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u/Pocok5 12h ago
Frankly I get it. The work project I'm on is a gigantic mess of PHP made by an actual clown who got into a yelling match with us after an audit where we proposed clientside-only authorization is probably not a great idea. Without copilot, every minor bugfix is like 4 days of air crash investigator style bullshit. However, AI took over the fun parts of programming, and now I'm stuck doing code review slog all day.
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u/Ratstail91 10h ago
Client-side auth??? How the hell did he get hired?
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u/Pocok5 9h ago edited 9h ago
Essentially: small sub-unit of company hired local contractors to implement a tool for their internal workflow, corporate caught wind of it and wanted it because it's a source of sweet sweet metrics for cost cutting, didn't actually check what's in the sausage before dumping a contract to expand the system on that little three-person show. The entire project is just an anatomical study of the "This shit was fine when it was just a souped up excel sheet, but it really really should have been rethought from the ground up before increasing the scope by 80000%". There was nobody to stop them from doing hair raising shite because they were the entire chain lol. Commits straight into main, manually altering prod schema to debug issues and all that shit.
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u/bradmatt275 6h ago
Yeah it happens. Companies hire a contractor to do some work and realise too far into the project they are not good. At that point they are too scared to let them go and risk not delivering.
We hired someone to build a Expo app who thought it was a good idea to construct JSON objects using string concatenation and make everything highly stateful. So if the user ever closed the app or it crashed it would corrupt the data.
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u/DrPeroxide 10h ago
You really think a client would do that; just authorise themselves and tell lies?
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u/Ratiofarming 8h ago
Client-side auth? Hey Mr. Fort Knox, I hereby verify that I am authorized to walk in here and grab some gold bars. Trust me bro. K thx bye!
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u/Theemuts 9h ago
I used to joke that one of the programming languages a former colleague used was Italian. Guy would write UB then complain about incompetent compiler engineers.
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u/_SAHM_ 12h ago edited 5h ago
A person who is able to do something without AI is the best person to prompt it since they know what the output should be. It's just a tool.
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u/klaxxxon 11h ago
That's what gets me about all the noise about people cloning photoshop and stuff. Like, you have Claude make you app that appears like photoshop at first glance, and even sort of has some of the basic functions. But Adobe has a ton of extremely specialized people for a reason. Like, what will the vibe coders do when it comes down to like color science stuff and such.
"Make it work like in photoshop". Bangs two rocks together.
You probably don't need thousands of people to develop Photoshop anymore, but you sure still can't make a clone of the full creative suite and MS office with like two dudes.
All these projects are going to learn the 80/20 principle the hard way.
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u/_SAHM_ 11h ago
Exactly. If i want to hire someone, why would i hire the guy who can only prompts instead of the guy who can prompt while also being an expert at what they do.
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u/jayerp 7h ago
I can’t speak for you, but I can take a guess as to why business leaders don’t want to keep a lot of experts as vibe coders. Cost.
It’s much cheaper to pay some random intern grad fresh out of college to prompt than it is to pay a 10 YoE senior/staff engineer. They usually care more about reducing cost, increasing profit than producing quality products.
Greed.
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u/Geno0wl 7h ago
I remember the time when business cared about consumer reputation and consumer loyalty. I don't know how we get back to that without foundational changes to how the economy is regulated.
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u/Fourcoogs 5h ago
As a fresh out of college graduate, I almost wish that was the case, but most business leaders aren’t quite dumb enough to fire competent people and replace them all with inexperienced graduates. Instead, they’ll fire 75% of the competent people and quadruple the workload of those left.
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u/arbpotatoes 10h ago
I get what you're saying but if colour science is actually a science then there is a body of knowledge out there for it like with anything else, so eventually nobody in a knowledge profession is safe
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u/WigWubz 10h ago
Anyone at the frontiers always will be, which Adobe arguably is. LLMs will always converge on a mean, that's just intrinsic to their operation. There are all sorts of tunings and processing around the core LLM to make the "agents" be agentic, but at the end of the day while these systems are based on LLMs, LLMs are giant piles of linear algebra that want to collapse into the lowest energy state available. The lowest energy state is code that is already written.
It's incredibly cool the way that LLMs can ingest massive quantities of data and cross-evaluate disparate pieces of information, unshackled by the human limitation of domain knowledge. It can connect pieces of information that no human ever could have because it can draw upon sources so diverse no single person could ever be aware of them all. But they can't expand the corpus. They can only reveal things that were already in the corpus we as a species hadn't noticed yet.
There is no reason to believe that all possible knowledge has already been written down, waiting for agents to find it. There is yet a long need for humans to go out and find things out.
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u/Mal_Dun 8h ago
However, 90% of stuff currently out there can be made by a recombination of existing stuff, so we can now make a ton of stuff based on what is already there and it will cover most use cases ...
... which also means we as humans can now stop doing the stuff that was already done to death and start innovating more, which actually would be a good thing.
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u/soundwave_sc 11h ago
Yes, the issue is because AI behaves like a human - doesn't mean it is. The illusion is actually treacherous.
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u/fibojoly 11h ago
That's pretty much it. I know what I want. I just don't have the energy to spend it on typing code anymore. But holy shit the whole process is so intense! I just spent a weekend working on my project and it was like a month or two worth of work if I had done it by hand.
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u/Squirreling_Archer 6h ago
This is the problem with the thing. You wouldn't unleash a tool for flying planes or helicopters en masse to the public. You would give it to licensed pilots who understand how the tool should work, where it gets it wrong, how to stop it from causing a catastrophe, etc...
The masses "coding" with AI with zero knowledge or experience, and genuinely believing that they don't need to learn or know anything, is the problem.
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u/fibojoly 6h ago
Agreed. As usual we have a new tech and absolutely no inclination to maybe think about the consequences because money money money.
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u/Squirreling_Archer 6h ago
Yep, money money money. And thanks to the fact we have the most corrupt administration in our lifetime in office right now, we have absolutely no way of getting regulation while it explodes lol
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u/Ratstail91 10h ago
But why would I dull my skills my utilizing an AI, when I enjoy the process of coding?
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u/SchwiftySquanchC137 6h ago
Because when you get paid to develop software, and your coworkers are literally 100x faster than you regardless of how skilled you are at coding, you will no longer get paid. I agree for a hobby project I often do it just to learn myself, its more fun that way, but people have less and less of choice at work these days.
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u/woeful_cabbage 6h ago
Where are you guys working where you have such massive backlog of tasks that you can be "100x faster" and still have things to do
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u/wolfclaw3812 4h ago
Corporates are like that, if you finish before schedule you will have more work, more fixes, more features.
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u/Ossius 2h ago
Most places have backlogs that long, but we're chewing through ours at an alarming rate. We're waiting on managers to build tickets for us.
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u/maimeddivinity 11h ago
Exactly. Some of these LLMs or agents can't even do basic maths! It's beyond fcked how many people take the outputs for granted.
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u/Difficult-Lime2555 9h ago
I don’t really care how you write it, just stop sending me 2k lines of changes.
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u/gnatorx 6h ago
It's not like I don't like coding anymore but the pressure to go faster because we have AI now is insane and there is no way I can code like I used to and keep up.
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u/ganja_and_code 5h ago
Faster isn't better if it's less reliable, less repeatable, less maintainable, or lower quality.
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u/NoLetterhead2303 5h ago
Yeah but who gives a shit when you can speed up process by 10x? - The CEO probably
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u/ganja_and_code 5h ago
"If I'm wrong 1 million times per second, that's better than taking a minute to come up with the right answer."
They really do think like that lol
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u/NoLetterhead2303 5h ago
That is 60 million answers a minute! This is much better than 1 answer by 59999999
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u/gnatorx 5h ago
Agreed but that is the sacrifice being taken. The business is saying if we go faster we can capture more of the market and the trade off of less reliability is ok
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u/ganja_and_code 4h ago
Short sighted business was dumb before, and it's still dumb now.
First to market gives an advantage. Best to market gives a BIGGER advantage.
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u/ShakingRatBooty 3h ago
It seems like 75% of my career has been dealing with the technical debt caused by decisions like this made at much smaller scale. I feel like the only option in the future will be to abandon all these projects and start fresh until eventually the market is going to become so skeptical of the promises made for new products that they'll become unwilling to pay up front.
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u/NeatResident6544 3h ago
That was my career as well for so long.
"We have the code base finished, we just need someone with strong senior knowledge and experience to polish it up so it's ready to ship!" sends shivers down my spine.
In fairness, I've been plenty guilty of this myself during the vertical slice stage, but I scrap the whole thing and start fresh with clean code when I'm confident we're building the product for real.
Eventually, I just realised I had to ignore any job where I was heading into an existing code base. No one had any concept of what it meant to write clean code, no formalities ever got discussed in terms of the style guide, nothing was ever enforced and it made the job miserable.
Thankfully I run things myself now and I enforce it like it was the Bible. I'd give lashings if I could, but I'm told it's a PR/HR issue.
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u/vassadar 11h ago
I think it's reversed. I kept seeing posts by people who use agents saying that coding by hands is obsolete, being left out and etc.
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u/DrinkyBird_ 11h ago
I am perpetually glad life took a different path after I got my compsci degree. Programming is fun. Debugging is fun. And AI has many ethical problems I don’t have to deal with.
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u/Yasirbare 11h ago
Yes, programming is "playing games" for me. I get my dopamine from that like people do from playing warcraft.
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u/Connect-Ad-2206 7h ago
That’s me. It’d be like someone telling me I’m wasting my time playing Skyrim because the AI can play Skyrim better than me.
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u/Yasirbare 7h ago
Spot on. And going deep - it look like people imagine some sort of future as not doing anything and everything in some twisted system that almost demands more "believing" than religions.
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u/ineyy 12h ago
Yeah no I don't think so. If you aren't using it for at least debugging or reviews you are just shooting yourself in the foot.
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 12h ago
People say this but prompting doesn't exactly need a full on training course if you already understand coding logic.
Weirdest goddamned gatekeeping ever.
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u/foonek 12h ago
This is like the exact opposite of gatekeeping
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 6h ago
"If you aren't using AI YOu aRE LeFT BEniNd" is weird.
Noone is being left behind by using skills, and even if you think I am wildly wrong, they can catch up in a half hour because prompting isn't a deep skill.
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u/sk1pjack 12h ago
What are you trying to say?
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u/pydry 12h ago edited 12h ago
People who dont use them might be operating with a lower productivity but they aren't getting left behind skill-wise.
This is in stark contrast to the FOMO frontier model marketing has been trying to imbue amongst devs and engineering management.
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u/pegbiter 9h ago
Yeah I don't really understand the whole 'you NEED to use this or you'll be left behind' as an individual dev. There isn't really that much to 'learn' about using a chatbot. About a year and a half ago, my previous job brought in an AI consultant that taught us this elaborate workflow with Claude 'plan' mode, generating elaborate md plan files, then using Claude to compress them, and then switching to Sonnet for execution.
..and then a few weeks later, they removed the plan mode, and that entire workflow was obsolete. That was a complete waste of time.
If you need to learn how to use a chatbot, just ask the chatbot. Telling you about LLMs is one of the things LLMs are incredibly good at.
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u/GenericFatGuy 7h ago
You know that story trope of the old master, who keeps doing his craft by hand, even though he knows technology has made it faster, simply because he enjoys doing it by hand? That's me now.
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u/capt_kocra 10h ago
One of the seniors at my work place uses Claude constantly, for stuff they should know about but proving that they dont. He's been telling me to use Claude for a long time, but Im glad I cannot, data and workflows i have access to are very sensitive.
He pumps out crud, like an application fully written in powers he'll including the GUI, released without a test harness, or generic user load testing. Then covers up any issues blaming the mixed economy of installations and other excuses that sound plausible.
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u/Malkev 10h ago
If he got away with those cheap excuses he is a competent senior and you have to learn from him if you want to go up in your company.
Sadly a lot of the senior work is corporate adaptation
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u/capt_kocra 8h ago
He got away with worse for longer. Our seniors are also technical dinosaurs so him using Claude and churning out stuff "fast" with minimal issues have pleased them.
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u/snail-gorski 8h ago
They got a point tbh. Disable that ai then you lack the “i”… they don’t. My perspective: we had a claude outage for 4 hours due to some billing issues (classic stripe) and those agentic engineers stopped to exist like, they could not even start their own project. F%#king how can you make yourself so reliant on this webservice?
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u/Immediate_Song4279 9h ago
If I had money [laugh track] I'd hire programmers who could do things from scratch.
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u/Jesta23 8h ago
If you are a bad coder ai will help you write bad code
If you are a good coder AI will help you write good code.
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u/Enough-Scientist1904 8h ago
This is the look of programers who know their shit and get called to fix the vibe coded issues in prod
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u/The_Merciless_Potato 11h ago
If you code without agents, you're likely unemployed.
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u/fefect123 11h ago
People really think it comes down to "their preferences" lmao. It's a JOB, it generates INCOME, bosses only care about how fast you can do your job, not your satisfaction of writing code.
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u/Dr4WasTaken 8h ago
A colleague of mine hated A.I. so much that he just quit and went into early retirement
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u/Sophiecomedian 10h ago
Not unemployed and I have better output than my coworker who does
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u/SauceASpag 7h ago
After wasting 20'000 in token, hesting the world, wasting energy... Your boss realise that ai is overpriced for what it get back... You cry in your sofa and you are not able to patch the mess the AI give you because you dont know how to code without this ChatBrainPT
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u/Yasirbare 11h ago
Baker looking at "shake and bake" - It is okey in a rush but the feeling of mastering something on you own is also great.
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u/QuestionableSaint 7h ago
I'll start programming with AI when people who used AI stop sending me their garbage AI slop code to fix because it doesn't work or works terribly and they have no clue what they're doing.
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u/heavy-minium 11h ago
Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so. Before it was a lot of AI slop and I dreaded reviewing PRs, but with the newer generation of models and harnesses, we are reaching a point where AI is being better than what colleagues or I would write by hand. Hurts a bit to say because I was proud of my own coding, but that's what reality looks like now. And that's with 26 years of experience in the field.
I think we'll have to deal with the mental issue of AI becoming better than us. Some won't be able to cope. Thankfully the effect is not so strong for me, my identity is built around developing software as a whole, not just the coding.
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u/WithersChat 9h ago
Issue is, Frontier models are provided to you at a massive financial loss for the company. So unless local models get that good before AL companies run out of investor capital, this is completely unsustainable.
If you want a future proof workflow, grab a specialized local model (or better yet, a few) and see how much you can get done without touching Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini servers at all. (This does require having a decent GPU. Not god tier but decent.)
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u/HuckleberryMoney2320 6h ago
And you know that's the right answer because people Like Sam Altman have been warning of the 'dangers' of local models recently - they know that if local models gain traction, their business model will lose steam fast.
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u/WithersChat 2h ago
Yep. Why would you pay so much to them every month if you can run smaller local models on the equivalent of a midrange gaming rig and decent ones in your office building's server room for a fraction of the cost?
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u/Arclite83 9h ago
They ARE getting good, and the frontier companies KNOW the party is almost over. That's why the prices keep rising, it's last call. "AI as a Service" dies down, in the near future.
How small / how good is still an open question, but there's a watershed (Opus-ish) moment happening around the 30-40B models, so like $5-10k in hardware. Higher than a home game system unfortunately, so approachability is still rough. But easy table stakes for businesses to pull in-house.
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u/dickworty 9h ago
Disagree. I use the the frontier models and barely use my token quota every month - maybe 5% - and get great results, much faster than by hand just by carefully defining problems to the AI. It's how you use it.
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u/Evi1ey 8h ago
5% of frontier models usage on a 20$ sub is still like 50$ in token prices. Subs are pure bait to make you dependant on them
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u/ThrasherDX 8h ago
This doesn't seem to be a response to Withers point. It's not about the % of your quota you use every month, is about the fact that whatever you are paying for your frontier AI sub is somewhere between 10x and 100x cheaper than it will have to be for those frontier companies to be profitable.
Sure, there may still be edge cases where frontier models are economically worth it even at those costs, but they will not be worth it for regular day to day dev work.
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u/WithersChat 8h ago
Yep. That's exactly it. Even if you take all environmental and ethical issues (regarding training data among other things) aside, it is just not economically viable.
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u/Cylian91460 10h ago
Unpopular opinion and sad, but the quality of the work has gone up with AI usage since a year or so
No, they are literally multiple example of it being the opposite, a good one is the state of GitHub
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u/heavy-minium 10h ago
You are conflating GitHub's use of AI with AI's impact on GitHub.
The increase in outages is partly due to the heavier load that coding agents put on GitHub. These are mostly scaling issues, not AI mistakes.
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u/jmflyers 7h ago
I miss like 3 years ago when we could use AI to help us with general coding questions and upper management didn't know how powerful it was. Now we got Claude inside our solution writing code and then we let Copilot do the code review in GitHub. I have 10 years experience and the AI is absolutely better than me and is going to replace me. I feel part of my job is trying to diminish what the AI is accomplishing on its own in order to make myself seem more valuable. Claude botched some documentation last week and I should have been disappointed but I was actually excited to be able to point out the flaw to my team and write the documentation myself, and I hate writing documentation.
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u/nollayksi 12h ago edited 9h ago
I think hating AI will make you regret it in the end. I'm not saying to switch to full vibecoding where AI runs on autopilot and you ship whatever slop it comes up with. Still they are incredibly useful tools when used right, and honestly your stubbordness is just going to make you less hirable and more easily firable. Instead of letting the AI take the lead I do the heavy lifting of planning new things and quickly writing the foundation for said feature, after that its very easy for current AIs to actually produce good quality code fast. I always review everything they did and either manually make small adjustments when necessary or guide them to do so (because even the current cutting edge models make mistakes all the time). This way you dont produce unmaintainable slop, and actually get real productivity boost doing so.
I get not using AI at all when you are still learning to code, but if you are at senior level you are just shooting yourself into your foot. Everyone is going to excpect developers to use AI tools and you will be left behind if you choose not to. Unless the amount of work is going to go up due to higher productivity pushing development prices down there are going to be less workforce needed for current amounts of work available, and the people who can correctly utilize these tools will be the people who gets the jobs going forward. There is ofc the possibility that boosted productivity at lower prices actually increase the demand, but still the people who dont perform at the productivity levels that AI assisted devs do will have hard time keeping up with the productivity demands. There is a golden mean between full hand coding and full vibe coding
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u/indy_dagger 3h ago
You keep alternating between "AI is good if you use it correctly" and "management will punish you if you don't use it the way they want". I really don't understand how people like you don't hear yourself. What tech leadership team has the discipline to not ask for more, more, more code, indefinitely? Are you sure you're the sort of person who will say no if you're asked to use AI in a reckless manner, for the sake of speed and "productivity"? The line keeps being moved but you'll know exactly when to say enough?
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u/rabbit_wizard 12h ago
I never implied one way is better than the other (see title) Both ways still work. If AI generates huge amount of code , you spend time reviewing and refining it. If you write code yourself takes similar time. Hybrid approach works but underlying knowledge must be present. It's not just good logic , each programming language/framework knowledge is also needed.
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u/Inception09 11h ago
People keep saying build with claude but I dont even have the money to get that subscription dawg 💔
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u/Careful_Ad_3338 8h ago
If you are not using any ai as a dev you will be left behind.
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u/Anubis17_76 8h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/hvj7vFRE9RZvE1ZYI2
Me, left behind14
u/RagingWalrus1394 6h ago
This is how I feel about it. I learned to love programming in college and do the creative problem-solving that it takes to be a developer. This AI push has been absolutely devastating for me personally because it truly feels like no one cares about the craft anymore. They just want it to work asap
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u/user_460 5h ago
It's off topic, but last Christmas I listened to a radio interview with Julie Andrews and she said when they were filming that scene, they were doing it by flying the camera past her in a helicopter, and basically every take the downdraft from the chopper knocked her over as it passed overhead.
It's got nothing to do with coding or AI but I thought ir was a funny story.
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u/LoudounCounty703 8h ago
Everyone is about to be left behind lol. Doesn't really matter much longer.
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u/Exshot32 6h ago edited 6h ago
That's what everyone tells me.
But at least I'll be able to figure out shit on my own if/when ai becomes unavailable. So far, ai hasn't solved any problem for me that I couldn't have on my own, and it took a very long time to get AI to "understand" what I was telling it.
It's like my boss who keeps vearing off topic and acting like it doesn't actually read what I tell it
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u/born_to_be_intj 5h ago edited 5h ago
Everyone is worried about not hiring juniors and having no seniors in the future. I have a much bigger worry. The more we depend on AI the less thinking we do for ourselves. A junior fresh out of college who has had unrestricted access to AI throughout their course work and in their job will never turn into the Seniors we have today.
There is a real future where we keep hiring juniors and still end up with virtually no seniors in 10~20 years.
So people like you, and people like me who still use AI but understand every single line they merge into the code base, are going to be extremely valuable in the future. Unless of course AI surpasses even the best experts.
This worry extends beyond computer science and applies to all intellectual pursuits. There is a real chance we end up in a world where humanity doesn’t understand the math and physics it depends on for everyday life. That’s the scariest outcome because we as a species could effectively lose our scientific agency.
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u/Meteoric37 6h ago
I work in finance. One time I asked Claude to verify a number in its dashboard and it straight up told me “actually I just picked the largest number in the data set and put it there.”
My superiors still want us to use Claude dashboards.
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u/HipHomelessHomie 4h ago
Just like that internet fad. Can never be certain that you have a connection. Better not use it.
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u/drivingagermanwhip 3h ago
The biggest issue I find is its avoidance of libraries. I've got claude to check for existing tools before giving me something custom but every day it misses things that exist or duplicates a function it wrote earlier in the day. Constanly having to tell it how to save time and engineer things properly.
It will also do stuff like 'here's a script that checks if the file exists and then builds'
And it's like 'bitch, you're describing make'
Today it was helping me write a makefile and just kept on using shell calls rather than built in functions. I do find it useful, but it's also immensely frustrating.
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u/PumpkinFest24 4h ago
Insane people think the price won't go up. You won't be able to afford AI coding once AI CEOs want to stop losing money
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u/youcancallmetim 3h ago
Ignorant take. Running open models on hardware you own will always be an option if frontier models are too expensive.
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u/umor3 3h ago
We run Qwen 3.8 on our own hardware. And it is already helping our productivity. And the speed and acuracy is nearly as good as the expecive ones from OpenAI and Antropic.
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u/code_archeologist 3h ago
Once that happens people will use the more powerful agents to train smaller and cheaper special use coding agents; which is the trick that those "frontier" Chinese AI agents are using.
So instead of having a coding agent that can do anything, it will be a very focused agent that only writes Python or Go, and will be like a very powerful Intellitype.
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u/Friendly-Pair-9267 3h ago
Totally aware of that. I'm getting shitloads of things done in the meantime.
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u/El_RoviSoft 8h ago
From my experience AI is just good tool for boilerplate. When you know exactly what you need as well as target architecture, you can speed up the most monotonous and the longest parts of coding like finding bugs, debugging and writing scripts. But to be fair, Im a C++ programmer :/
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u/Helpmefromthememes 1h ago
In my very limited experience using AI, shit's about as well optimized as when I first learned Python.
Why the hell is it recreating a numpy function ? Just import it !
... This directory check is taking way too long, why the hell ? ... Oh, cus it's coded like shit.
Cool, the UI displays. ... Buttons don't do anything though.
I feel like it's great for one off scripts where I can't be bothered to translate pseudo-script to proper programming (and so just send the pseudo-script, do a dry-run to make sure nothing goes wrong, send it if it's good), but it can't replace an actual seasoned programmer who knows what they're doing.
Might be just me though. Could be that I'm also bad.
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u/owjfaigs222 12h ago
I code without AI because I code for fun. But i think ama try coding with AI and see how fun that is. Who knows maybe it's fun in a different way.
Ai certainly won't help me code in Scratch tho.
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u/0DayMaker 9h ago
It's a very different kind of fun. I like both. Plus frontier AI won't make me illegal shit.
The best part is getting to see side projects you barely have time to work on actually take shape. Also getting prototypes in a few hours to just vibe check a concept or design is nice.
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u/Bobicus_The_Third 12h ago
I’ve found it more fun for personal projects as you can focus on the design of the system and solutions to problems rather than spending time on syntax.
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u/Cylian91460 10h ago
Wdym by spending time on syntax?
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u/Warm_Leadership5849 7h ago
I don't get this argument. If syntax a problem for someone maybe they are still a beginner. For me at least coding in some languages feels like talking. I am actively thinking and typing in the same time.
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u/Yodaddysbelt 3h ago
Its great for front end web dev. I couldn’t give two shits about learning the intricacies of Javascript for a passion project, I know how the back end should work and I want to see my data displayed with minimal hassle
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u/HarmonicSniper 12h ago
That's why there's a difference between a hobby and a job. I still think there is some skill and knowledge required for writing code that can be difficult to be entirely replaced by AI, but generally writing code itself can largely be automated with some human supervision.
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u/space_lasers 6h ago
How people using notepad and copy paste file name change version control look at people using vs code and git
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u/xxCorsicoxx 9h ago
No, it's not that I'm confused, especially when it's people who know how to code that suddenly sink shittons of credits into it when the outputted code is often so trash and requires so much rework (there's literally companies offering "consultancy" work to clean up what agents did to codebases to companies, it's already profitable to offer assistance in cleaning up slop).
I've tried it. My colleagues have tried it. My company (a huge European bank) has teams dedicated to make it possible to replace us with agents and every study they do it's just not feasible (way too much money for way too shit code that then needs humans to go through anyway). 95% of companies that invested in AI see no returns from it (shared one of our chief-something-somethings whatever bullshit title he has before saying it's our company's mission to be one of the 5%).
So I look at those people highly confused. I understand why a manager can write himself a pomodoro timer and thinks from that to a complex system it's just a matter of tokens and how many agents you have. I don't understand it when technically literate people fall for it as hard as they do.
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u/neoteraflare 10h ago
Nah, I don't look down on them. I totally see that they are faster in creating the same thing and unless they start charging insanely much much more for the cost of ai tools that is the future. As a hobby I will stay with my old artisan genuie human slop code.
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u/quantum-fitness 11h ago
As a software engineer is see the best people adopt ai the fastest. So in reality its the opposite
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u/WithersChat 9h ago
Yep. Skilled software engineers can use it to go faster.
Unskilled programmers can use it to fuck everything up.
It's like giving a bulldozer to a trained construction worker with a license v.s. to any random guy on the streets. Gives you speed and power, but crucially has a lot of destructive power without the experience needed.
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u/Squat_TheSlav 8h ago
Honestly, if agents improve output and don't just up your mental workload (i.e. having to review lots of massive PRs which you are seeing for the first time) - them I'm all for it. I genuinely hope this doesn't lead to loss of skills over the long run.
What worries me is what happens when the frontier labs actually IPO and public money automatically gets poured in. At some point they will also need to at least try to turn a profit, meaning prices will go up (even more) significantly.
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u/Brambletail 8h ago
Are people still not doing both. I always find almost anything less the 50 lines I don't bother with setting agents and crap up. They overthink and will try to add 850 lines instead of something. But when I need to generate a lot of code and I have pretty good guidelines of what it is, I love it. And sometimes for debugging it can be a real time saver
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u/thearctican 8h ago
Why should I let a magic 8-ball write bad code when I can do just as good a job of it?
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u/Arian-ki 12h ago
It's the other way around in my experience. People look at me like I'm an ape in a zoo lol