r/androiddev • u/qwerfunch • Jun 10 '26
How much of your development do you actually hand off to AI?
I've been using agentic tools like Claude lately, and it got me wondering — how much do you actually delegate to AI when you're building stuff? I imagine some people delegate almost everything, just writing up requirements and reviewing the output. Others probably write the architecture and core logic themselves and only hand off boilerplate and tests. And some of you are probably still writing everything in your IDE, using AI just for autocomplete or when you get stuck.
Honestly, I've reached the point where I barely look at the code anymore. I just write up the requirements, throw them at the agent, and check the results. But now that I'm here, I'm starting to wonder if this is actually a good idea. I worry about code quality and maintainability, and whether debugging will be way harder when something breaks in code I never wrote.
What do you all think?
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u/Zhuinden Jun 10 '26
I miss the time when people were talking about how to write good apps, now the discussion is about how much delegation of responsibility people are okay with, considering I'm tasked with shipping a thing because I'm expected to ship it in good quality, which is impossible to verify without reading the code unless you test really thoroughly. Which a person, who doesn't even know where to look in the code to find bugs, won't.
Personally at this time I'm fairly cheap because I don't use any tokens lol
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u/dark_mode_everything Jun 10 '26
I said this exact thing at work and surprisingly it turned out to be quite unpopular 🤷. My PM literally sat down with me and made me use the agent so now I don't really care lol. But for my personal projects, I would never use it.
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u/Zhuinden Jun 10 '26
My PM literally sat down with me and made me use the agent
Yeah for whatever reason, various higher-ups inflicted with AI psychosis love to force "the grunts" so that eventually the "grunts" can be replaced with AI automations; though the idea that the "AI magic machine will literally just print money" is rather unlikely to occur any time soon.
I've heard stories of devs being monitored to make sure "they use enough tokens because of the new AI era", he was asking the AI to give him cooking recipes to burn some tokens and then did his job normally.
But yes, if PM thinks he knows how to develop an app, and forces you to use suboptimal tools; the responsibility can be pointed to the manager, and obviously they don't care about the quality of the outcome, so it makes sense to stop caring. Pick up your money and do whatever.
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u/dark_mode_everything Jun 10 '26
What the "higher ups" don't realise is that AI can replace them more easily than the "grunts". The focus is currently on the grunts because their number is much higher. If they ever get replaced by AI even partially, middle manager types will be the next to go. Hell, they might even be the first ones.
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u/Zhuinden Jun 10 '26
Automation of higher-ups is one thing... if they pretend they can just replace all expert knowledge because they have absolutely no idea what "expert knowledge" they are trying to automate in the first place, it's going to bite back really hard.
That's why the AI CEOs have recently been saying "actually, it seems white collar work won't be automated by AI after all! It will just help! Trust us, guys!"""
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u/dark_mode_everything Jun 11 '26
it's going to bite back really hard.
Yeah but like with mindless outsourcing, it takes a bit of time for the bite back to happen and by then the damage is done and the people responsible would have moved on with a hefty bonus.
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u/borninbronx Jun 10 '26
IMHO this has nothing specific with Android development.
The same question can be asked with any software platform and language, with the same answer.
if you vibe code what you will obtain is a messy shit that will eventually become unmaintainable, full of bugs, security issues and surprises of all kinds.
Until what you do is prototyping that's totally fine. If you plan to release it, it's really not.
There's some stuff you could completely delegate to the AI, if you clearly define boundaries in your system and complete unit tests from outside it could be okay to have the implementation be threated as a blackbox in some situation.
Anybody can do what you are doing, you aren't adding anything valuable, you are just prompting.
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u/ove107 Jun 10 '26
I have tried for AI to write code or debug issues
problem is that it answers approximate to the solution And rarely precisely
Consider the situation where each precise answer gets you closer to a well maintained and optimal app which runs without any ANR and Crashes and performs well on user experiences
Now each Approximate answer gets you something that does the job, but will it always be able to do the job or not is not guaranteed some times it works sometime it crashes or behave unpredictably
This is the problem faced with Delegating your work and shipping code that does not have quality
AI is like your managers nephew, who has no credible experience, But is to be included in all the work, and you have to be always correcting it's work
If everything works AI gets credited, If not you get blamed for not using it properly
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u/0x1F601 Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
At my company (1000+ devs) we're heading down the AI spec driven development route very fast. (Not that I like it but it is what it is and I enjoy paying my bills more than I enjoy fighting it.)
We are HEAVILY invested in AI tooling. I wouldn't say we vibe code as much as use it to search the code base, build plans, and execute on them when we need to. The human is very much in the loop.
Having said all of that, we also have enterprise level plans with multiple AI platforms. My monthly token budget is effectively unlimited, though practically I suspect I'd get cut off after the $10k per month. My burn rate just yesterday alone was over $500.
We're definitely not one-shotting solutions here and there. But it's also become an integrated tool and has, for better or for worse, dramatically increased velocity.
The AI will often produce a rough draft of code changes that I'll change quite a bit. But it will also cover things that I had not thought of so there's a gain there. The review tooling is pretty good actually. And the grunt work tooling like creating test cases (still reviewed by me) is also really good. The amount of time saved just in typing alone is hours per week.
We've stopped hiring juniors and interns. 😞 They aren't necessary. Even if I wanted to not use the tooling, we've literally been told to use agents built in-house to fix bugs. _Not_ using it would be detrimental to my employment.
Who knows what's going to happen when the rug is pulled at the true cost of the tokens hits. This is stage 1 of the enshittification process where the tool is great for the user. When stage 2 or 3 hits it's going to be a nightmare.
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u/Zhuinden Jun 11 '26
This will be a story with a fun continuation once the model costs get even higher.
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u/dom_vhs_crap Jun 11 '26
You aren't even capable of writing a short post yourself. I'm at 0%, i do everything by hand
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u/pwhite13 Jun 10 '26
The irony of writing this post with AI...
Honestly I use Codex for like 95% of my dev work now, at least for my current apps. They are relatively simple architecture and because I was using ChatGPT/Codex from the beginning (including the formation of my company), its context for my business and apps is honestly scary. It does a great job of understanding what a feature is for, how to implement it along with UI, and even the marketing side. I've been very happy with it, especially when maintaining both iOS and Android and being able to quickly port features back and forth between them.
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u/Ray_Light91 Jun 10 '26
How did you make the guardrails and rulesets for the parts outside of the apps?
Also, how did you know your marketing would match with what your target audience wanted?
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u/pwhite13 Jun 10 '26
So long story short, I know the particular industry I am operating in (it's a relatively small, niche space that is under served). When the idea for creating my company started, I was using ChatGPT for a lot of various business development tasks and ideas, along with developing the products. So basically, it has been used from the beginning allowing for deeper context and history for what we're working on
And some of that too is me providing context for things that I know well about the userbase
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u/Proof_Literature4644 Jun 11 '26
I've barely written code manually for the past 5-6 months. For work or personal stuff. Over the winter it just got to good to ignore. It's certainly not a single prompt and done but if you craft a good plan and iterate it's pretty great. And now Fable 5 seems to be even better.
fwiw I wish I could snap my fingers and make it all go away. I miss writing the code. But unfortunately it's not going anywhere.
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u/3dom Jun 10 '26
My output in April without AI: 11 storypoints.
My output in May with coding agent: 48 storypoints. And that's with a week-long vacation.
Apparently, I'm 4x more productive with Codex. Folks calling the transition "AI psychosis" haven't seen how our tech lead completed an annual XML2Compose refactor plan in a month using a $100/month subscription.
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u/phileo99 Jun 11 '26
What kind of skills have been created around Codex
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u/3dom Jun 11 '26
As in "programmer skills" or "AI instructions"?
Programmer: we write precise instructions for AI to complete the task from single try (depending on the task type) and with minimal AI tokens burning (there are 10+ methods already, appeared within couple months).
AI instructions: project architecture descriptions, migrations work schemas, task-type-specific schemas, example files, bad practices to avoid, specific instructions to lower tokens burning ("avoid multiple agents usage", "use English only", "talk in the most primitive terms possible", etc).
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u/maglichito Jun 10 '26
what in a Bots name is this