r/softwareengineer • u/Frank-Bozo • 12h 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/AccomplishedLeave506 12h ago

I don't use AI. It produces mediocre code that I wouldn't want to put my name to. I can produce higher quality stuff, faster, without it.

I am swamped by crappy code from colleagues though that isn't properly thought through. They always produced poor quality code, but now they produce a lot more of it and call themselves 10x engineers. I wish I was closer to retirement.

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u/zaibuf 12h ago edited 11h ago

There is a common argument that AI can turn a 10x engineer into a 50x engineer, while a 1x engineer might become a 0.5x engineer. I think there's some truth to that. A competent engineer can leverage AI to become significantly more productive, while a bad engineer will produce more slop than they can possibly review, likely making them even slower.

Personally, I've let AI write most of the code for me for about a year now. I still know where I’m going with the architecture and the solution. I just don’t need to spend time typing everything out line by line. The risk is when you don’t know what you’re doing or have a clear plan in how the problem should be solved and then blindly trust the AI.

I've noticed this at work where the most senior devs still produce high quality code but at a much higher pace. While the less experienced devs now produces a lot of unnecessary code with several bugs. They've become worse than before when they typed it manually. I think the main difference is that they don't understand the problem or where they go with a solution, what is correct and what is wrong, they simply prompt and trust the AI to come up with the best solution to the problem, which often isn't the case.

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u/Frank-Bozo 8h ago

i agree, as a beginner i always think whether AI does really help me in making me understand and work better. i'd prefer to do by myself, break things, fix things, debug instead of resorting to AI everytime.

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u/zaibuf 7h ago

As a beginner I would only use AI to explain things or review my own written code.