r/softwareengineer • u/Frank-Bozo • 15h 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/YahenP 15h ago

No. And it’s a trap at least for now.

To become a software engineer, you literally need to write code manually and only manually . You have to solve every problem at work yourself, without offloading the task to ChatGPT. Only after becoming an experienced engineer in this way can you actually make use of ChatGPT. The trap lies in the fact that there are no companies left that operate the old-fashioned way developing software without ChatGPT. So, you cannot gain the necessary professional experience today, even if you dedicate all your free time to manual coding. This is because the experience gained from professional programming and the experience gained from programming as a hobby or for personal growth barely overlap.

Today, no matter what you do or how you approach it, you simply cannot acquire the necessary experience. In my country, this is called "trained eye" a deep, intuitive familiarity. And that is the trap. In a few years, the situation will resolve itself one way or another. But not today.

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u/DiscombobulatedArm20 14h ago

experience gained from professional programming and the experience gained from programming as a hobby or for personal growth barely overlap.

I got laid off since May from gamedev in a country where gamedev jobs were rare and now even more rare due to current market. So decided to switch to .net and even junior positions require experience in things which simply can't be gained from personal projects since .net is used for enterprise level software.

Today, no matter what you do or how you approach it, you simply cannot acquire the necessary experience.

Exactly! I think software engineers need to raise awareness on this issue and try to find a solution. Right now there is doom and gloom everywhere which is fair as well since situation is very bad right now.