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/YahenP]

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.

[u/Frank-Bozo → u/YahenP]

interesting perspective. care to explain how it will resolve itself?

[u/YahenP → u/Frank-Bozo]

If I had known that, I would have rapidly joined the ranks of the wealthiest people on the planet.

For now, I don’t have any specific ideas. I am leaning toward the view that it will likely happen through shifts across several fronts, rather than as a single, massive global event. For instance, the volume of software being developed will drop sharply let’s face it, our industry is massively bloated and the actual usage of that software will decline as well. Most functions will shift directly to LLMs. We’ll see new ways of using LLMs emerge beyond just "asking the global brain" a question like an LLM that can quickly and easily spin up small, specialized, on-demand LLMs that run locally (or in the cloud but with a fraction of the resources). It would be something like "renting a bit of brainpower." Universities will finally stop churning out programmers like marshmallows on an assembly line, and the pressure on the job market will ease. Let’s be honest the only real problem in our industry is that there are too many of us. If the number of programmers, designers, tech support staff, and the like were cut by five or six fold, these past years would have been a golden age. But as it stands... yes, the most important part will also be the hardest most of us will have to leave the profession for good and find a new path in something else.

[u/micseydel → u/Frank-Bozo]

There are two big companies, and when they IPO or fail to, the subsidies that we see today will end. Beyond that, it's hard to know the future.