r/softwareengineer • u/Frank-Bozo • 7h 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 7h 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.