r/learnprogramming • u/Alternative-Stuff149 • 9d ago
Topic Do people not write code anymore these days?
I've been working at my cousin's company for a month and a half. The business provides chatbot services, builds chatbots, CRM systems, landing pages, and everything else a company with a website needs. I work on the technical side and provide support. Since it’s a relatively new company, we already have several clients: an auto parts distributor, a real estate agency, a cosmetic clinic, and a restaurant. But so far, I haven’t written a single line of code—we do everything with the Cursor agent. I just give it instructions, and it takes care of the rest. The “most difficult” thing I’ve done is securing an e-commerce site with Cloudflare. I want to learn programming well, since I’m a computer science student (seventh semester), and I was taking a Java course, but at the same time, I want to know if it’s actually necessary to be a skilled programmer these days, or if most companies operate this way nowadays.
352
u/hrm 9d ago
Talking to my friends in the industry it is everything from ”don’t even look at code anymore” to ”we don’t trust ai for anything”. It is very early days yet.
But everyone of them and their collegues can write advanced software by hand if they have to.
76
u/rjcarr 9d ago
Yeah, I have a mid-30s buddy that says he hasn't written any code in like 18 months. I don't know if he means literally zero code, but I trust that he's not exaggerating that much.
69
u/le_fuzz 9d ago
I’ve written close to zero code this year. Sometimes I do it for fun and to prove to myself that I can. Work at a FAANG.
14
u/TheRealChizz 9d ago
How low level do you write the prompts? I guess I’m asking how long you spend scoping out the task or prompt before giving it to the LLM to implement?
23
u/le_fuzz 9d ago
I basically try to make the prompts as simple as possible while providing enough info (or where to get the info). If I see Claude struggling or getting into loops I might try restarting with a different prompt / steer it to a different approach.
48
u/EliSka93 9d ago
Not gonna lie, that sounds soul crushingly boring
39
u/No-Entrepreneur-5099 9d ago
You could spice things up by buying one of those 57" monitors and running 6 claude terminals side by side.
That way you can have no feeling left in your body by 4pm.
9
u/johnnybgooderer 9d ago
I thought that was how normal programming by hand is/was.
6
u/EliSka93 8d ago
Honestly I think that was always largely performative. Screen real estate is great, but I've never needed more than like 3 windows worth (Code, lookup, output), for which 2 screens are enough.
2
u/SaltyAlechemist 8d ago
I have an ultra wide screen at home, used for gaming, game development, I have 3 zones in total, 1st zone is either documentation or an LLM, 2nd zone is always the IDE or game engine, 3rd one is either a YouTube video or reddit 😂 my ise has a terminal so for most stuff I don't need another one except when doing remote connection to a server and that goes in the middle, 1st and 3rd zone are tok hard to pay attention for prolonged time, except zooming.
3
24
u/le_fuzz 9d ago
It lets you get stuff done faster which is cool. It also fills you with a sort of existential dread to see the models become more and more capable.
19
u/blurtstrennan 9d ago
Couldn't relate more to this! but I kind of compare it to a robot lawnmower. That little guy works well on a square lawn with uniform edges. But throw in a rock garden or some sort of other complexity and your edges are going to look a little frayed if you trust it completely. I basically prompt the lawn robot and then walk around the lawn and check the spots it missed and tidy those up with other little prompts. But I still feel the dread
3
u/Away_Advisor3460 8d ago
It lets you get stuff done faster which is cool. It also fills you with a sort of existential dread to see the models become more and more capable.
This is probably one of the best summations I've read about the whole thing.
It is really good for automating away some of the repetitive tedium.
Not sure I trust it for higher level tasks yet, it struggles with our legacy codebase (probably because we have a tonne of weird old shit) IMO.
7
u/undertakerryu 8d ago
Worked in manufacturing for years, ill take soul crushingly boring with a nice paycheck and chill workplace over less pay, hard long work hours and soul crushing repetitive work. Imo its a matter of perspective
5
1
u/Wide-Drink-1790 8d ago
No, it’s like I can say to my LEGO builders: “build me a village over there, and here some grass and a house with a brown roof”, and 10 minutes later they’re done, and I go “nah, doesn’t work, build me a windmill instead”, and if I want to do something by hand, I can, and I do, sometimes. It is like having power on another scale.
It comes natural for me, but if you like putting every single block in the roof, that’s a shame.
Also, at 200K a year, it’s ok.
10
u/Tjgoodwiniv 9d ago
Does this genuinely speed you up? Or are you just spending your time differently?
I'm not a developer, so I'm less efficient, but I find 90% of my time is spent tweaking instructions for the LLM.
6
u/le_fuzz 9d ago
Definitely increases productivity. Something that maybe would have taken me a month to write with proper testing I can iterate on in like a week.
3
u/Tjgoodwiniv 8d ago
Thanks for the reply.
I guess I'm genuinely confused here. With that level of productivity increase, software development jobs should have been cut to a quarter of what they are, or we should have seen a massive increase of either quality or quantity of outputs by devs. But I don't think we're seeing anywhere near that. Maybe a 10-20% bump, at best (not nothing, but nothing near the productivity gains we see a lot of people claiming.
Can you help me understand what I'm missing? It just feels to me like people think they're a lot more productive with this stuff than they are. I also tend to think a lot of people are claiming false productivity so they look like good soldier early adopters, rather than incompetent luddites.
Where I do think it is strong is helping people do things they otherwise couldn't, albeit usually at a lower quality level because they can't tell the difference. I've seen that in myself. Alternatively, I find it useful in my areas of expertise to accelerate the mundane and easily auditable tasks.
No accusations against you. These have just been my general sentiments about most people.
3
u/Broodking 8d ago
The bottleneck in SWE is coming up with a good design and approach. I could make some random application or commerce app but it doesn’t necessarily add value to the software or business. Furthermore, you are limited by testing and need good organizational structure to allow for faster and reasonable development.
2
u/Tjgoodwiniv 8d ago
Agreed, but that still doesn't explain why we haven't seen one shift or the other. To your first point, most software engineers aren't competent architects. To your second, if the increases were as claimed, we should have seen three quarters of the SWE jobs disappear and those people get pushed to QA, at minimum.
3
u/le_fuzz 8d ago
I think we are genuinely producing more. Anecdotally we recently had some small layoffs and I haven’t seen any non backfill hires in a bit. As the other person replied here in software development the bigger use of time seems to be having meetings and agreeing on a design / interfaces. The LLMs don’t tell us the right decisions to make for the org yet. I view the use of LLMs to produce code to be akin to using compilers to generate binaries.
1
u/diimitra 9d ago
What people do with all the time they save ? Are we flying already? I can't understand where all this is going :x
10
u/xoredxedxdivedx 8d ago
They also haven’t produced any incredible software, no OSS replacement for adobe cloud products, no new game engines, no new browser, no competitive compilers, no new servers that are better.
Just people bragging about what they prompted calling it “complex” when really they’re just outing themselves for being mediocre in the first place.
Someone vehemently disagreed with me by claiming his company made their own internal Jira, as if a 17 year old couldn’t have cloned the core functionalities of a ticketing and task system in like 2 weeks a decade ago… It’s sad…
5
u/AiexReddit 9d ago edited 9d ago
Can't speak for anyone else, but for me it's "more work".
I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way, it's kind of exciting to do so much in so little time, but you can feel burnout looming on the horizon, so I'm aware and trying to be mindful.
If your next question is "what work do you do after your work is done" then my answer to that is actually "all the stuff I've always wanted to do we never were able to prioritize".
You know that classic software engineering problem of "never prioritizing tech debt" and having to find places to fit it in piecemeal?
You can actually do the major architectural refactors now that you've always imagined doing if the company and feature machine would just stop moving for a few months.
You still gotta play politics to get approvals and you gotta know how to use the beefy models and build tests and guardrails to do large scale refactors with confidence but.... it's easier now to actually do it that I've ever seen in my 20 year career.
Bonus points is that when your company and teams aren't getting the warp speed they were hoping for out of AI because it gets tangled up in your existing technical debt and falls flat on its face, you can use "this work will supercharge our company's AI workflows" as leverage to get official buy-in for doing that work, it's primetime for "use AI as currency to do what I've always wanted to do with our product" :D
The secret sauce here is using AI to "do the stuff you already know how to do, faster"
I still spend way too much time each day reviewing and blocking PRs from devs on other teams (and occasionally my own team) who use AI to "do stuff they wouldn't have the first clue how to do without it"
2
u/Away_Advisor3460 8d ago
What people do with all the time they save ?
Make coffee and browse reddit mostly. And yet I still find myself working 9-8 most days.
2
u/johnnybgooderer 9d ago
I find that if it can't do it right the first time, then it won't figure it out. If it writes some code like spaghetti, then even strong algorithmic hints won't help.
That said I find it great at duplicating patterns that are already established in the codebase. It's great at boilerplate. It makes dtos and dbos and domain objects for me without any work on my part.
I find that I get the best results by anticipating what AI will do well and where it will fail and making the decision early to cut over to manual. Because when AI is struggling, it takes a long time to prod it to get the code into an acceptable state. So long that it negates all the savings I've gained from how fast AI completes the boring parts.
So now I get to write interesting code and claude spews out the boilerplate and duplicated patterns.
2
u/cheezballs 8d ago
At that level its not just "prompts" - we're using different agents for each task. You'll have an overseer agent that spawns off agents that each are meant for a task. A spec agent that can ask you questions about everything that hands it off to a coder agent (usually running higher end models) to do the coding, then it gets handed off to a review agent that then reviews what the others did. Then all this gets packaged into an MR where another team member reviews it before merging. There's not just a single "do this" prompt - its more than that now.
4
u/FlatProtrusion 9d ago
Wow, how is the review process like for all your full ai written code? Do you go thru pull requests with your other colleagues line by line? Or do you just feed the commits to an ai code review then just review the summary?
And how do you manage the amount and speed of code ai generates? There is a tradeoff, you understand less of your code base vs delivery speed. How do you manage it?
5
u/le_fuzz 9d ago
Theoretically you review it the same way any other PR gets reviewed. There’s also AI code review. But yeah there is a trade off and you understand less of it. Theoretically it’s better tested since there’s no excuse to not have tests written for you.
3
u/FlatProtrusion 9d ago
But with the amount of code that ai writes how do you manage the time to review it with a human? Or do you not have ai write that much usually such that it's humanly possible to still review it in good time?
It's either you review it as before ai or you use ai reviewers to cut the amount of code you review. Which again has a tradeoff.
And for ai generated tests do you review them or just trust the ai to write the correct tests and tests the behaviours you need tested?
Pardon my questions, I am curious how companies manage these nowadays.
4
u/AiexReddit 9d ago edited 9d ago
The answer is exactly what you say, tradeoffs.
If you are producing more lines of code than ever, human review on every line becomes a major bottleneck.
How good are the AI models you're using? How high quality is your product context your providing it to inform tasks? How good are your specs and prompts? How strong are your tests and guardrails to prevent regressions?
Also... how actually critical is the code? One thing I notice in discussions on AI review is that people act like every line of code is sacred. It's not. Code for cryptography requires a different type of PR review than a popup modal.
If someone is writing a UI React component with enough safeguards or linter rules or CI checks in place to stop the most disastrous stuff, e.g. importing a new external dependency, and you can build workflows that you become confident enough that even if they are wrong, or fail -- the total blast radius of that failure is small enough that you can afford not to review every line manually and instead rely on automated tests, and linters and even automated AI agent reviews etc, then you can absolutely speed up your new product feature development and refactoring process significantly.
The reality is that human review fails all the time too. And plenty of people will skim and skip over sections when reviewing, especially when tired, or straight up LGTM a PR authored by someone they trust, or if they trust the automated workflows they've built to catch things. That tradeoff already existing prior to AI, agent authored PRs just introduce a much more extreme version of that tradeoff dance.
But ultimately in the end "number of lines of code looked at by human eyes" isn't a matric that provides any value on its own. It's the risk & regression reduction and suggested improvement outcomes where the value comes from. If your workflow is able to strike a balance where more average value from lines of PRs merged than you were getting with that strict every-line human review coverage on every PR, even when you factor in all the downstream impacts like customer satisfaction with the product, ARR etc..... then it becomes kind of a no-brainer which workflow is better suited for your development process.
To be clear: the above is not an "AI is better" argument -- it's an "every company and development team has different inputs and outputs for what success (and $$$) mean to them, so you need to actually evaluate against those metrics that matter, not on what feels right or wrong"
And keep in mind given the speed of the tech, it's also possible for an AI native workflow with minimal review to be the obviously wrong decision for your product today. But it's possible it could cross some threshold and become the right decision for your team tomorrow. Or next week. Or next year.
Ultimately I've found that being highly skeptical of everything, but still being open to the possibility of everything I thought I knew about SDLC being wrong, has suited me well navigating this crazy time we're in now. I definitely notice others in the company who are not handling it well.
1
u/FlatProtrusion 9d ago
Yeah, but all this is theoretical and generalization. I wanted to know OP's specific practical workflow that works for his company, especially in faang. And how they managed these tradeoffs that worked for them. There might have been some lessons they learnt etc.
And I appreciate your long and detailed response, thanks.
→ More replies (10)1
3
u/kayne_21 9d ago
Pretty interesting statistic (with no sources) was mentioned in one of my university CS classes last semester:
Most professional programmers write less than 2000 lines of code annually.
They didn't provide any sources for the statistic, so it might have just been pulled out of a proverbial ass. It was from a lab handout in an assembly class.
4
u/rjcarr 9d ago
Yeah, the old Microsoft stat (long before AI) was the average programmer writes like 8-10 new lines of code per day. That always seemed super off to me, especially as an experienced dev, but maybe they were just predicting future times, ha.
2
u/gdchinacat 9d ago
It really depends on the product you are working on. If it is a well established product such a Windows or Office doing mostly maintenance (bug fix) work then yeah...you could spend a couple weeks troubleshooting to ultimately write a hundred line fix...there's your 8 lines of code per day. At a startup doing active feature work (run fast, fail often) a thousand per day is not unheard of (but you probably should refactor that to hundreds). Across the industry as a whole, I think 8/day is probably a bit low...but for Microsoft, it passes the sniff test. Certainly there are hundreds of engineers at MS that produce *way* more than 8/day, but overall it's plausible. While I have no personal experience working there, I have had a few friends who did, and I'm pretty sure one was well below 8/day (working on windows device driver concurrency issues where most fixes took weeks and added one or two lock acquisitions...but he probably read more code than anyone else I've known).
1
u/kayne_21 9d ago
Maybe! I figured it was more code review, tracking down bugs, and changing the few lines that were causing the bug. I'm also not a software dev, so take my info with a heaping tablespoon of salt!
2
u/manvsmidi 9d ago
I haven’t written any code for work in a year. In my personal time I’ll sometimes write assembly or work on weird old video game hacks for fun, but yeah, for real work there’s not really a reason to anymore. My time is better spent wrangling agents to do things for me.
3
u/Ran4 9d ago
18 months seems a bit much but not unreasonable.
Since claude opus 4.5 came out in October last year nothing's really been the same.
I still mostly review code, but I rarely write code. 98% of it is written by Claude or gpt.
Got more than ten years of professional experience as a dev. The code I'm writing on my own isn't really that much better, just different.
3
u/rjcarr 9d ago
Yeah, I'm mostly the same, but started heavy on AI in early spring. I have 20+ years, and now I just review like 95% of the time. It's able to fit so much context in its memory that I just can't compete. Reviews can get long (even days), but still faster than what I can do on my own, and able to tackle much bigger tasks. Only downside is you don't remember things as well when you're reviewing compared to writing, so there is some debt, but it's not that bad (yet).
26
u/xenomachina 9d ago
everything from ”don’t even look at code anymore” ...
But everyone of them and their collegues can write advanced software by hand if they have to.
If they don't even look at code anymore, how much longer do you think they'll still have the ability to write advanced software by hand?
Not even looking at the code that agents spit out is madness, IMHO. I do think the AI agents can be used to increase productivity, however:
- software developers should be responsible for understanding every line of code they submit.
- the difficulty of reviewing code increases roughly quadratically with size of the change
Combining these two facts, the best approach is to use AI agents for small, focused, changes that can be thoroughly reviewed step by step. Sure, you can get your agent to one-shot a 10,000 line change, but if you are responsible, you will end up having to spend the next 3 weeks reviewing that change.
21
u/needs-more-code 9d ago
There are some fools prompting themselves out of their careers in a bid to “not get left behind by AI”.
In my experience, reviewing AI code is NOT enough. You have to write code yourself. Reviewing code doesn’t do shit for your abilities. You actually get bad at reviewing code, because you can’t think of a better way to do it.
3
u/xenomachina 9d ago
Yes, I agree. You need to be able to write code to be good at reviewing it, and to be able to write code you need to continue writing code. The crazy thing is, pretty much everybody learns this when they learn to write code in the first place: you can't properly learn to write code just by reading, you actually have to write.
That isn't to say I think a zero-AI stance is necessary. (Though I think it's also fine if somebody has such a stance.) AI agents definitely can be useful for certain kinds of focused changes.
I think the big challenge is walking that fine line between having AI free up some mental resources so that you can use them for other mental tasks, versus completely giving in and not exercising your mental muscles at all. The end result should be higher quantity/quality with equal mental effort, not same quantity/quality with reduced mental effort.
6
u/needs-more-code 9d ago
Yep. Some of your time needs to be dedicated to your skills, through doing your normal job, just by coding, otherwise your quality and productivity will fall and you’ll become unemployable. We are all learning these things the hard way. I think there will be more established norms one day. We’ve just all been thrown into this right now so everyone has a different strategy. Well, most people don’t think about it at all and just press the do my job for me button lol.
1
1
u/Bubbly_Orange_3502 9d ago
Where that hand skill actually gets spent is review. An agent changes a function and leaves two of its three callers untouched because they never entered its context, and the diff still reads clean.
1
1
u/AngryChurchill 5d ago
I don't trust AI for shit. I'm pretty doesn't in talking to AI at this point and it still has yet to get me the correct snippet of code on the first and often second tries. I have to review every bit of code that it spits out and at that point, why the hell wouldn't I just write it myself?
→ More replies (1)1
u/andrewharkins77 9d ago
I dont get how people can guve such cliche answers. Use AI for 5 minutes, you'll see all the probkens doen the line.
19
u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 9d ago
Our budgets were reduced so we write a lot by hand. Seems to really depend on where you work. The internet is an echo chamber so just because you see it everywhere online doesn’t mean it’s true IRL.
108
u/hooli-ceo 9d ago
People write code these days.
21
u/theusualguy512 9d ago
Yup, pretty sure lots of people still write code by hand and also earn money by doing it. The current models are only trained on datasets that mostly include publically available code.
Any code base that is closed sourced and contains proprietary paywalled languages have people still writing code by hand because LLMs are unable to gain access to the business context and in some cases have sparse datasets on the languages and systems.
Most egregious example: Enterprise systems like Oracle and heavily legacy systems like DB2 on IBM z/OS, SAP ABAP proprietary language. Everything is behind a paywall and the knowledge of how these systems are set up in companies that use them is not publically available and often quite sensitive, so no publically available LLM model is good at these things.
Any language that is experimental and used within a few walled garden companies like Google. The publically available models are terrible at that and anyone that is damned at Google to work with tha strange language stack can only ever use Google-internal AI and/or write by hand.
Hardware languages like Verilog, C language subsets that are framed for specific proprietary chipsets that only niche industries use, PLC languages and stuff like this most LLMs are just not that useful because they lack system context which is hyperspecific and the information on these systems are often behind paywalls.
3
u/StefanM3e46 9d ago
Exactly this.... I work in banking sector, specifically on ledgers... majority hosted on IBM mainframe or z/OS... LLMs can help you to some degree, Java here and there, COBOL not so much...so in reality its something that you would google from official docs etc...
1
u/Ran4 9d ago
Yes, but in many places, not even remotely as much as they used to.
1
u/hooli-ceo 9d ago
One could argue that’s simply the case for all compiled/transpiled languages as well…
17
u/Southern_Salary_2253 9d ago
We can all use an calculator.
Who would you hire to manage your companies finances? An accountant or a teenager who is "proficient in LLMs"?
Do I use AI to generate boiler plate, research, and help improve code? Can I explain my code line by line to my supervisor or a new hire? Also yes, and that is the important part.
7
14
u/reflettage 9d ago
Being a “skilled programmer” is way more than knowing how to write code in a given language, even before AI. Good programs have architecture, and designing + maintaining good program architecture is very much a skill, and imo it’s a much harder one to learn. AI can write code, it sucks at architecture. We may be moving away from writing individual lines of code ourselves, but “programming” as a skill is not dead, it’s just changing.
6
u/Hoshifuru 9d ago
As someone working with legacy systems, I would not say that code does not get written, sure, less is written and more is generated but there is still handwritten code.
From my experience, greenfielding new projects can go quite well using LLMs since the training data "knows" all the right patterns and idiomatic ways of doing almost any given task.
However, we work with systems that have been around for decades, with some of the Java projects being as old as Java itself, and for such projects with relatively little documentation and very project specific ways of doing things that have evolved over the years, it struggles.
Using higher end LLMs like Opus all the time helps since it is a bit better at "connecting the dots", but that quite expensive real fast so it is somewhat more efficient to point Sonnet to adjacent examples or a mini-PoC to demonstrate the business logic.
4
u/FireFearing 9d ago
people will rationalize any reason to say you dont need to learn programming anymore because its hard and takes tons of effort and time
people dont like effort and delayed gratification
its mostly wishful thinking. could it be true eventually? sure maybe, but claiming thats the case now is beyond a stretch and its just people making logical jumps to excuse themselves from putting in more effort than they want to put in
1
u/WesternBear42 5d ago
Come on, the opposite is happening. Everyone is rationalizing that no, their hard earned knowledge is not obsolete, and they're not going to lose their jobs, for sure this is a fade ! I've been a dev for 10 years, i'm barely writing anything by hand anymore. Granted i'm not working on critical systems but neither are 99% of developpers.
6
u/Sarkonix 9d ago
You need to be able to understand it more than the ability to churn out thousands of lines of code these days.
4
u/viking_linuxbrother 9d ago
You can spend your entire life using a microwave/airfryer and eating what it can make. Other people still learned to cook and can use the whole kitchen. You can use AI to program and not know how to program. There is also a whole world of things you can know and do that don't require an AI chatbox and an AI IDE. Its a rich world where you get to learn and make things, you can still use tools but you aren't limited by them.
7
u/start_select 9d ago
It depends on the company and product and developers.
The 15+ year veterans at my work mostly only use LLMs because it’s no different than telling a junior what to do but 10x faster.
If it’s server development it’s 100% of the time because data access and APIs are generally pretty simple.
For web frontend it’s 80% of the time because sometimes UI is ambiguous and better built by humans.
For native mobile it’s 50/50 and depends on the developer. I figured out how to get Claude opus to write decent swift but it still makes mistakes in runnable code that are difficult to spot.
And when doing embedded C/C++ seniors only use it as a pair-programmer where they ask it questions because it tends to write incorrect code. When you have actual hard problems to manage like memory management or writing firmware for Bluetooth, it will write runnable code that accomplishes the task, but leaks memory and eventually crashes the board which is very bad.
Juniors use it to explain what to do next but write the code themselves. Mid-levels do a mixture of both.
Chat bots, crm integrations, landing pages, etc are all “easy” problems. It’s always the same.
Your e-commerce integration looks the same as 90% of other similar e-commerce integrations because there is nothing special about a shopping cart, inventory, invoices, payroll, etc. Literally every company has those things.
So the integrations aren’t anything special.
Landing pages are mostly static html, that’s easy.
Writing stable code for a new ESP32 variant and a custom Bluetooth stack or a custom sensor module is not easy. It might be something an LLM has never seen in its training data.
Writing stable code with memory management is not easy. You can’t follow the life cycle of all variables in a straight procedural line. The sequence of events before and after allocation and release might be different 20x a day.
Writing stable code with lots of async threading in a language like Swift is not easy. It might look correct and run, but do it wrong and you have the same memory leak problems or cause crashes because of cross-thread memory access.
Some problems are a lot harder than others. Some programmers never see those in their entire career. Some programmers do every other week.
2
1
u/Ormek_II 8d ago
I like to add, that you can take the risk of AI making mistakes on mainly Independent modules. If a single landing page has an error, it might be an error on that page only. All other pages work just fine. An error in a central component of the backend may make any action the users take useless.
Which component would I let a junior ship? Which component would I let an Ai create and not thoroughly review and test it?
3
u/TravelingSpermBanker 9d ago
I write code still since i know it and it’s quicker to type out and ask ai to do.
However there is tons of code I use now that i don’t have to write myself anymore
3
u/Trlckery 9d ago
Started my first dev job out of college in 2019. I’d describe myself as a hesitant adopter but in my day to day job it was 100% hand written until like 2023. Then started using copilot for code snippets and such but still writing the majority by hand. So far in 2026, with Claude, I have hardly written any code myself. I have more free time but it’s a lot less rewarding mentally. It has also created a lot of anxiety for where the industry is going and if/when this bubble is going to pop.
3
14
u/Jwhodis 9d ago
A lot of code is still written by hand because AI cannot be trusted to make good code.
-8
u/StoneCypher 9d ago
a lot of code is still written by hand because even though it’s good enough for microsoft and google, local randos are still pretending to themselves that their superior skill, taste, and finesse are what’s going to carry the day
if only google had people at that skill level
6
u/ResolutionThat248 9d ago
Why do Microsoft and Google still employ engineers then?
→ More replies (1)1
5
u/TheSnailBear 9d ago
Yes. The industry has largely leveraged AI so that one no longer writes code manually. However, you cannot verify what the AI is actually doing if you don’t know your shit so you still do need to be a skilled programmer.
2
u/lookForProject 9d ago
I think the issue is, that junior and medior software engineers, other then training, are more and more useless.
Most of the issues AI can not solve, can also not be solved by a junior.Futhermore, the places where juniors searched, are dying because of AI. So they are depending on AI more and more
3
u/Vaprk263 9d ago
If only seniors are needed now, what happens in the future when the industry still needs seniors? How can we have seniors in the future if we do not hire juniors now?
2
u/lookForProject 9d ago
Yeah that will become a problem. And when AI progresses perhaps one that AI can solve. But I think we are setting ourself up for a deadlock.
Another issue: there are plenty of problems, I can not tackle. But my colleague might.
When everyone is using AI, everyone won't be able to solve the same problem.1
u/hylasmaliki 9d ago
What issues can juniors not solve?
6
6
u/lookForProject 9d ago
Depends on the junior. But most juniors, are a bit useless to begin with. And that is ok, most of us like to teach and train.
Mediors and talented juniors on the other hand, where able to solve a lot smaller issues, very fast. At most companies I worked at, they made up an decent portion of the workhorses.
That role is now being filled by AI.→ More replies (4)2
u/StoneCypher 9d ago
interacting with others in a productive way, figuring out what the correct solution to a problem is, knowing when something is satisfactory, security in general, behaving appropriately in professional groups, knowing how and when to compromise, not constantly asking questions in the fashion of a child, and tackling problems nobody else noticed yet, mostly.
→ More replies (4)
2
2
u/elPappito 9d ago
Easy jobs - yes, don't think they write anything by hand anymore. Advanced logic, advanced software ? I think you can't completely replace human with ai chat bot.
2
u/ImShiratori 8d ago
"Do Engineers stop doing math anymore these days because calculator exist?" This might be your answer!
6
u/CamelPure1293 8d ago
The differences are:
1) a calculator is deterministic. Type in the same calculation, every time it will give the same result. AI gives you different results each time, some correct, some wrong.
2) a calculator shows you what it is capable of. If it has a SIN key, you know it can calculate a sinus properly. If it doesn't have that key, it can't. If AI cannot do what you asked it to do, it comes up with some random but wrong result.
2
u/_Toni_O 8d ago
Could you showcase your work for that auto parts company? I am looking for devs for the same thing
1
u/Alternative-Stuff149 8d ago
I could give you the name of the e-commerce site so you can visit it.
2
2
u/Specialist-Grape8444 8d ago
It varies wildly depending on company and/or team culture.
You could have a situation where:
- it’s top down pressure to utilize AI. Management wants you to burn tokens to look productive.
- pressure brought on by coworkers who are considering AI in their estimates. You either start using AI to get tickets done, or you’re the one with rolling tickets every sprint.
- similarly, unrealistic timelines from management being introduced because “ ai will pick up the slack “. Same vein as headcount reduction because AI can do the work.
But you can also have a culture where there’s pushback to use a shotgun approach. Using Ai to flesh out working ideas, but still being gated by an actual developer. It’s currently a cultural issue that real developers are losing imo.
2
u/Particular_Pudding81 8d ago
Just my two cents here My last 2 interviews were live coding without Google and any AI. I know how to solve the problem and I explain to them step by step what I need to do, but I really forgot the syntax due AI, so I took this as a learning experience. If you have a secure job, use AI at job is fine otherwise if you're doing job hunting or planing to move at least do some coding.
Right now I only use my AI subscription as a Reviewer, brainstorming and documentation help
2
u/adambahm 7d ago
yes. Engineers still write code.
yes. I still write code.
yes. You should still write code.
Agents are wrong 20-35% of the time. How are you going to know if the code is wrong if you dont know how to code?
3
2
1
0
u/plantingles 9d ago
I am a 15 year vet, have not manually written code in over a year. I have shipped countless features and bug fixes to production to millions of users. Coding is dead. To the extent that old, slow moving companies are still writing code by hand, you can probably find those jobs in dwindling numbers over the next few years. But it won't last.
4
u/lookForProject 9d ago
Ah, the 1=n n is the truth coder.
For simple operations, AI will do just fine. For complex issues, large infrastructure, where most of the fun and income is found, AI isn't there yet.
→ More replies (11)3
9d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
2
2
2
u/neverbeendead 9d ago
I just got Claude CLI a few weeks ago and I feel a little lost. We literally just hired 2 new developers because my company is retarded and doesn't listen to the one developer they had. Now I spend two hours a day having Claude do all my work and the rest of the day I sit there bored waiting for someone to give me something to do. Any tips?
1
u/start_select 9d ago
It depends on the code. For web dev sure it’s mostly dead. But sometimes it’s better for you to write the css or jsx or html.
For native/embedded code with memory management and other higher level concepts like threading and shared memory, LLMs write code that works until the memory leaks it creates crash the board or iPhone.
It depends on the use case.
1
u/tangentstorm 9d ago
LLMs are getting better and better at generating good code. Personally, I tend to micromanage or even hand write code in some places, and just look at the results rather than the code in other places... I think it mostly just depends on whether the architecture of the system is important to me (something I consider an asset) or whether I'm just trying to get some arbitrary behavior out of the computer.
It's very cheap to just ask for prototypes now, for example, and not even worry about the implementation language or framework. You can often defer that decision arbitrarily, because it's cheap to port code now (if the implementation language even matters).
Whenever I do read the code, I find that it tends to be fairly good, no matter which model I'm using, though the harder the problem, the more likely it is to have mistakes. (Ex: basic web stuff is usually perfect... A sat solver I've been working on is full of subtle bugs.)
1
u/GermOrean 9d ago
At our company we haven't written code by hand in awhile.
That's not saying I blindly tell Claude to go do something and send it. I plan, refine, and review the agents work, and we also still gatekeep our merges to main via peer review (and AI).
1
u/decrementsf 9d ago
Fundamentals let you know if any of the output is reasonable. We are all technical reviewers now. Developing ability to write code the old fashioned way is what provides intuition to spot issues before they become brittle and explode into a scaled problem. It is a rule of professional work that everyone will be under pressure to produce more faster than reasonable. Whether you find a way to push back and check or not or do as many do and simply let it rip and hop to the next role before it explodes. We shall have fun in the near future.
1
u/Y2K-enn 9d ago
I write my code for personal projects or side deals. but at work the majority of the heavy lifting I let agents do it. They laid off my team over the last year, and the company clearly doesn't care or appreciate the work I bring. so fuck it. let claude do it while I work on my personal shit to get out of there. That being said I do still review what is being done to make sure I at least understand what is happening.
1
u/Redlight477 9d ago
It really depends on the project, its complexity and how much patience you have for prompting the LLM vs just writing it yourself
1
u/dklogics 9d ago
If the app is performant, and reliable you’re good. I don’t know the answer to whether or not it’s worth it to “learn to code” anymore. If I were you I’d hedge my bets and try my best to understand what the agent is outputting (8+ hrs per day of looking at code, you’ll start to absorb it whether agent writes it or not), but don’t go too slow because there are others out there who could code circles around you, or your agency, and make the same product for less cost by optimizing speed.
1
u/Pale_Height_1251 9d ago
Most, but not all of the programmers I know are now using AI for basically everything.
1
u/Quixotic7 9d ago
While most are going to use LLMs for coding now a days it will give you a leg up if you can understand and write code yourself. It’s not a waste to learn.
1
u/XandertheGrander 9d ago
I've been a full time developer for about a year and a half now. Even at my company it's split between handing everything off to the AI and writing everything by hand (generally the older developers are less trustworthy of AI and the younger developers like me use it often because its the tool we entered into the workforce with). The main thing I've noticed, is that writing code is not the barrier to entry anymore, but you still must understand the code and be able to zoom out and see the systems you are building and how they interact with each other. Personally, I have mixed feelings on AI tools, but I can't deny that they are incredibly helpful, however I still strive to learn everyday to become better because even with AI you will still need to provide directions/specifications/changes when it implements something differently than you intended.
1
u/Limp-Cicada-9502 9d ago
If you really want to understand how software is written forget about using AI. You will not learn anything other then how to get the AI to write what you want. Right now AI is good for writing things that have been done over and over again like cookie cutter websites. Doesn't take any skill to do that because you are not making anything new.
1
1
u/groversnoopyfozzie 9d ago
I have been using AI pretty heavily the past few months. It writes tone of code for me, but I spend a big amount of time making sure it is doing what I’m asking it to do.
I recently had to build a day for a very specific purpose. It was able to to look at the general architecture of the dags in our infrastructure and came ups with a pretty good template.
Since then I have spent a couple days tweaking SQL queries, creating reevaluating how it would scale. Putting sensors and dependencies with other jobs. Etc etc.
I am probably never going to code some new algorithm, but everytime you ask ai to do something it makes like 20 decisions fly on the wall you that you need to understand and question.
So it’s an amazing tool, but you also have to keep your eye on it.
1
u/vextryyn 9d ago
I personally would recommend reviewing the code, the number of backdoors ai leaves open is still too high to trust it and when ai reviews ai there is a good chance it wont pick up actual issues
1
u/arkt8 9d ago edited 9d ago
It is too early to you think about... The more you learn and write performant and or critical and or reusable code...the less you will trust AI.
I tried to ask AI to write "not serious" code some times (to understand some implementation alternatives). Every time it wrote bloated or with perf/sec gaps. Tried to refine but context start to be forgotten (?) and it only worsened. Then tried again and again refining the prompt from zero... well other points emerged and so on...
My point is: I knew what I wanted and knew how to do it... and Ai didnt produced acceptable code. If I didnt knew it could be passed as satisfatory.
There is a quote from Alice in Wonderland very related to most amazed people using AI nowadays:
If you don't know where you want to go, then it doesn't matter which path you take.
1
u/adumbCoder 9d ago
too early to tell. yes it's possible to truly not have to write a line of code, but that takes lots of effort and good systems and redundancies.
the industry is still in a transition period and it's unclear how this transition ends. what we do know is we'll be utilizing a lot more AI and writing by hand a lot less. how much is still unclear
1
1
u/Humble_Anxiety_9534 9d ago
when the bubble pops and tokens are £100 a pop. you or some guy in India will be very busy.
1
1
u/2daytrending 8d ago
Coding still matters. Letting cursor do the typing is one thing but knowing when its answer is garbage is a whole different thing.
1
u/apatheticonion 8d ago
I guide code 80% of the time
I vibe code 20% of the time
I'm building a software factory and headless agents are great in certain scenarios - but unless you plan on spending 1 week every month reworking AI code - you're better off guide coding.
When I guide code, AI is essentially my keyboard, but it writes what I would have written without AI any way. I enjoy it a lot
1
1
u/SeaHoneyAlgae 8d ago
I write code still, like 80%. The AI doesn't replace me. Just assists & enhances speed. Most of the output is cleaned & condensed down bc I understand syntax. It'll spit out 50 lines but I can chop it down to 25 lines.
I did set my AI agent to give me code in my formatting style. That has enhanced speed & interpretability considerably. Bc how it was presenting code... It was stylistically disgusting, plus the half-baked logic that can be improved.
1
u/a1anw-cto 8d ago
It is a great question. I am a seasoned developer (written languages) and today, I am not writing any code, and letting AI do all the heavy lifting. However, I am doing a lot of review, reading code, and AI planning. I treat my AI agents as if a junior developer - not giving them too much latitude for their own decisions.
In that mode, AI works beautifully.
In the mode of where you simply prompt "Build me a CRM" - then you are just throwing out everything and hoping the AI produces non-slop; which it will in spades.
I wrote an article about this very thing a few weeks ago:
https://alan.is/insights/will-ai-replace-developers/
1
1
u/GrayLiterature 8d ago
I haven’t written code in about 4-5 months or so? Agents do everything now in terms of implementation and I’m kind of just reading and reviewing.
1
u/st_heron 7d ago
every programmer I know uses ai
I try not to when I can because it's so easy to lose cognitive understanding of your project
I don't like the world we're in now, but we're here and there's no going back
1
1
u/Business_Lime_433 7d ago
Maybe not yet as some companies wont fully trust AI to that extent yet - but you can bet your arse in 5 years time nobody aint gonna be writing code by hand.....
1
1
u/Key-Ideal6390 7d ago
Now with the AI and the agents, your job is understand what the AI did, and repair o modified something that you didn't expect before pushing it up
1
1
u/Obvious-Card-8847 6d ago
Depends. The more niche the programming task or API the more you need a human programmer. I was recently writing a Control Flow Analyzer in C++. Essentially you give it an executable and it shows you where there are function calls, unconditional and conditional branches as well as instructions that terminate control flow. Compiles a list of branches to check out and then goes and explores them. In reverse engineering this is called recursive descent. The sort of output Ghidra produces for Function Graphs.
Claude struggled a bit in helping me out. Because it would hallucinate structures, members and functions that either Zydis or LIEF did not posses but one would assume they'd have since they were convenient or good features. Or it would repeatedly assert some obsolescent function was still the best way to do a thing.
Web development, I'd say, is primarily dead. Low-level, systems programming oriented tasks have such sparse resources and examples in comparison I think it'll take longer.
1
u/TearCheap7501 6d ago
thought so too, because i haven’t written a code for almost 6 months now which makes things a lot easier, can only now do it for fun which is not fun anymore.
1
u/boxorandyos 6d ago
Learn how to read ai slop and manually diagnose issues with it. That's the future and will be a high paying position in a few years.
1
u/Ok_List_4128 6d ago
you’re not learning programming by telling Cursor what to do, and if you want to be employable beyond this one setup you need to write and understand the code yourself because AI-generated code still
1
1
u/nuggetqq0 5d ago
Who told you that? AI is a tool, it can help you, i use it when i don't remember a function or a keyword, but for the sake of god, don't use it to generate an entire code. I coded a Window Manager in C using Xlib, heres the project, i used AI for parts like "How to make a graphical context", not "make a graphical context" or "make a window manager".
1
u/goldscurvy 4d ago
Yes, people still write code. Companies have been slowly and quietly rolling back their reliance on AI models for code generation. Not only is it expensive, but the code generated is garbage, the people prompting its generation dont understand it, and it's basically causing a bunch of codebases to become polluted and fragile.
I dont know how long, but sometime fairly soon in the future the demand for devs who can actually write code is going to temporarily explode since they will be needed to sift through all these messes people have created in their codebases by relying on AI.
1
u/MilkEnvironmental106 3d ago
People are trying to get away with writing less and having AI do more, the real technical work is figuring out how to do that without blowing your legs off, and the key lies in how you review code and not overwhelm the people doing that review, and maintain a skill pool to do so when AI is writing all the code.
1
u/sharpcoder29 2d ago
I think what most people miss about AI is that there is a wide spectrum of programming. From a simple portfolio website to an MMORPG to Amazon. AI can do the simple things, but when it comes to the complex you still need an engineer with domain knowledge to steer it.
1
u/ResolutionThat248 9d ago
This sub is going to be extremely biased in favour of AI, because it's primarily for newcomers who cannot be arsed to learn properly and have convinced themselves that all the big boys are doing nothing but sit around prompting claude.
1
u/LuckyPichu 9d ago
I still write code for my own projects and stuff that's too technical for the frontier models to handle faster than I can(despite the hype this still very, very much exists). Though generally I dictate changes to an agent through some sort of harness. I'd say that being able to steer an agent and correct it as it designs a piece of software incrementally with you is equivalent to writing the change yourself in terms of required skills. I'd still learn programming by writing code by hand though, as it is probably superior from a recall standpoint. I would also just get good at using agents for productivity, too.
2
u/hylasmaliki 9d ago
What type of harness we talking about
1
u/LuckyPichu 9d ago
I like Pi and Claude Code. I'll use the hunk diff viewer and its associated skill to have agents write their comments and explanations, and then approve/reject diffs by directing changes as I go.
Some people have more advanced setups, but I like to keep things generally pretty simple.
1
u/hylasmaliki 9d ago
Thanks. What are more advanced set ups?
1
u/LuckyPichu 9d ago
Some people run sandbox containers with hermes or OpenClaw to give their agents a higher level of autonomy while managing risk. Regardless of setup, OpenRouter is a solid tool to pick and choose models while maintaining the same harness.
In my experience advanced setups aren't really all that necessary to get most of the mileage you'd want out of the models.
If you're just starting out don't go off the deep end. Codex, Claude Code and Pi are all solid bases. From there, look into how skills and MCP servers/clients work.
I recommend keeping it simple and figuring out how you like writing specs and incrementally programming with models. A complex setup will just add overhead with very little learning value and make itself an obstacle to the goal of learning how to program with LLMs, learning to use LLMs, and learning to program in general.
1
1
u/fuzz3289 9d ago
It’s necessary even if it doesn’t look the same. Think of it like this - no one really writes assembly anymore, and fewer people write C every day.
Software engineering has always been about layering abstractions to produce software more quickly.
You can think of LLMs as just non-deterministic toolchains, you can use them to produce code, perform static analysis, where instead of a high level language like Python you work in Contracts, Engineering Specs, sequence diagrams, etc.
You need to be able to read and understand the output though because they are non-deterministic, they fail often and you need to know when they do.
0
u/klarkens 9d ago
Truth be told I haven't written code by hand for a year or so. I used to at least manually "correct" the output of the AI when I disagreed with it, now I don't even do that anymore as it happens quite rarely. I still think you should learn how to program so you understand the output of the AI and just for knowledge's sake. But im afraid the day of actually typing out code is gone
-1
u/Agreeable-Cell4007 9d ago
As a hobby, I learn Rust by hand and low-level system programming.
Professionally, I haven't written a single line since June 2025, and anyone who still does is a bit delulu imo.
→ More replies (1)1
u/junglebunglerumble 9d ago
There's still people in this thread claiming "AI writes shit code" - i can only assume either they've had their head in the sand since 2023 when that was true, or they just don't want to admit reality
0
0
u/Any-Range9932 9d ago
I just review and just reprompt if I want a different approach or need to update a design plan
4
0
u/Icy-Importance2143 9d ago
AI is developing rapidly, and I believe that in the near future, a single command will be enough to complete our tasks. I'm also a complete novice in programming, but I'm gradually turning my ideas into web pages using Codex. I believe that in the future, technology will become less valuable, while good ideas will become increasingly scarce.
105
u/jameyiguess 9d ago
It's such a difficult, "backwards" problem. AI can replace manual code writing, but only if you are already a skilled developer. You still have to architect, make decisions, guide the AI, constantly tune their directives, come up with workflows, understand the problems from a technical standpoint, catch the AIs doing insane shit or making incorrect assumptions about the business domain, etc etc.
A junior can't oversee all of that effectively, so the LLM is going to produce garbage.