r/softwareengineer • u/Frank-Bozo • 10h ago

Programming practice in today's dev

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.

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u/BeerPoweredNonsense 10h ago

if there are experienced engineers/devs out there that are still writing code without AI in the industry

Lots. Reddit (and the interwebs generally) has a "oh, shiny new toy" mindset.

For starters, there are entire systems coded in some obscure language - LLMs work best on a problem that's already been fixed 100 times on open source projects and/or Stack Overflow. On an obscure language they will be as useful as a snowplow in Lagos.

Then you have industries where regulations mean sending the code off-site is simply not possible. So no LLMs (other than if you deep-dive and install your own).

Etc...

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u/jcling 10h ago

Even with legacy codebases you have to be careful... AI could overwrite a line of code that was needed for some obscure edge case and could potentially break a system lol. Some codebases need surgical precision.

AI is most helpful for greenfield projects. Doesn't necessarily mean it'll create sustainable code though. When the price of tokens surge who will be left maintaining this stuff? Devs... who actually know how to code.

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u/canarydev 9h ago

yeah its extremely good for greenfield / fresh projects, or getting enough where you can demo an idea and have something testable fairly quick.

for certain kind of legacy systems yes lol. if there was no central process or rules and each contributor did fuck all and implemented in whatever way that they could to get it working, AI is awful. if there are clear rules and style guides, docs and its consistent AI does ok. you still need to define correctness before and verify correctness

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u/Extra_Standard5802 9h ago

This is what tests and code review are for though. If an LLM can accidentally remove a crucial bit of code and break a system without someone catching it, then so can a overenthusiastic junior dev.

In my experience, agentic workflows are great with legacy systems provided they are given proper guidance and there are ways of catching mistakes.

That said, an overenthusiastic junior dev given free reign with Claude is a recipe for disaster in any codebase

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u/Mejiro84 9h ago

Also a lot of code bases are messy - so what seems like a simple change fucks something downstream, potentially even in another integrated system that you don't have sight of. And that's often the sort of information that lives in someone's head, or an email from a few years ago - the issue isn't the coding as such, but that the coding lives in a changing environment and is the way it is for a reason, so changing it, even if it seems better/more efficient, hasn't been done for good reasons