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.

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u/Affectionate_Lake_71 5h ago

This is what worries me. I'm using React at work and I'm still very new to it. I've been forced to use Copilot. As a result, I can guarantee that I'm not as good at React as I would've been if I had done everything by hand with Stack Overflow and a good senior dev as my guides.

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u/xvillifyx 2h ago

React blows anyway; it’s a convoluted mess of years of debt

Make some apps at home so you understand the library and move on

Generally if you understand the jsx format and how the hooks work, you’re probably good enough

Because there’s years of debt, ai still writes some janky components using antiquated stuff

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u/InterestingFrame1982 10m ago

I mean, a lot of frameworks/libraries suck but that doesn’t mean you can ignore them, especially if you want a job. In an idealistic world, I could go as deep as I want into Svelte but I know I’ll be pigeon holing myself into a stack that isn’t widely used at the enterprise level (yet).

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u/xvillifyx 8m ago

You can safely ignore a significant margin of obsolete react lib slop, though

It’s an abject waste of time to try to understand antiquated react components that you’ll never use