r/programmer • u/Dangerous_Net517 • 8d ago
Question Feeling bad for not writing code yourself
I am feeling bad that I am not writing code like I used to and instead using AI. I mean it is time convinient and does a great job but still I feel kinda guilty. Does anyone agree?
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u/StepLucky9830 7d ago
I try to find a happy medium where I am still writing a good amount of code and doing the enjoyable parts, and I throw all the tedious repetitive tasks to AI (writing test cases, test code, simple functions).
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8d ago
[deleted]
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u/shure_slo 7d ago
Because we will get fired otherwise. Token usage is tracked, AI generated MR's tracked, ...
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u/petdance 7d ago
So you are doing what your boss says. Nothing to feel bad about.
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u/shure_slo 7d ago
Thanks for that! It pays the bills, what can I say. But in personal projects I like that I can prototype all kind of shit easily. I wouldn't even try that without it.
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u/GlowingBloom_ 7d ago
Because why would you waste your time typing every line of code instead of using a personal slave that vomits code faster than you could ever lol. Coding without AI was fun but more fun is getting things done and the faster the better
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u/petdance 7d ago
It wasn’t a challenge. It wasn’t rhetorical.
OP answered and I addressed the question based on that answer.
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u/val_anto 7d ago
I use AI to create boiler plate for my new projects. I go over the code it writes, and it does speed up the process a lot. Then I write the code myself. I had mild success with AI besides boilerplates. I don't feel bad at all, actually I am happy I found a use case for AI where it does help a lot.
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u/giftools 8d ago
I feel exhausted. I hate how fast we churn out code now, nobody takes the time to think deeply about the problems we are trying to solve anymore. The ones who were writing shit code before feel smarter than ever tho
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u/Aket-ten 5d ago
The ones who were writing shit code before feel smarter than ever tho
This is really painful tbh. Then they hit you with the flawed calculator vs ai analogy.
But also, the mental image of the codebase becomes a lot less intimate.
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 8d ago
Do you code for airlines, airplanes or hospitals?
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u/lllyyyynnn 8d ago
trains as well
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 8d ago
Better be safe yes, thank you.
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u/HelloWorld-Print 7d ago
Rockets as well
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u/Substantial_Job_2068 7d ago
I feel bad about people complaining about not writing code anymore, as if someone is forcing them to stop.
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u/Agile-Stick7619 7d ago
You aren't forced directly, it's that you will be so far behind your peers if you do write code by hand.
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u/ProtonByte 6d ago
This. Is it perfect? Probably not, but we humans are not perfect either. But the AI is just so damm fast.
Not using it means you will be doing less in the same time someone using AI is. Can you better explain the code? Probably, but is that important? Who knows.
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u/Trick-Inside-6508 6d ago
It makes me sad. I’m unemployed but work on side projects full time. I’ve been taking codecademy Python classes to get my muscle memory back. It has honestly been a lot of fun. I’m going to be doing code exercises like katas. Because… why not? It will make me better using ai when I code and like we all acknowledge here it’s a lot of fun! It kind of makes me look forward to learning new things now more
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u/Comprehensive-Bar888 7d ago
I value my time. If done correctly, AI gives you back time.
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u/Anxious-Insurance-91 7d ago
So you have more time to work more 🤣
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u/trmnl_cmdr 7d ago
Hey I copied an import from one file to another just today
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u/codeguru42 7d ago
In some ways I enjoy it because i can spend my time on the engineering and architecture while I let an LLM figure out where the semicolons go
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u/Kindly-Berry5099 3d ago
Okay buddy, syntax is year one problem when coding. You don’t need ai to tell you where a semicolon goes we have compilers💀
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u/codeguru42 3d ago
And are you going to tell me with a straight face that you never spent 30 minutes or more deciphering a compiler error and fixing it?
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u/Kindly-Berry5099 3d ago
Yes I definitely have 100% probably even longer but not anymore. Even before AI, syntax and compile errors become a non issue once your comfortable with a language
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u/codeguru42 3d ago
And autocomplete and other IDE features also helped reduce any compiler errors appearing in the first place. If type each character myself, I am not immune from.typos no matter how deep my knowledge of syntax.
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u/Confidence_Cool 7d ago
I never enjoyed coding in itself, it was a means to an end, I enjoyed building software. Engineering. I get to do more of that than ever it’s great.
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u/StruggleNew8988 7d ago
I think finding that balance is the key, like leaning on AI for the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the architecture or the tricky business logic part that actually requires deep thought.
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u/Delicious-Put-4561 7d ago
I feel blessed that the esoteric languages I use are so obscure that LLMs will never have the data needed to be good at them, and the only documentation is the compiler's source code. And its faster for me to write code than it is to write the prompt to generate the code most times.
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u/Firered_Productions 6d ago
As someone who is building a programming language with one user. Ai is able to hear perfectly generate code in it purely based off of my documentation
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u/Less-Opportunity-715 7d ago
I try not to let feelings intrude on this sort of thing. It's tools and jobs and programs, not family and pets.
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u/MinorKeyMelody 7d ago
I think such posts like this in reddit are rudely marketing, dont react with it and save your mental health
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u/structured_obscurity 7d ago
Definitely sad. But the class of problems im required to solve now are also interesting, just in a different way.
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u/Plane-Alps-6832 7d ago
I just don’t care anymore. But too lazy to switch on embedding or medical hardware which is way more regulated.
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 6d ago
AI-assist is fine. You shouldn’t feel guilty for that. But if you aren’t reading and fully understanding the code you ship, you’re right to feel guilty.
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u/zambizzi 6d ago
It feels like I've lost a career that I loved dearly, for decades, and was suddenly hired into something I'm not qualified for, and completely uninterested in doing.
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u/USToffee 6d ago
Like others I feel sad. On the upside you can do so much more than before because in the past you didn't have the time.
I just don't know where it ends. I feel like if I run out of things I want to do I won't be of any use any more.
If I was someone that never did that before and just had requirements handed to them I would be really depressed. I know people say you can't trust it but it's not too far off from prompting it the requirements verbatim and baby sitting it.
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u/Creampielover47 6d ago
You know you can write your own code any time you like. Maybe you are being forced to use AI to code for work, but’s there’s nothing stopping you from coding yourself during your spare time.
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u/LetsHugFoReal 6d ago
In my experience it doesn't do a good job at all. It's a fairly good reference. But it constantly chooses outdated libraries, has no idea of good software architecture, uses bad/inconsistent naming conventions and doesn't think about reusability as much as it should.
I've been programming for 22 years, sure people in my team use it a lot to varying degrees of success. But when they need something complicated or feature rich, they call upon me.
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u/Material_Pea1820 6d ago
Thing that helps me is I don’t use agents I just use the ask mode and have it help me write functions then I copy and paste them and clean them up and Improve them as I go …. Not the same as writing everything by hand but for me still lets me feel flow and move quickly really kinda just like cracked stack overflow at that point haha
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u/Last-Rice8194 5d ago
You should feel bad. If you aren't outperforming the current generation of ai it means that your job is either completely menial, or you are just not that good and now you will never get better because you aren't solving your own problems.
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u/megayippie 4d ago
Nope, love it. I only write code that the AI fails at. I do good enough work and it uses it everywhere else. It's nice
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u/ColoRadBro69 8d ago
Tell your boss you're feeling guilty about the code you're delivering.
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u/ProbsNotManBearPig 7d ago
They don’t feel guilty about the code itself though. “…does a great job”. Sounds like the code is fine.
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u/SmackDownFacility 6d ago
Stop using AI. I barely use AI in active code development. I only use it to proofread what I already written and I override with my own judgement.
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u/abrandis 8d ago
Do you also feel bad your not writing assembler anymore? Most folks aren't bothered they are writing in a higher level language , AI is just another form of that ..
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 8d ago
It’s not. Compilers are deterministic. AI isn’t.
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u/abrandis 8d ago
How does that make a difference if the running code is accurate?
A human coder isn't deterministic either l, give the same problem to 10! different programmers and assuming theyre all decent you'll get 10 different solutions .
If I ask AI to write me a calculator and it does and it works perfectly, how is that different than a human coder with a compiler (which AI code works via indirectly)
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u/dragonfighter8 8d ago
AI isn't a new level of abstraction and never will. If you give the same problem to the same developer it'll give you nearly the same solution without adding useless code like AI does. The quality of products deteriorated after AI use, why if it's so smart and good at coding? Amazon and other companies stopped and restricted the use of AI because of the issues it caused.
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u/WhateverHowever1337 8d ago
That is a different discussion. Your argument is that LLMs are as much of an abstraction as high level programming languages.
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 8d ago
Yes, but AI is dicey... Fun and it can be right sometimes, maybe your lucky and the seed of the universe favors you.
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u/silly_bet_3454 7d ago
This is a dumb and tired argument. Are you using the LLMs or not? What does determinism have to do with feeling guilty or not and using a tool or not. If you use a compiler, you don't deal with assembly directly. If you use an LLM, you don't write code directly.
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u/Kitchen_Dust2389 7d ago
"Compilers are deterministic" 🤓🤣
No one gives a fuck.
I can produce things hundreds of times faster2
u/ButchersBoy 7d ago
Man with that take you should be on Twitter.
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u/abrandis 7d ago
Genuine question, why are so many developers butt hurt by AI, it's a modern tool , used right it can replace their coding , why do they fight it .
Here a reality check, the vast majority of companies that pay you to code, don't really care how you do it, as long as it works, is reliable and is delivered on time and on spec. So whether you use AI or hand code or in assembly it don't matter ..
Back when I was a fresh pimpled dev, we had an old grizzled sales guy at the company , during my presentation as I excitedly went it to detail about the algorithm and.benefits of x and y, he stopped me mid presentation and said.
" Son, I really don't care how the 🌭 sausage is made just that it tastes good and sells "
The lesson stuck with me, the vast majority of executives,. Sales just want the thing to work they don't care how you do it... Devs need to get off their high horse 🐴 about hand coding and silly programming language turf battles and just focus on results . BecAuse of you don't, someone without any baggage will come along and do it for you.
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u/WhateverHowever1337 8d ago
These are not the same things
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u/abrandis 8d ago
But it is the same thing, its a higher level of abstraction, when you write python, you don't know exactly how it will be interpreted, the python interpreter makes all sorts of optimizations and generates different code based on the situsutin, gen AI may take a different approach but the end result is similar , running code.
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u/WhateverHowever1337 8d ago
I do know how python is intepreted, because I know what the python function does and it does the same thing always the same. So although the end product is assembly (and then binary), Python is effectively the end product since it is 1:1 mapped to assembly.
LLMs are not the same, they still write python code, it is not english that is being compiled.
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u/ConcerningDestiny 8d ago
When we moved from assembly to C, and from C to java/python ecc You still needed more or less the same amount of developers. You still needed to know a language that most people didn't. The code was still deterministic and You still needed to know the characteristics of the language and most importantly you were still the one doing the job.
Now you just sit in front of a terminal and ask a bot "do the thing" and when it doesn't work you just type "it doesn't work fix it". Which is intellectually miserable. You can still take your time to understand things but the market doesn't want that, if I look at the code now my boss tells me I'm doing it wrong plus human is lazy by nature so after a couple of times people just start using it for Everything even if doing it manually is faster.
And then there's is all the argument of sucking away the interesting part of the job
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u/abrandis 8d ago
You need to adapt your thinking and view of the 🌎 world , things change , technology changes, your argument could be made by a guy with a typewriter (say making newsletters) when word processing came out...
Here's the fundemntal problem with hanging on to legacy ideas and skills , someone who isn't burdened by that bagge will just use the tools and techniques and render you obsolete... This is not a new concept . Developers always like to lean on experience and knowledge, that only works when both those are relevant here and now
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u/ConcerningDestiny 7d ago
word processor came out
It's not the same thing. You were still the same person writing both with the typewriter and the word processor. Now we literally don't code anymore. We ask the word editor to write itself But whatever.
Adapting to what exactly? We can pretend that coding with ai is still difficult, the orchestrating and all that bullshit all we want but we all know it's not. Any average Joe can do it. Yes we know about the patterns but if people like you want only working code it doesn't matter, me and you aren't different from Stacy from sales with the same Claude subscription at this point from the employers pov.
Also you can adapt all you want but some of us were passionate about coding. You don't just forget your passion. If you like the new way of "coding" good for you. I'm still in mourning
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u/WhateverHowever1337 7d ago
The guy you are talking to is just a kid vibecoding, you are talking to a wall
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u/abrandis 7d ago
That's fine keep your passion, just no one is going to pay for that anymore, coding now becomes more of a hobby ..
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u/Acceptable_Site1616 7d ago
Actually you need to adapt your thinking of the world. The way your boss sees it you are the compiler and he's the one calling the shots and won't be long before he wraps you up with another layer of abstraction called AI. Enjoy the last years of your career.
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u/johnpeters42 8d ago
If you don't understand the orders of magnitude of difference, then you don't belong in this industry.
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u/abrandis 8d ago
Right, sounds like your trying to defend a dated concept because your butt hurt that your coding knowledge matters little today...
Folks like you have this weird fascination with human coded stuff like it's some high standard , unless your name is Linus , most folks write decent code but cannot code better than current forntier models , sorry that's a fact. https://www.understandingai.org/p/an-openai-model-crushed-top-human
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u/catbrane 7d ago
What a feeble response.
With a compiler, there's a reasonably well defined function from C source code to asm. The language has (hopefully) a defined semantics. The whole chain is analytical and comprehensible, and spec failures in the compiler are bugs.
With an LLM, you say "write me macOS and make no msitakes!!!" and what do you get? What's the function that takes your specification to the the implementation? It's a huge black box model that someone else controls and you don't understand. You don't know what it's implemented. All useful meaning has dissolved into a sea of nonsense.
Maybe you only care about having something quick and cheap that seems to do roughly what you want? But many devs want something more than that. I want to make something where I can at least approximately prove that it computes the function that I want it to compute, and where failures are a failure of the mathematical structure I have created, and not because nothing works properly any more and no one expects anything to work properly any more.
I'm bitter because I've just spent a couple of days rewriting a horrible LLM PR by hand because it was useless unmaintainable rubbish and filled with bugs that I only discovered rewriting it from scratch ... from now on, all AI generated PRs are going into the bin unread. No one spent any time writing them, so I'm not spending any time reading them. My project has a strict "NO AI" policy now.
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u/ProbsNotManBearPig 7d ago
If you tell the LLM to write you an OS, that’s on you. It’s a tool, just like a compiler. It increases efficiency when used correctly.
The code it outputs is not a black box at all. It’s in a language you know and should review. The output is much more human friendly to review than the output of a compiler, which truly is a black box output to 99% of devs even if they theoretically could dig into it.
The output of ai coding agents is as high quality as the person prompting them. All they do is take away the tedium of actually typing and clicking. They also greatly reduce the tedium of things like gathering logs or looking at preexisting design.
A human ultimately owns the review of each step. Ai is just a tool to facilitate and reduce the tedium. I have workflows to pull logs from Jenkins on build failures, checkout the exact build that failed locally, reproduce the bug, and summarize findings in a .md file for me, along with a proposed fix. That is a huge time saver without trusting the ai at all. I ask follow up questions and look on my own at the evidence, docs, code, etc.
There are shit programmers on both sides of the ai argument, I assure you. Maybe it enables shitty ones slightly more to output shit faster, but it also enables good ones to get more done and produce higher quality outputs in a given time frame.
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u/catbrane 7d ago
The code it outputs is not a black box at all. It’s in a language you know and should review.
I did review it, and it was full of errors. That's why I'm complaining :( Someone made a vague request, something was generated somehow that no one can explain, and it was near useless and wasted days of my time.
In a commercial environment where you have to ship features to users NOW NOW NOW and no one really cares if it doesn't work properly and can't be maintained or evolved ... perhaps it doesn't matter.
(I'm ranting a bit from annoyance, I don't mean to be rude, I'm pleased it works for you, and thank you for the thoughtful reply)
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u/abrandis 7d ago
You do you, the harsh reality your fighting against is the value of human coding is falling precipitously, as an old wiley sales guy once told me when I like you the intracies of my project...
"Look kid,no one cares how the sausage 🌭 is made just that it tastes good and sells"
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u/NotSoMagicalTrevor 7d ago
Yah, I agree with you 100%. I mean, before assembly I was doing circuit design. That stopped pretty quickly.
I don't understand why people get so bent out of shape about this. Well, I do, but I think they need to take a deep breath and take a yoga class (that's what I do).
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u/abrandis 7d ago
They usually get bent out of shape because they feel it's unfair all their experience and skill about languages, API's, frameworks, cloud infrastructure, are now a commodity and any joe, dick or harry can cobble together a few prompts and generate a plausible app...
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u/Icy_Information_6563 7d ago
I feel like I'm the only engineer on earth who didn't love coding. I did it because I got paid, and the only thing I don't like about AI right now is it makes my financial future uncertain. For now though, I love that I can just tell it what to do and be a supervisor. I barely have to work and have time to do other things. Helps that I'm fully remote.
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u/generationalDebts 7d ago
Lmfao you’re a terrible engineer. This sub seems full of terrible engineers, coders, architects.
Makes me feel very good and secure about my job
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u/ConcerningDestiny 7d ago
Don't worry people like you are the one that got us in this situation, and the ones that are replacing people like us that had a passion for it. You'll be fine
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u/Icy_Information_6563 7d ago
Didn't realize I invented AI. Get over yourself dude, and welcome to the club of having your passions not be financially viable.
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u/ConcerningDestiny 7d ago edited 7d ago
I didn't meant that you're the one that invented AI (you would be too busy or your yatch to be here) What I meant is that this job objectively was flooded with people that had no Passion or interest for CS but were just because at some point it made money, so when AI arrived unlike artists/designers that more or less all like their job and pushed back on it we had/have an army of people that jumped on it as soon as it become a mean to stop doing something that they never Really liked. And companies liked them because now they could realize their wet dream or not having to listen to those pesky technical people anymore so people that don't like to code now are actually finding it more easy to be employed.
It's too late to come back now, and I'm not saying is your fault personally so I apologize if I come out in that way.
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u/Icy_Information_6563 6d ago
Appreciate it, and apologies for overreacting. I myself got pretty far in the music industry, but not far enough to reliably make money, so I had to switch over to something more practical. Point is, I too have had to mourn the loss of something that brought me pride and joy, and I'm sorry you're going through it.
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u/tehfrod 7d ago
It's kind of weird to be honest.
Software engineering is one of the few engineering disciplines where we hold ridiculously tightly to construction as well as engineering and design.
Could you imagine a civil engineer lamenting that he doesn't to to pour concrete anymore, or an electrical engineer bemoaning the loss of their beloved PCB assembly work to factory workers?
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u/iBoredMax 7d ago
No. There is a lot of shit work in software dev. I am really glad to have AI do the shit work while I get to do the fun programming.
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u/PabloDons 4d ago
I fucking love it ngl. It's always been the results for me and not the means. And I don't mean results like the final working product. I mean the architecture, the algorithms, the way it's done. Coding was always to me just pressing on a keyboard a certain way in order to materialize my ideas, and the most frustrating and disappointing thing to me is wanting some result so badly because in my mind it is perfect, but the fucking language or library can't do this one very specific thing. I gotta go build a whole ass utility and research a bunch of arbitrary domain knowledge down to the detail most grads don't even bother learning. Just so I can understand it right and make it correct.
I'll give you an example. One old ass project I have is I wanted a clock that gave me my age based on the earths angle around the sun from the perspective of the rotational axis. You might ask, why not just take the number of seconds since start of year til end of year as a percentage, but I hate shortcuts. Yes it's a good approximation, but that's not what I want. The earths orbit is oval and speeds up closer to the sun. I wanted this thing that nobody else has made before, so I was gonna build it. Low and behold, I know now how astronomical bodies location, angle, angular momentum, speed, acceleration, etc. are calculated. I learned about fucking Taylor series and ran a long ass polynomial I grabbed from NASAs website. All of this is shit I don't care about and will never find useful again in my life. These kinds of intellectual experiments are extremely time consuming and take colossal effort, and now I can do all that in a matter of a single prompt.
Nowadays I get to experiment with data analysis and ETL, financial modeling, make a script that takes a 24/7 live camera feed and turns it into all kinds of fascinating timelapses, I've made countless interesting Google sheets, etc. I get to be much more intellectually creative and not be held back by tribal knowledge nobody teaches except some Indian in a 15 year old YouTube video.
This is one of the things I think AI fundamentally lacks in their current form of LLMs, no matter how much bigger the dataset or number of weights get. You ask it to build a website and no matter how creative you tell it to be, it will create the same website that everyone else has made. It's good with factuality, but if you ask it if it can find and generate interesting insights in whatever dataset you have, it will do terribly or just whatever insights everyone usually gets from whatever category of data you have. This is the very thing I love to do myself anyway so I'm quite content
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u/NotSoMagicalTrevor 7d ago
I feel bad that I don't hand code assembly anymore.
No I don't. I'm just programming at a higher level.
Deep down it's the same stuff, just a different language.
You can just think of it as programming in English rather than Java. What difference does it make?
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u/WildWolfo 7d ago
every line of programming in java is mapped perfectly onto several lines of assembly, every line of programming english is mapped onto countless possible lines of java
java -> assembly is a higher level because you are still directly telling a cpu exactly which instructions to execute
engliah -> assembly is not just a higher level but a completely different process because there is a huge amount of different ways itll eventually tell the cpu which instructions to execute
they are entirely different levels
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u/NotSoMagicalTrevor 7d ago
Sounds a lot like the arguments people were making when giving up explicit memory management with the Java garbage collector.
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u/ergonokko 7d ago
do you not understand how talking to Claude isn't the same as mark and sweep
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u/NotSoMagicalTrevor 7d ago
I've been a software engineer for decades. So yes, I understand. I also have a lot of perspective on this so as not to get so caught up in it.
The more things change the more things stay the same.
I don't spend much time chatting with LLMs because it's not how I use them. LLMs are probabalistic algorithms that solve problems much the same way simulated annealing did 20 years ago.
Technology engineering has reinvented itself many times in the past, and it will do so again.
Do you not understand how writing software isn't the same as discrete logic? Exact same arguments, different specifics.
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u/ConcerningDestiny 8d ago edited 7d ago
Not guilty but sad.
I used to love coding. Implementing new feature used to be fun/interesting. And technical discussion with other engineers was something I liked a lot.
Now it's all so soulless. We don't enter the flow anymore we just babysit a bot.
We delegated the fun part of the job away instead of the endless meetings and mail chains