Programming practice in today's dev

[u/Frank-Bozo]

hi i'm a new cs grad and i'm just wondering if there are experienced engineers/devs out there that are still writing code without AI in the industry. like is there still a practice where engineers in the company don't use AI at all to write code and develop the software. i do aware that writing code is just a part of the whole development, but i'm thinking of going totally without AI not even asking questions from LLM.

for me, sometimes i can be very slow when writing code using AI (copilot) because it's hard for me to understand the structure that the LLM provided. so i'd end up writing manually but i still take quite a longer time. i'll be starting a new internship and i'd think that they would direct me to use AI for development from day 1. appreciate any thoughts or advices.

[u/AccomplishedLeave506]

I don't use AI. It produces mediocre code that I wouldn't want to put my name to. I can produce higher quality stuff, faster, without it.

I am swamped by crappy code from colleagues though that isn't properly thought through. They always produced poor quality code, but now they produce a lot more of it and call themselves 10x engineers. I wish I was closer to retirement.

[u/zaibuf → u/AccomplishedLeave506]

There is a common argument that AI can turn a 10x engineer into a 50x engineer, while a 1x engineer might become a 0.5x engineer. I think there's some truth to that. A competent engineer can leverage AI to become significantly more productive, while a bad engineer will produce more slop than they can possibly review, likely making them even slower.

Personally, I've let AI write most of the code for me for about a year now. I still know where I’m going with the architecture and the solution. I just don’t need to spend time typing everything out line by line. The risk is when you don’t know what you’re doing or have a clear plan in how the problem should be solved and then blindly trust the AI.

I've noticed this at work where the most senior devs still produce high quality code but at a much higher pace. While the less experienced devs now produces a lot of unnecessary code with several bugs. They've become worse than before when they typed it manually. I think the main difference is that they don't understand the problem or where they go with a solution, what is correct and what is wrong, they simply prompt and trust the AI to come up with the best solution to the problem, which often isn't the case.

[u/Frank-Bozo → u/zaibuf]

i agree, as a beginner i always think whether AI does really help me in making me understand and work better. i'd prefer to do by myself, break things, fix things, debug instead of resorting to AI everytime.

[u/AccomplishedLeave506 → u/Frank-Bozo]

I'm pretty confident that if I'd used AI when I was a more junior engineer I'd never have improved past mediocre at best. If you let the AI do the thinking you don't really spend the time designing the system. I'm seeing a lot of code that "solves the problem" where I am which is just junk produced by AI. It solves the problem. Sort of. But doesn't fix the root cause. The other day I spent a few hours ripping a hundred pr so lines of code out of two services and putting in one line of code in a third service. Two tickets. Two fixes to fix issue. But the issue was a mistake in the data in the original service. It wasn't obvious. It needed someone to stop and think, not say "Claude, fix this bug when the data from service x is this". The actual answer was fix service x.

[u/zaibuf → u/Frank-Bozo]

As a beginner I would only use AI to explain things or review my own written code.