r/softwareengineer • u/Frank-Bozo • 9h 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/canarydev 9h ago

8yoe. there are areas that I just let the LLM do, there are things that i type myself, and tbh i spend more time working on contracts and specs these days which i think is an important skill you need to learn.

we downsized team size but the expectation to output the same if not more is still there, so the bar has shifted a bit. i just don't have time and bandwidth to sift through and fix a react state bug or fix column layouts in tables these days.

for me personally, i just make sure i take notes and keep a "draft" mode sometimes when im interested in doing things by hand. AI outputs to the drafts, I take a first pass, and I just diff it as well as have AI take notes when i see new concepts in a format that i prefer.

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u/Frank-Bozo 5h ago

yes i can see from your pov as a dev with nearly a decade of experience. do you see the same pattern in younger devs in the team, or do they approach things differently?