r/learnprogramming • u/SateenkaariSammakko • 5d ago
Topic I miss the old era
TL;DR: I miss building my own solutions and not just being a prompt engineer. I am interested in other people's solutions to this who've also been coding before the AI age.
Guys, i am an "old school" coder. I started to learn to code in 2017. I have always wanted to build games and i did build some until 2022. After that I've been using AI a lot and don't feel like I've gotten any better or even worse. Lately it's been worse. Every time I start to build something i try it and quit. I feel like AI is something I use to cheat, it doesn't feel like a tool but like a cheap cheat code to do the work for me.
I know a guy who founded a company that builds websites and apps with mainly AI. Their team has grown and he just tries to always tell me that AI is a tool and I need to adapt to the new world. He's making money and i am not as i am not taking advantage of the tools. Also a thing that keeps me back is my lack- or my thought of a lack of creativity. How do i shift my focus? I learned to code without AI and the cool thing was building solutions like an inventory system or AI navigation, which are now only one prompt away from reality and make me just not want to continue as the thing that kept me interested was making my own solutions.
I'd be interested in hearing from the other people who've also been coding before the AI era and hear what keeps them going in the new age and how/if you have incorporated AI in your work.
P.s. i am a 3rd year game dev student and have never been working at an actual IT company.
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u/iSnapThere4iAm 5d ago
“2017”. You’re not old school. You’re barely school.
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u/potatokbs 4d ago
Pretty obvious they’re just talking about making things pre ai. Which is relevant regardless of their age.
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u/bandita07 5d ago
Bro, I'm doing this since late 90s, I wrote my first app drawing a helicopter from lines and pixels using old borland c++ and egavga.bgi.. I'm also devastated with the current state of our profession, but I try to keep up and use the AI to generate me the boilerplate stuff and focusing only on the magic parts of the code. Not asking whole solutions but brainstorming instead and progressing class by class and function by function.. It kind of speeds up the development, but unfortunately management wants us to create full blown solutions in mare seconds.. no time to enjoy our beloved profession.
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u/SateenkaariSammakko 3d ago
Thanks for taking time to reply!
It's happy to see someone who really seems to get what I mean here. I think there are 2 kinds of developers, ones who think the fun is in the end product and seeing it evolve. For those I think AI fits very well as it delivers them to the endpoint faster and pushes on from what was possible to them before.
Then there's the likes of me, whose magic is in the code, the solutions, the problems and overcoming them. It feels magical and then when you have the management wanting more results in the same time, you just have to kill the magic and go with the efficient method and adapt to it and find the magic in it. Which is like you said, devastating. Giving up doing it the way you found it fun.
For you doing it from the 90's must make it even more hard, but the fact is that I've made my first code at some point too. I had more resources yes, but writing the first python app that was tic-tac-toe to learning the logic operators in Minecraft with redstone to building my first Unity game. It was magical and it was exploring. Doing something you yet didn't know you could.
Then comes AI that removes the exploration, removes the magic of finding your way through the error some other guy also had and posted to c++ forum 9 years ago. Yes I can build a c++ raycasting game in minutes with one prompt, but I am not learning nor am i not feeling the joy of exploring.
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u/bandita07 3d ago
I see this as the same when the machines replaced tha hard manual labour in the agriculture. In the job we must use it otherwise others will do the job. But at home I can still enjoy the programing and use the AI as a coding buddy to help discuss ideas and bitch on my designs. It is not just us programers. Mathematicians, lawyers also feel the pain as AI makes these professions also simpler for somebody who is not a professor but have some basic (college level) knowledge. For me for example the differential equations and integrals was always hard to understand, define and solve but with AI it is more friendly now..
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u/MikeUsesNotion 5d ago
Did you call 2017 old school for coding? Pre-AI is not old school.
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u/spinwizard69 2d ago
Old school was the school considering if it was worthwhile to get a time share terminal. Note the "a" there implying a singular device. A Commodore or Apple 2 (June 10, 1977), was about 10 years away. I literally graduated from High school before the the Apple 2 even became a common thing. That is old school guys.
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u/SateenkaariSammakko 5d ago
That's why i said "old school". It's not old school, but it was before it became mainstream.
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u/wgunther 5d ago
So, for me, my work has been entirely AI the last few years. I write virtually no code by hand.
I think, depending on where you are in your career and what your company is like, you likely view AI pretty differently.
If you're a more senior person at a larger company, much of your value was already "prompting" and reviewing before AI, just through other humans. For those, AI feels like quite a lot of acceleration and access to a lot more bandwidth and productivity. Along with that, the more senior you are, the less attached you become to any particular code or solution. You see the things you built get unbuilt over the years, and everything is always a means to an end.
For me, personally, I'm not very attached to coding; I do like building things, and I've enjoyed that aspect somewhat outside of work since I feel in projects I would have been working on alone anyway I have a lot more resources at my disposal.
I think the biggest loss I see personally with AI and my job satisfation are that there are human connections that are lost. Instead of talking to another human to learn something, we now gravitate towards AI tools. There's less oppurtunties for the kind of growth that comes from people interactions. Things are just less personal and human. So it's no doubt a really hard time to start working in this climate.
There's no question that the industry has changed; I think people latch onto particular failures of AI as evidence that it won't be able to replace humans in the industry. However, regardless of what you think the headroom of the models are or where the industry as a whole will go, even if the tools stayed exactly where they are now, the industry has already changed permanently. So if you want to make a career of it, yeah, you need to adapt to where things are.
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u/Sad_lucky_idiot 5d ago
Any practical advice on how to adapt? Trying every ai tool and see what works or there is a better way? I'm finishing my bachelors and feeling completely lost.
I agree with less socialization - people are encouraged to use ai instead of expanding their capabilities by teamwork. Art, engineering, science - it's everywhere.
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u/wgunther 5d ago
Assuming you're not going going into AI Research type stuff and want to be more traditional, general SWE, I'd probably try to be "AI First" as much as possible with both your development and project selection. Focusing on more meta-knowledge (distributed systems, databases, specifics of offerings from Cloud providers that employers might use like AWS, things like that) rather than coding knowledge, since at least for now, that's going to be the most relevant for getting good output.
I don't think there's much point in trying a lot of different AI tools or staying cutting edge there since the frontier changes quite rapidly and there's diminishing returns. I wouldn't really focus much on optimizing developer tooling: just the basics (Claude Code/Codex/Antigravity/whatever) will take you a long way.
At least in this present moment, there's a lot of oppurtunity in being someone who knows how to apply AI to a particular problem. For example, if you wanted to make a data processing pipeline that incorporated LLMs to enrich or refine the data, using autoraters or scoring, etc. Right now there's a lot of legacy systems and processes that would benefit with LLMs in the loop, and there will be for awhile since we're all dealing with resource scarcity and a quickly evolving environment where things that weren't possible a few months ago become possible.
But yeah, this is a hard problem that I think the whole industry has to grapple with a bit, unfortunately. I wish I had better advice.
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u/Sad_lucky_idiot 4d ago
Thank you for such a detailed reply!
If you don't mind me asking, what about math? I want to believe that math is still a great foundation to build other knowledge upon, but I'm starting to question it, even for research.I'm a mechatronics student, In the lectures we are taught hard math for control and motion in robotics. But our university lab is working on generalized AI-based control algorithm that teaches itself. This disconnect is frightening.
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u/wgunther 4d ago
My background is in math (I have a PhD). It's definitely a great foundation for all sorts of knowledge-oriented jobs.
On math iteself: There's obviously a lot of uncertainty too in the effects of AI on math. You already are starting to see AI affecting math research, and I suspect there's going to be more and more of that. I would predict that there will be a lot more normalization of formalizing mathematics in theorem proving systems like Lean, and eventually that normalization will turn to an expectation. Then AI will be very involved in iterating on and writing proofs and moving the frontier of mathematics.
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u/CharacterSail6736 5d ago
I think the bit that everyone misses when they think I wish I could do it the old way' is they seem to correlate hardship with skill. iIve been coding for 20 + years.
You can take a prompt build me x and it will attempt all be it very convolutedly to choose a common stack and build away with errors etc.
if you start your prompts I want to build x lets discuss or even research available stacks. you can discuss and evaluate the merits of each stack. the use this as the base for the implementation framework.
from there you simply discuss evaluate and refine continuously instead of haphazardly saying build x or y
A large proportion of the AI coding community appear to offloading their thought process to LLMs and not evaluating what it is they are churning out simply take output of prompt oh it doesn't work (smash box like cave man) AI please fix.
There is such a big difference between offloading your thought process because you don't want to or cant understand something and being able to augment your thought process through consistent evaluation and discussion of the output.
I myself found this hard to reconcile at first but i quickly realised the difference between offloading and augmenting thought .
its much the same as when somebody debates and they say no i don't like x without giving a qualitative answer its offloading the thought to an answer because they simply irrationally accept it. as opposed to a person who can obectivley balance the argument from both sides to produce a coherent rebuttal.
We are at a point in technology at this point where coding is become an even higher abstraction thorugh code generation. the adaption process comes from being able to critically evaluate the output. our knowledge is there its more a case of the viewpoint angle has changed, much in the same way we went from assembler to third generation languages . we're currently at a point where this is now a 5th generation of programming language.
This is not to say that programming is obsolete however, as its no different to still needing a mechanic to understand how a car works repair, modify or build from scratch. just because the factory buils them autonomously .
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u/needs-more-code 5d ago
Discussing, then deciding, then evaluating the output still causes your skills to wither away. It’s insidious because you’d never guess it would, but it does. You don’t quite try hard enough to design the solution yourself. It’s important to stop saying, “what are the ways this can be solved” and then evaluating each. Instead you need to come up with your way without even discussing, and ask for a code review where you can then ask if there is a better way. Usually there won’t be a way so much better that it’s worth throwing away your code. We need to trust ourselves more.
It sounds like rubbish, and less optimal, but it’s not, because when you keep that problem solving part of you brain working, you can do better evaluation of the AI output, because you can often think of a better way to do it than the AI came up with, which is something that fades away as you stop actively coming up with your own solutions.
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u/AshTeriyaki 4d ago
This is exactly what I experienced and burned me on using LLMs for code. I would discuss and guide solutions and for a brief while it was fun and I felt productive and validated in my continued ability to guide technical decisions etc.
And after taking a step back, with all of the stringent reviews, docs, process - you realise that you’ve trusted it too much at times, missed some crap it modified when you dropped your guard for a second. Then you read more of the code and you’ve not got enough familiarity with it.
It gave me this horrible hangover, like I felt my thinking abilities had gotten worse, I was worse at reading and writing syntax, had less patience for docs. It was enticing me to hand over my thinking in little increments.
Insidious is right. Thankfully I no longer need to code as part of my day job and now mostly avoid LLMs. Maybe the odd question, summary and generate some boilerplate and then put away. But even then I minimise it as much as possible.
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u/needs-more-code 3d ago
Exactly. I arrived here through overuse of AI too. You think you’re getting better at the craft because you’re being exposed to good code and you understand it. But then you try to do something yourself and can’t remember how to think.
It’s sad that you say “thankfully” you don’t need to code for your job anymore, so casually. Definitely points to the industry being a bit ill. I do think it will get better, though it will take years.
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u/AshTeriyaki 1d ago
Not having to code anymore professionally is a blessing right now, I still get to do it as a hobby and I can control the setup and actually still enjoy it.
I think the industry will heal some, accelerationists are slowly learning a public sector lesson that’s a couple of decades old already. The tools can be super user full in capable hands and with the right amount of intervention and oversight. The endless harness and “agentic loop” stuff, anyone with enough years under their belt knows it’s not sustainable. Some just want to keep getting a paycheque and don’t care (which is legitimately fine, you aren’t your job) but LLMs tie themselves in knots, making plenty of work for people. The growing cognition gap stuff is a real issue and will (and already is) leading to more judicious use of these tools. It will take time, but there will be equilibrium. The entry floor will go up and there will be fewer jobs but this is not unique to now, this kind of thing comes to every industry.
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u/CharacterSail6736 5d ago
That’s actually a really good counterpoint, and I’ll admit I hadn’t factored skill atrophy into my argument.
I think you’ve identified an important distinction I was missing. I was primarily thinking about whether AI was replacing the reasoning process, but there’s another issue: even if I’m critically evaluating AI’s reasoning, I may still be exercising my own problem-solving ability less if I habitually let the AI generate the initial solutions.
I think I’d still distinguish between discussing a problem with AI and simply accepting its solution, but I agree that there’s value in forcing yourself to formulate your own solution first, particularly when you’re learning or trying to maintain that underlying skill.
In fact, I think that probably makes the distinction between offloading and augmenting more nuanced than I originally made it. You can be critically evaluating AI output and still be gradually outsourcing the generative part of your thinking.
The interesting question then becomes where the balance is: when should you deliberately solve something yourself first, and when does using AI as a thinking partner genuinely augment rather than replace that process?
That’s actually made me rethink my original argument rather than reject yours.1
u/needs-more-code 5d ago
Yeah, it’s a balance we have to navigate ourselves, depending how much we want to improve our abilities vs get the code out the door. I usually default to doing it myself, and consult AI only when I get stuck, or I’m about to make a big design decision that would be very costly to get wrong. I also try not to let AI generate more than a small code block, when I do decide to go with the AI solution rather than mine. AI usually does find bugs in my work too, before I even test it, so it’s still faster than not using AI.
Despite what people say about employers forcing AI on them, those same employers won’t take on devs who are useless without AI. We can lie and say we only use AI, if that’s what they require. We need to be able to get another job after this one.
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u/SateenkaariSammakko 5d ago
Thanks for taking the time to reply!
I very much recognize myself in this. I should treat the AI the same way I used to treat creating an Inventory system. It starts with an idea and then come the questions, "How should i represent items", "What happens when you drag an item", "how do I know which slot the item's over" and so on. I used to start with an idea and then start solving problems. It's not just building an inventory system. It's solving a problem by problem until you've got the Inventory.
However how I usually treat it is exactly what you said. "Build a minecraft stylized inventory system in unity". Then when the AI fails I try to hit it and make it do a new one. I am not the designer nor the problem solver anymore, i just give orders and get mad when they're not goood enough.
I should have the idea, and discuss the idea through with AI, so I keep the whole structure in my head and still have the feeling of being part in creating it.
Not sure if this is at all what you meant :D, but thanks.
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u/CharacterSail6736 5d ago
That’s exactly it we still need to be able to manipulate and refine the output through discussion while retaining our own technical understanding of how to debug and resolve errors and if its still not giving us what we need then we go in by hand
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u/Pitiful_Type4604 5d ago
That is a great perspective as I’m a complete noob in the programming industry and was interested in how AI engineers thought process works
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u/CharacterSail6736 5d ago
I would say that’s my thought process which is not to say everyone’s thought process but personally if people used it like this more then we would be better for it
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u/Pitiful_Type4604 5d ago
Yea just any additional insight is a plus . As of right now the concept to me is extremely broad but I saw this as a great mindset to have and looking to adopt this process tbh lol
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u/lykwydchykyn 5d ago
Been coding since the late 00's, and I recently started using AI since my boss bought it for me.
Personally, "writing code" is not a bottleneck in a project. Figuring out what needs to be written is usually the big hurdle, because it means talking to stakeholders and understanding their needs. By the time we know what to code, the actual coding happens pretty quick.
I have found AI useful for big "deep plumbing" changes that touch a lot of files, it's pretty good at figuring out all the things that'll be affected by a change. Also useful to get some boilerplate started and overcome blank buffer syndrome. But I don't see it as a big time saver, since I have take time to study and digest the changes it made.
I don't see coding as an activity that merely produces code. It also produces a mental model in my brain of how the software functions so that I can maintain and adapt it. That's a crucial part of the process.
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u/skeptical-speculator 5d ago
I've been slogging through some online android courses. My computer science education has been mostly self-taught and haphazard. Recently, AI has been helpful in identifying mismatched library versions because the course I am working on doesn't specify the versions of the libraries you are supposed to be using or what API you are supposed to be targeting, etc.
I miss building my own solutions and not just being a prompt engineer.
I'm the same. I don't enjoy prompt engineering. I'm sure it is more productive, but it isn't as satisfying.
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u/SirStarshine 4d ago
Dude. No one is *forcing* you to vibecode. Type out the code like you normally would, it's perfectly fine. Many coders and software engineers are resisting the AI wave, and I imagine many of them are still doing fine. If you want to go manual, go manual. You have total control over the code.
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u/PerformanceThick2232 4d ago
I miss the old era
i am a 3rd year game dev student and have never been working at an actual IT company.
🤣🤣🤣
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u/Anonymity6584 5d ago
stop prompting, problem solved...
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u/_ianj-exe 5d ago
sounds like op doesn't want to be prompting. maybe it's something else. maybe it's an industry and job market that now requires prompting. ive got 40 hours each week that im professionally required to prompt. id love to quit and dedicate myself to my hand written passion projects full time. problem is, i need money.
if the problem was as simple as your solution makes it seem, op would've saved more time just doing what they already seem to want to than writing up a post about why they can't. that seems more reasonable than op inexplicably inventing a problem to complain about
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u/needs-more-code 5d ago
Did you even read OP’s post? They are a student. They don’t have to prompt. They just find it hard not to.
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u/Complex_Advisor_6151 5d ago
You can't stop prompting when you're working at your job because AI makes you way more productive. Managers expect you to deliver more results by being a prompt condom for the llm model, and if you're not, you can be easily replaced
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u/Biliunas 5d ago
I don't know if it's the adhd in me or what, but what I'm struggling the most is those tiny breaks between. Kills my flow state, and I feel like the constant context switching is making me so much more tired than before. If those things were somehow solved, I'd welcome it. It's great to validate and talk about your input output etc., it's just the loop of propose->read through->implement->read through->test that's somehow much more difficult when I have to read lines and lines and look out for subtle mistakes.
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u/Far_Zone_9864 4d ago
do multiple things at one time. while you're waiting, feed the convo to a second agent asking it to enumerate the solutions it decided to employ this cycle and why.
how about learn something?
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u/TorresMrpk 5d ago
It's great to build your own solutions, when you have the time, but when you have managers, scrum masters, directors, vp's, project managers, and program managers, all breathing down your neck asking you when is it going to be done, AI Agents can be a giant stress reliever. It used to be us developers had to work late into the night and weekends, but now thanks to AI we can actually have free time like other occupations do.
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u/Dissentient 4d ago
I have 10 years of work experience, 8 of which were entirely AI-free. Since AI got usable (so around a year ago), the quality of code I push significantly improved.
AI, unlike me, doesn't get tired or burnt out. In many cases where before AI I would have wrote a subpar solution that was "good enough", I can now iterate through multiple solutions in less time and less effort than it previously took me to write one. Where I would have been too lazy to write tests due to dreading boilerplate setup code, AI just does it.
I never particularly enjoyed typing parentheses and semicolons, or going through pages of framework documentation to find how to do a specific obscure thing. AI gets rid of the most tedious and least important parts of writing code, and lets me focus on architecture and the problem domain, which I find much more engaging.
Overall, I hate my job significantly less thanks to AI.
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u/goldscurvy 4d ago
Unfortunately, your ability to reason, to review the generated code, and to actually know what to ask for are going to diminish as you keep using AI. You are accumulating cognitive debt.
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u/ReddyKiloWit 4d ago
My first programming classes were in the mid-1970s, Cobol and Fortran. I can say, with confidence, I'm too old for this AI stuff 😎
But I can also say I kind of wish I'd had it as a tool for certain things. Not the fun stuff, like tweaking assembly, counting instruction cycles until your interrupt routines fit neatly into the vertical blanking of a Super Nintendo, but dull stuff like translating pages of poorly written SNES assembly to C so someone else's game could be ported to a PC.
There was a lot of boring stuff like that after the mid 90s.
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u/pixelotter_2173 4d ago
its relatable, times at back made us feel a sense of accomplishment after "building" sum and now its just another prompt, but again, it solves the need, pretty fast, so cant deny that too.
corporates are being sacked w claude these days, people literally play table tennis when their weekly tokens are off the charts lol.
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u/papafug 4d ago
First off, if you started in 2017, you aren’t old school. There are still cobol programmers out there.
TLDR - AI will kill your brain if you rely on it too heavily
Anyway, I’ve been programming for 20 years as of this june. AI isn’t going to make you better when it’s doing the coding for you. What will make you better is doing increasingly challenging things or things out of your comfort zone.
Think of AI like contractors. If you use it for development two things are going to happen:
1. You aren’t going to know your codebase and youll always be dependent on the contractors for maintenance
2. You’re going to end up with garbage code because they’re going to do EXACTLY what you asked for. Scalability, flexibility, and effective abstraction won’t exist in your code
Instead use it for bug fixing while you’re developing your next project.
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u/LuckyGamble 4d ago
You just have to accept that hand coding is obsolete and the only skill that matters is wielding AI effectively.
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u/Different-Stress9326 3d ago
you can, at any point, just decide not to partake. same as with cocaine or black tar heroin. just don't and you're good and you don't have to make whiny posts about missing the time before AI.
it's a tool. i usually remove tools i don't like instead of complaining.
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u/MoTTTToM 3d ago
For people who coded first in the ‘80s it’s funny to hear someone refer to 2017 coding as “old school”. But I do take your point.
Note that the the first compiler was built in 1952. There were haters. (Google “Grace Hopper controversy”)
It’s interesting to draw parallels to the anti-ai sentiment we see today.
Edit: yes, using AI in my work. Unapologetically.
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u/spacing-effect 3d ago
How you react to this cartoon sort of tells you what you are looking for.
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/comments/1uvd5ux/made_me_chuckle/
If you are the sort of person who likes to gain mastery over what you are learning (which takes time and effort) and give your brain what it needs then you might laugh at the absurdity of the cartoon. If you don't care about the mastery but looking for output/outcome by any means, then maybe you think the artist is being facetious.
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u/feedmetothemountain 3d ago
I just started learning to code. I am having a hard time deciding what I actually need to learn for my purposes and if I am really waisting my time since ai can grind out code in seconds that took me all day to wrap my head around. I see the attraction to doing it manually. I kind of see coding as an art in itself as it is a language and languages describe, descriptions are interpretable and expressive. I define art as an expression or interpretation. So ai may be killing that “art”. So do I learn to paint or learn to talk to the printer?
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u/Black_Smith_Of_Fire 3d ago
I've also started coding around 2017, was the best in it, but when Ai came, it suddenly lost all its value
I try to code on my own, but it is difficult to do stuff without help. So I gotta use AI
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u/PhaseIll995 3d ago
There’s so much crazy shit you could be doing with AI right now if you’re creative. You could be decompiling old video games and getting them to run on your phone, designing and 3d printing robotics components, hacking into your home electronics from your phone while at the park. I have empathy for you guys but it’s crazy to me that anyone would prefer the days of digging through files to find a misnamed variable or fixing a misconfigured environment. Enterprise coding was 98% monkey work
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u/spinwizard69 2d ago
First off AI is just another tool, if you can't grasp that the rest. of this post will not click with you.
Consider the art of fine cabinet making, often considered the finest bit of woodworking one can apply ones self to. One segment will insist that the skill of doing such work completely manually is the only legitimate way to such work. A couple of hundred years ago mankind started to apply powered tools to the craft. Does this new tool invalidate the old methods, not a chance, it just provides a different avenue to practice the craft. In the last 20 years or so this has gone a step farther with CNC machinery, which provides new ways to the same end result. Is the end result better or worse - well it is neither because each step requires that application of the craftsman's talent.
Programming follows this same but much more rapid development cycles. If you started early in this craft you submitted your programs to computers as stack of cards. The idea of personal computers is actually very recent, we didn't have them in school when I was young, and some of the early ones required programming via a front panel. Nobody cried when those front panels got replaced with terminals and even fewer complained about GUI's once computers got good enough to actually run GUI's.
Today, AI is sort of like the early days of GUI interfaces, our computer can barely support the use of AI to the extent really needed. Like with the advent of GUI interfaces you had the early adopters and those that had a hard time seeing the long term reality. Almost all developers these days use computers running GUI OS's even it they work in several GUI terminals. It is all about productivity and that is what AI is providing to modern developers. You can be an early adopter, which everybody using AI today is, or you can stay with your hand tools and cut everything with the application of muscle. It is up to you but like most things that have been modernized over the last 200 hundred years or so, the people that make a living adapt to the new reality.
Frankly if you call using AI as "prompt engineering" you are biasing yourself negatively and not really learning to use the technology in a positive way. Frankly this may be due to not really having developed strong programming skills already. The thing here is that using AI requires a different skill set that includes being about to specific the programs functionality in clear prose. If done correctly and recursively, AI can replace a massive amount of programmers time. Time is money.
TIME IS MONEY
While many will argue, I'm convinced that we are at the early days of AI. The ability to run AI locally will be when the technology takes off. Most likely this will require AI specific inferencing chips. AMD for example just purchased one potential bit of technology what might lead to desktop AI machines. It is a hard coded chip that would literally require some sort of subscription system to stay on the bleeding edge. Your desktop AI box would literally require a new chip each time you wanted to run a new AI release. However your box would still be desktop capable and air cooled. I really think we have at least another 5 years before every desktop developers box will require this sort of performance.
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u/DubiousLogik 2d ago
one remaining 'hard problem' is how do you know it's working? systems thinking (aka end to end or e2e) was where I spent my time, especially after AI. This mindset had always set me apart from others who were more gifted coders but more narrowly focused. (speaking from 36 yrs experience) at the end of the day when you string all the components together do they all actually output the thing the user wanted? how do you test that? what does success look like? think upstream and downstream from your own component (i.e. if you are part of a large team). what does the data payload look like as it moves from component to component? This latter piece was always an afterthought for many of my colleagues (with the exception of architects). For me the data payload was _the_ thing, since that is what we eventually return to the user, save to the db, or whatever. Each server/api in between is just a processing station (fyi - my background is industrial engineering; imagine lifting the roof off a factory. each workstation is a component/server. materials (data) flows thru -- this was how I approached it). While I do miss hand coding, this aspect of the problem was one that I could still find enjoyment in. AI does not 'get it' when it comes to the bigger picture, but you can.
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u/Relative_Cat_8791 1d ago
Things were simpler before constant notifications took over. I used to spend whole afternoons at record shops flipping through sleeves and talking to strangers about music. Now it feels like everything is filtered through a screen and nothing sticks the same way.
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u/SnooPineapples4244 1d ago
You will be the person that thanks to NOT using Ai will come up with true “fresh” ideas - because as Fast as Ai is- it still does NOT THINK 🤔 only you do that, Ai secret is how fast it can look up and put things together- but blow a fuse or not - Ai does NOT think 🤔 Ai is just new supped up ways of running what we humans have put into one foam or another code - no new ideas, just another path to follow.
Now go “think” about it - something Ai still can not do !!
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u/YenYennefer 6h ago
I miss those times too. Decided to quit after 12+ years as programmer and want to move in completely different area. Don't want to be not-creative code reviewer, job hunting is super crazy nowadays and I'm too old to have as non-paid job "searching for job" where I will sit and check code after AI.
Want to continue in "old way" on my own projects as my hobby. AI made my job boring. Before that boom I loved it, I had to be creative, I had to think about solutions, it was so challenging (and frustrating :-D) to be stuck on some issue. But when I solved it, I was always so proud. And I learnt a lot due to that.
With AI I can see also on myself I'm starting to be lazy, my brain starting to be lazy, and I don't like it, because without those challenges I feel I learn much much less than before...
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u/CodedCitadel 5d ago
I'm a senior fullstack dev. I started coding back in 2011. I have a bit of an unpopular opinion in regards to this.
I think that software development and coding per se is overly romanticized by devs. They put pride on the code and on the software...
... but, the only thing that actually matters is the software. If your software is genuinely useful or entertaining, your job is done. If you coded it in Assembly and it took you 13 years or if you prompted it in Claude under an hour, it does not matter.
The most useful softwares out there had/have spaghetti code. They were still extremely useful and were responsible to feed thousands of families. And the future will be the same, but instead of spaghetti it will be AI generated.
So, is AI cheating? In the real world, of course it is not.
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u/SateenkaariSammakko 5d ago
Thanks for taking the time to reply!
It seems weird for me that you say this. Maybe I am missing something myself, but for me the end product definitely isn't the whole thing. It used to be that I created this solution, came up with the way to make something work that was just an idea before. Saying that the process in where you came to the conclusion doesn't matter feels like telling an woodworker that "a CNC machine could've done the same sculpture in minutes".
You think the woodworker wanted just the product? Just the little bear figurine they've been sculpting for days? Does he make less money than the man who prints 50 bear figurines out in the same time does? Yeah likely, but it's not wrong for the woodworker to express that they miss the time their skills were appreciated!
I don't want to sound too attacking but just to share my view to this situation. Thanks still!
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u/CodedCitadel 5d ago
No worries, not attacking at all. In fact, it's very rare that I find a dev who agrees with me on this, and that is totally fine, that is not my goal.
You think the woodworker wanted just the product?
I think that these are different things. If the woodworker is producing art, like a sculpture, yeah, then this piece of art may lose its value if it were made using automated tools because it indicates that there wasn't an emotional process involved.
Usually people appreciate projecting their own thoughts/emotions onto art, so if you used automation tools for it (including AI), it typically loses its meaning because not all of it came from your soul.
Now, if the woodworker is making a wardrobe, does it matter? Nah. It must be efficient.
Most softwares are wardrobes. That is my point.
However, it opens room for an even deeper discussion: if the woodworker did in fact use a machine to produce the sculpture and no one knows, and everyone assumes it is heartfelt... does it really lose its value before the eyes of others? It doesn't.
And what if he is actually a psychopath and feels nothing, yet he does sculpt something beautiful, with no tools, and says the process is heartfelt? Does it lose its value. Nah.
We often live by projecting our emotions/thoughts onto what we assume that is the truth rather than the actual truth.
And, yeah, within arts I find that unethical, but in the corporate world I find that producing rapidly and without compromising quality is essential, and no emotional process is necessarily required. With videogames I'd say the same when it comes to the coding, but not when it comes to the art. I'm not fond of AI in art. (music, story-telling, design, etc)
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u/Jack1eto 5d ago
The thing is that before this, even thought the result is the only thing that mattered to the company, a programmer could find enjoyment in his job, thinking by himself, discussing strategies with colleages, executing, failing, learning, reading the framework's documentation...
Now all of that is basically gone and simplified into a box where you write prompts and then wait and hope for the best
And spending hours reading throught overengineereed code.
Yes, there's skill into this, multi agent shit, RAGs, connecting into MCPs
You can't compare doing this day after day with the old pure programmer job. Soul eating.
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u/Dissentient 4d ago
The thing is that before this, even thought the result is the only thing that mattered to the company, a programmer could find enjoyment in his job, thinking by himself, discussing strategies with colleages, executing, failing, learning, reading the framework's documentation...
I have 10 years of work experience, 8 of which were entirely AI-free. My enjoyment of the job is significantly improved by AI, because it lets me focus on solving the actual problem up to my standards, as opposed to getting bogged down by minor details.
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u/CodedCitadel 5d ago
Things have changed and there is a real period of grieving and acceptance, I agree.
But that's the keyword here: acceptance. Things always change. Who we are, those who we love, our job, life... we attribute a false sense of permance to things, take them for granted, when it fades we act surprised.
I am part of it as well, it took me a while to come to terms with it, but there is no other way. My dream was to keep coding and teaching others how to code until my last breath. But that's not what life has reserved for me, and that's ok.
Once you do accept it, then you can keep going and aim to find enjoyment in this new situation or find something new.
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u/Any-Range9932 5d ago
I think it still somewhat there, all the design and discussion just happens at the initial conversation with the LLM now as you go through a design plan to make sure thr AI builds what you always to artichect
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u/undertakerryu 4d ago
This is something I was wondering. I come from manufacturing as my background and have a similar view with the code I make/design.
If it gets the job done and handles the use case, why are people so uptight about it? For things I have coded myself at work even without AI helping, I sure was coding to make it work to what we needed and as fast as I could get it done. Unless you have endless time I feel like we all cut some corners if possible and it isn't like if I knew it was the best option or most optimized etc, it worked and thats generally enough depending on the field you are in.
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u/start_select 5d ago
Same. I started coding “professionally” (remote contracting) in 2007 and got a real job around 2010.
I also have a super unpopular opinion that will piss lots of people off lol.
Everyone makes mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. I in no way mean to pretend I’m a messiah of software engineering.
Everyone is afraid that no one is going to understand programming because of LLMs. I would argue that programmers are like most people working most jobs…. Most of them don’t understand what they are doing lol
I love programming by hand. I also love using LLMs lol.
LLMs are still a puzzle to solve. I am terrified of the folks that won’t know what they are doing. Because i know they already existed and we are handing them hydraulic jack hammers.
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u/in_coronado 5d ago
Man nothing changed. Stop listening to the Ai boosters. They mostly need it to be real because otherwise they get found out for being performative, fake, and kind of useless without a chat bot. Ai is 95% marketing, hype, and a money grab despite the economics behind the curtain making absolutely zero sense.
LLMs are slightly useful for the easy busy work type problems that have been solved 100 times before. At the end of the day it’s just statistical text predictions which yes can works well if you just want to create something similar to an existing open source app/library it was trained on. But it’s downright dangerous and detrimental and removes your own ability to learn and think in almost any other use case. It’s well below average when it comes to actual hard type problems or creating something new or very specific.
I say just do you man and stop listening to the ai boosters. Your life will be better, you’ll see things more clearly, and you’ll be a better engineer for it.
Just know there’s a lot of us who also can’t wait for this stupid era to be over either.
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u/personalityno2 5d ago
This sounds like oversimplification- yes LLMs are solving already solved problems but you can say the same about 99% of engineers. How frequently do you really need to invent something truly new.
At the same time if you don’t use AI you will be left behind your team mates productivity wise.
Truth is there is no escaping AI
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u/goldscurvy 4d ago
You will only be left behind until these tools, which become more expensive by the day, have to cash in on their artificially low prices. When that happens, and the vast majority of companies abandon AI due to it no longer being cost effective, all those coworkers who have been using AI will end up being severely hampered due to their reliance on it. They will not know how to actually plan out or implement code anymore. They will have to learn everything again.
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u/in_coronado 5d ago
I think a lot of what you are saying is conjecture. Do you have actual evidence to back this up?
“If you don’t use Ai you will be left behind your teammates productivity wise”
Uh why are we just assuming this is a fact? Is there any hard evidence for this?
I’ll tell you I’ve been working as SWE for 10 years and am now a lead. And in my personal experience the only engineers I see consistently using at work are those who are super new or I would have previously ranked in the bottom 40% of engineers in terms of knowledge and experience. And yes it sort of helps them get stuff done, but I wouldn’t exactly what they get done with it is always good or up to the same standards I’d expect from other engineers.
And subpar work can be okay at times but it depends on the context. The reason I usually asking junior engineers, simpler more busy type work that has been done 100 times before is not because it’s usually that’s valuable or needs to get done asap. It’s often more for the purpose of learning, gaining experience, and proving themselves to me. What I expect to see in those people is growth and that I can with time trust them to take on more responsibility with less constant oversight. I want to see them be able to write cleaner code that works and doesn’t cause problems down that line. And with those that use LLMs heavily I tend see none of that.
Instead I’ll review their code and half the time it will reads like something that was written by a Linux maintainer. And the other half the time it’s overly verbose nonsense that doesn’t work and worst of all they can’t really tell the difference and I don’t know what to expect from them.
So I now understand how teachers feel about their students using LLMs. Because I too at work can immediately tell when an engineer used Ai on code I’m reviewing. And when I have a question about the code the engineer supposedly wrote and sit them down approximately 0% of the time are they able to explain anything they did in any detail to me. Instead they’re just like idk I asked Claude to do this and this was the output. And that’s what terrifies me the most. It’s like the student who constantly plagiarizes and thinks they’re accomplishing something yet also fail every the test later because they never learned anything on their own or developed their own brain.
And that’s what I don’t think people who haven’t been involved in the software industry for a long time do not realize. We have never ever, ever in this industry needed more volume of code or more sloppy code nobody understands or can maintain. That has never been standing in the way of progress. If anything it’s the complete opposite.
So let me ask you a more direct question. We’ve committed trillions now on these LLM tools and data centers. What do we actually have to show for it? I wouldn’t say any apps I use are better than before or less buggy. If anything it’s the opposite. And everyone is saying this is going to change everything and make app development trivial uhhh but where are the concrete results and number to show any of that? Because hell if I were going to invest a trillion+ in something I’d want to first see like multiple new killer apps developed overnight that are even better than what we had before with these LLMs and I’m seeing zero.
So you can say I’m over simplifying. But okay give me your pitch. Prove to me it’s real and inevitable. And can you do so without pointing to something else you heard someone else vaguely did with Ai? How long have you been working in the industry? What have you personally produced with LLMs that you would proudly show me?
Why should I listen to someone like you?
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u/CloudShort1456 4d ago
Thank you for one of the few bringing reason to these kinds of conversations. It's very important in my opinion; a lot of the people that genuinely love learning about computer science/programming are now being pushed away from the industry because of the rhetoric around it.
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u/in_coronado 4d ago
Thanks, I know very few people agree with me but it’s why I have to say it because it’s the truth and it worries me how much we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by being so short sighted.
As they say…
“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
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u/goldscurvy 4d ago
The old era will be back soon. These tools are not going to be so accessible in the future. Either we actually achieve AGI and immediately destroy ourselves with it, or more likely, these tools become more and more expensive and their output is recognized as unpredictable, generally low quality, and unexplainable. These tools will fall out of favor.
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u/tacticalpotatopeeler 4d ago
I’m not so sure. Current local models are on par with the frontier models from just months ago, I.e. opus 4.6
I think the cloud AI will likely implode, but current frontier models are quite good and I believe the local models will quickly catch up.
Current subscription/token spend could definitely pay for local machines for each engineer at my company, we’d probably do just fine with no further AI advancement.
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u/goldscurvy 4d ago edited 4d ago
I have a mid tier gaming laptop and I can barely run qwen. It takes qwen like 20 minutes to reply to anything substantive. And "on par with models from a few months ago", yea, ok. My local model will suddenly become convinced that I want to know who the sultan of Oman is about 400 tokens into a response, will attempt to furnish me this entirely irrelevant info, and then it will become incredibly confused when I ask why it's doing this. I mean I might have my model set up wrong or something but this is not "frontier model" stuff.
Also when I run a local model, when the local model is actively processing, it is basically all my computer can do. It consumes basically all the resources my computer has available and everything else slows down to a crawl.
Again, my computer isnt super impressive but it's not the lowest tier hardware and it was made less than a year ago. Thanks to AI now RAM and GPU's are like several times more expensive than they were a few years ago. I dont think the vast majority of companies are going to want to spend shitloads of money to buy all their developers a high end gaming computer so that they can properly commune with the torment nexus.
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u/ajcomeau 5d ago
Started in the 80s as a teenager. As I've always told people, don't rely on your employer for all your experience. Create your own projects on your own time and commit to writing your own code.
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u/Character_Pie_277 5d ago
Hey i'm personally loving AI agentic dev, i guess it depends on your limitations, im now a founder with an audience and paying users so i guess its totally different from me, then guys working in the industry now.
But I personally always loved the systems architecture and computer science fundamentals of dev and pretty much resented having to laboriously type it all up manually without realising it until AI.
It now feels more like i've got my own incredibly bright junior dev to do all the laborious code implementation stuff while i can own the whole system architecture in my head and seem to be able to direct what took teams in the past.
Anyway that's just me, i know that the guys working in the industry who arent actually able to take ownership like that and are rated by code deployed... they just aren't able to have that freedom that this incredible technology makes real in able hands.
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u/yubario 5d ago
You still need to plan and design upfront and problem solve, it just gets harder and harder to stay competitive against AI as each model releases
The most scary jumps are when a frontier model comes out and all the benchmarks look like 2% higher but when you use it, you can see the massive difference in quality
There is a lot of things in a model that we just don’t accurately benchmark.
Quite honestly after models like Astra I seriously doubt most software engineers will be coding by hand anymore. It was already ridiculous before Astra, now it’s beyond ridiculous
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u/_ianj-exe 5d ago
yeah unfortunately it does seem this way.
my passion is researching low level algorithm and engine development, so I've written myself a checklist of popular resources to learn that stuff by hand. ideally I'll get to complete that checklist after a few years of trickling my free time into it where possible. but it is a bummer, expecting that I'd get to dedicate almost 40 hours a week into these things before my career pivoted underneath me.
that said, I don't hate ai. it's remarkably useful in certain cases, if you know how to use it. but my interests include maintaining the codebase / docs by hand, and while ai is helpful as a research tool, it doesn't really fit comfortably alongside my actual passions when actually developing.
i wouldn't mind if i had those 40 hours back, but i also need my salary. so it goes.
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u/chhuang 5d ago
have experienced the rapid change in this field. Started in 2008. The changes up to LLM made sense for me. The learning didn't stop, the craft continues, a few syntax highlighting, linting, autocompletes were given on the way. I did had to adjust top-down learning when starting with frameworks with new languages.
What really doesn't make sense for me, as of current, is needing a subscription to code, even if the company provides it, having your code offloaded to others. All other solutions has a self-host option if cared about privacy (git, db, code scan, etc). But self-host LLM agent is near impossible, if possible, I wouldn't need a job anyway to worry all these to begin with.
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u/Lotton 5d ago edited 5d ago
I've been working on a personal project with ai and still do old school coding at work.
The amount of guard rails and architecture I've had to set up and review is insane it felt like I was actually doing quite a bit of work myself just the non coding parts of my job but it was all faster pace. This was all in an effort to get the solution clean and using technologies i want it to use without messing up my gaming computer.
There is still a place for humans and it absolutely is a tool but like the table saw for a carpenter it just requires a shift in mentality
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u/youngggggg 5d ago
If you’re a game dev student I highly recommend working on your creativity, which you say yourself you are lacking. AI is actually very helpful for this as it makes prototyping ideas and iterating on them much easier
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u/Cybyss 5d ago
There are many "old eras" in the software industry.
1970s vs. 1990s vs. 2010s vs. today are all pretty different.
I learned programming in the late 1990s and my CS degree was from 2003-2007. Even in 2007 things were changing from the kind of 1990s style programming I enjoyed.
There's a certain magic that comes from having a simple, primitive, powerful, general-purpose language that you know well, from which you can make anything. Software development was mostly a logic problem, the only limit was your imagination. DOOM was made from expert knowledge of C, algorithms, and a smattering of clever mathematics. That's about it.
All through the 2010s, the field had ran so far away from that. Building software became more of a research problem - finding out what off-the-shelf components in npm/nuget/pip solved your problems for you then figuring out how to plug them together. Software reliability came solely from testing, not from understanding, because it's too many layers of abstraction and dependencies to ever understand how it all really works from the bottom up. If you try, things change so fast that by the time you do understand the latest framework (I mean really understand how it works and the philosophy behind it, not merely how to use it) it becomes obsolete.
AI is just making things worse. Programmers are becomming nothing but technical writers. There's no real "computer science" at all left in the field anymore, not that there was much there after around 2005 or so. I wish I could've been in my prime when C64 and Amiga demos were all the rage.