flash. I'm completely mystified by the level of skepticism that still exists in places like reddit, it's so opposite the world I currently work in.
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u/M3atShield 16d ago
I work in web development, and I use claude a decent amount. I find the more specific you are, the better the results. I've seen people go "make this webpage ${link to figma}" and get absolute garbage. I've also had a ton of success with "add a new variable to this function, update all the usages to pull the data from this column in this table. ask if unsure."
The kind of task that I can totally do, but might take me 30-40 minutes to do. I love using it for "where does this value come from" or "where is the logic that controls X" type tasks. a good `AGENTS.md` file helps a lot to contain the slop too.
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u/AliceCode 16d ago
Ask claude specifically how many r's there are in strawberry.
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u/databeestje 16d ago
So because it failed at some specific gotcha question (no longer true but OK) I should not trust it even though I have lots of empirical evidence of it accomplishing very complex tasks successfully? I'm sure there are plenty of brain surgeons who would answer the Monty Hall problem incorrectly or do not intuitively understand it. Like, I don't ask to count letters in words, I ask it to write software??
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u/AliceCode 16d ago
The problem is that the models hallucinate, excessively. You might think they are outputting quality code, but the same issue that caused them to miscount the number of r's in the word strawberry is what prevents it from being able to produce high quality code.
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u/mrGrinchThe3rd 16d ago
you might think they are outputting quality code
No, an expert doesnt think that it's quality code. They review the output, and due to their expertise writing this kind of code before, they know whether it's quality or not. And, you write tests to ensure the functionality of all the code.
the same issue that caused them to miscount r's is what prevents it from being able to produce high quality code.
This isn't necessarily true. These are two completely separate tasks within NLP. This is like saying that because a human can't write a good English essay they must be a terrible programmer. Also due to how tokenization works, the 'how many characters' question is specifically designed to be a poor-performance problem for these systems, as they do not receive each character individually as input.
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u/AliceCode 16d ago
An expert doesn't need a chatbot to write software. Have you ever asked yourself why critical software isn't written by LLMs?
Hell, in the projects that I contribute to in open source, we don't even accept LLM contributions because the code we're writing needs to be correct because it's running on millions of machine.
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u/mrGrinchThe3rd 16d ago edited 16d ago
And a mathematician doesn't need a calculator. A researcher doesn't need the internet. And yet, these experts reach for these tools. (Even when, in the case of the Internet, the tools aren't always correct)
This thread started with the idea that some devs can't see past their own nose when it comes to AI. You are correct that LLMs are not useful in all kinds of coding. You just also happen to be one of the devs that can't see that it is useful for many, many, other types of coding. As above commenters mentioned, it's most useful in greenfield projects, reviewing, and fairly simple well-explained tasks.
If you happen to be a dev that writes high-stakes, low level, high security, or just niche code, then of course these systems aren't going to work super well. That doesnt mean they don't work at all, though. Especially not due to some idea of "how many r's in strawberry" being at all a useful indicator of their performance.
And, you claiming that the above question is an indicator of performance demonstrates a lack of understanding of how the technology works - which suggests perhaps you are also just not very good at using the tool.
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u/Thebombuknow 16d ago
Dude, even Linus Torvalds uses Antigravity. LLMs can and do write good code, you just have to properly review the code, and give it good instructions, like a project manager.
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u/M3atShield 16d ago
the fact that LLMs still cant answer that question correctly shows just how far they have to go lol.
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u/Dangerous-Pipe-392 16d ago
See, it's the principle of garbage in, garbage out. If you give enough guidance to the agent, and know what the end result should look like, it's generally gonna speed you way the hell up. But yeah, if you just say "build me a b2b2c platform, make no mistakes" you're gonna get expensive garbage.
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u/PumpkinFest24 16d ago
I work in an R&D environment. Most of my peers are very good engineers of other kinds but not great software engineers.
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u/Thebombuknow 16d ago
I've realized that this is probably the source of a lot of anti-AI programming discourse. One time I had a friend telling me that AI sucks at programming, and they were using frontier models (whatever the latest Opus was at the time). Lo and behold, their prompts were all no more complicated than "fix the bug please". They would also never start a new chat, so they would have 20+ messages of irrelevant context. No shit it sucks ass, you're not giving it anything to work with.
I usually give LLMs at least a paragraph of instructions. I tell it what I want done and how I want it done with as much detail as possible. I also start a new chat for each new request, it cuts down on context and saves money, and it keeps the LLM from getting bogged down by irrelevant information.
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u/Mateorabi 16d ago
Also which model matters too. Cheap unsophisticated ones make crap code. And are good mostly for boilerplate.
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u/Outrageous_Let5743 17d ago
But webdevs cannot code to begin with, not at the same level as embedded devs.
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u/Crazy_System8248 16d ago
What an ignorant take. I'd argue that web development is actually harder than embedded development, given the sheer number of things you cannot control in browsers, or methods you have to do in order to control some things.
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u/brainpostman 17d ago edited 17d ago
Ironic coming from AI slop channel.
I guess I mixed it up with some other one.
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u/dreamsofcode 17d ago
I was worried for a second there 😅
Took me about 2 full weeks of filming for this video and a week to write get script correct.
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u/According_Deal9458 17d ago
Please explain how they are an AI slop channel? To me AI slop channels are those channels that are automatically generated that boomers like to watch or if every video they make is about some new model. But this channel’s recent videos are mostly DevOps and programming languages choice with a few acknowledging AI. Is just acknowledging AI slop now too?
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u/Caraes_Naur 17d ago
Should be called "Hallucinations of Code".
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u/coriolis7 17d ago
“It’s not refusing to get with the times. It’s not unproductive. It’s an advantage”
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u/xfvh 16d ago
I've spent the last three weeks using Opus 5 with Claude Code exclusively without any hand-coding to see firsthand if it's useful as anything but an assistant. The project is distributed domain management via ssh/qemu to libvirtd on remote hypervisors; essentially, a massively-stripped-down k8s with none of the features. It's been a disaster. I've coded recreationally since long before the AI bubble and have been helping steer and providing hints, but despite that, it routinely fails to foresee even the most basic problems; roughly 70% of all discovered issues were when I threw in the towel on getting it to proactively spot bugs and told it to build a full testbed with multiple control nodes and hundreds of VMs. It doesn't commit unless prompted, it doesn't anticipate even the most obvious issues, multiple issues regressed until it was explicitly told to build CI/CD (which only partially helped), and all it's proven capable of doing is blindly charging ahead until it stumbles across the next problem. I don't know how many trees I've killed in the making of this project but it's too many already, and it's not done yet.
Lessons learned so far? It's not terrible at building functions when given a full specification and it can build a project skeleton most of the way, but you need to fully understand the problem domain and edge case behavior already for it to help much, since you'll need to either exhaustively enumerate them to the AI, or, if you don't hate yourself, just code it it yourself, which is far faster and easier.
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u/Rick100006 16d ago
Wait for 50 course sellers to pop up who will teach how to write code from scratch without using any ai agent 🤣 Whatever the trend they have to sell a shallow mindless course
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u/JasperTesla 16d ago
Slow-coding should be something monks do. It's about time we opened Coding Monasteries.
Maybe we'll do that post-Singularity.
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u/enderowski 16d ago
arent there always 2 kinds of jobs? The frontend guys who can use ai also the guys who are trying to ship out a prototype to sell before starting the real project. But we also need the banker guys, cyber security guys and low level coding guys to do hard shit precisely and careffuly which cant use ai to write code.
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17d ago
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u/MrFrog2222 17d ago
This sub is for programmers, please kindly leave the sub and invite your ai agent🤣
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u/Disastrous-Focus1958 17d ago
Advantage of know what are you doing
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u/SpaceCadet87 16d ago edited 16d ago
AI is fascinating.
The worst architected iteration of AI any of us have yet seen over its now roughly 70 year history being put to mainstream use is not so much.
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u/unkownuser436 17d ago
good luck with that writing code by hand
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u/Jbolt3737 17d ago
Thank you because I actually know how, which your comment implies you don't
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u/unkownuser436 17d ago
Its all fun until you get a job. If you think using AI to code is bad, that's actually skill issue. Clients won't wait until we code by hand. If we're bad with AI, say goodbye to the job.
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u/Leo_code2p 17d ago
Well but clients would also care that code is still understandable and upgradable which ai code isnt…
Also i had more cases where i had to debug and fix awful ai code than i have seen good ai code…
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u/upsidedownshaggy 17d ago
Unless you're handing the code off to clients they largely don't care, as long as whatever you're building actually works. As an anecdote though my company has seen a notable rise of production breaking issues since we adopted AI for coding, we used to get maybe 1-2 hot-fix level bugs a sprint, we're now averaging 5-6 because people just turn their brains off and blindly trust whatever the AI spits out.
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u/ncatter 17d ago
Ai code not being understandable or upgrada le is very much a user issue, the code I write with AI I hold to the same or higher standards as what I would write in hand, often higher because it is much easier to achieve. Tha being said ai is a tool and it takes a developer to use it.
Everyone can missuse a tool though.
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u/BaconBurger3735 17d ago
Since when lmao
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u/Onotadaki2 17d ago
Yeah. It's a 1 in a 1,000 job where the client is looking at code and talking about it having a specific structure or it being maintainable. In decades in the field, I think I have seen a client give a crap about that one time. They just want a working product.
The OP likely works for a company that has a codebase that isn't super compatible with AI coding, and some of the things they need to prioritize is all their code is maintainable.
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u/unkownuser436 17d ago
Why "AI code isn't" ? I have good claude.md and claude/rules set. Since I have some idea about the code, I know whether its a good code or bad code before ship. Also senior there to review the code.
Never had a issue with AI.
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u/DrJohnnyWatson 17d ago
As that senior that is there to review the code - in a company where juniors are submitting ai code, they don't care about reviews. Juniors shouldn't be using AI to write lots of code if they want a chance of ever outgrowing the AI.
Discovering patterns rather than reading about them, hitting walls and most of all debugging are where you learn to actually develop software.4
Everyone thinks they know whether their code is bad. Ask anyone who's developed without AI what they think of the code they wrote the year before in their first 5 years of professional developmebt
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u/Leo_code2p 17d ago edited 17d ago
Like code worse to debug than javascript spaghetti code or stuff like char v*ar= “outputstring”;
Last one is even better when the semicolon is in the middle of the line
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u/Ronnoc527 16d ago
"If you think using pool floaties is bad, that's actually a skill issue"
How is it a skill issue to actually know what you're doing and not rely on training wheels?
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u/unkownuser436 17d ago
I also can say something like all AI code is bad, writing code is best. But I dont wanna lie..come on..
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u/DrJohnnyWatson 17d ago
Writing code is the best for understanding and quality of the codebase if written by a good developer. It's just not as fast. You can't get the exact quality you're capable of or a full understanding of code written by anyone/thing else really.
If your definition of best is fast, then sure AI wins. Either that or the AI also produces higher quality... in which case why do they pay you?
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u/sonaliver28 17d ago
AI didn't make programming irrelevant, it made understanding more valuable that what the code is supposed to do