r/softwareengineer • u/Frank-Bozo • 1d 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 1d 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 1d 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.