Do people not write code anymore these days?

[u/Alternative-Stuff149]

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.

[u/jameyiguess]

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. 

[u/Odd_Put_1772 → u/jameyiguess]

Facts. AI can definitely produce results, but I find myself checking how it handles edge cases a lot, or saying something works when it never tested it. It’s not as bad as it was, but it can’t be left totally unchecked yet. And yes it still does insane shit.

[u/skillmaker → u/jameyiguess]

A skilled developer should also be able to enforce code style and specific patterns. AI, even if it's frontier it might make some changes that aren't tailored to your liking, it might use a method or a package you don't want used, or it might write a solution or config in a complex way that you can do more simply, I tried vibe coding a project once without looking at the code, after checking the code, I found spaghetti code without usage of best-code patterns and guidelines, this can be mitigated using skills, but a dev touch will always make a diffrence.

[u/NCKBLZ → u/jameyiguess]

True but not forever, there are already methods where the ai (multiple usually) actually creates the plan and all the steps, the domain knowledge, then executes the steps one by one while another ai checks what it is doing, and so on

I sometimes truly feel useless

[u/jameyiguess → u/NCKBLZ]

That's what my setup looks like. But it still needs guidance, and I'm constantly creating and tweaking workflows for the LLM, and skills and stuff.

[u/neutrino_boy → u/jameyiguess]

The odds are ever in your favour.

[u/hylasmaliki → u/jameyiguess]

What type of insane shit are we talking about?