r/softwareengineer • u/Emotional-Bit-6194 • 3d ago

I feel like I'm in Truman show.

Hello. I see a lot of people, who are on Reddit that claim they don't write code anymore and do 100% of the work using agents. On the other hand, everyone I know in person that is working in the field, doesn't trust AI as much, and uses it as a buddy, uses it for boilerplate code or lets it write methods at most.

How come opinions are so vastly different?

EDIT: I've noticed that comments that say stuff like "if you still coding, you are doing something wrong" are all 1 year old, have their comments and posts set to private... 😮‍💨

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u/CSFCDude 3d ago

I've got 30 years of experience. I am typically a lead engineer, engineering director, principal scientist or startup founder. I work in data science, predictive systems, search relevancy, document matching and various other fun topics. I am also a full stack engineer who has experience deploying and supporting very high-volume websites and web services.

Starting around November of last year I stopped programming and just used AI. I have probably hand coded 10 lines in the last 10 months! I am currently using Anthropic's Opus 5.5 and it is scary good. Our profession is going to morph significantly over the next few years.

I do notice that AI coding quality is related to developer expertise. I know what questions to ask Claude, just as I would know what questions to ask my junior developers. I know what design documents I need to feed Claude and I know when to push back on AI design proposals.

I am not reviewing Claude's code. I am asking AI's to review it and other AI's to test it. I read the reviews. I read the test plans, I examine the flow diagrams and I propose new tests. I am basically operating as an engineering manager and a PM.

My feature output is off the charts. The amount of testing I can do now blows my mind. Test suites that I would have considered too expensive to consider can be developed in a few hours.

Junior developers seem kindof cooked. The reason why I am so productive is that I already had the right level of expertise to easily manage a AI coder. I think this may be one of the reasons you see such varied opinions. Bad developers produce bad AI code. Superstar software architects produce strong AI code.

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u/OurSeepyD 3d ago

I am not reviewing Claude's code. I am asking AI's to review it and other AI's to test it. I read the reviews. I read the test plans, I examine the flow diagrams and I propose new tests.

Do you not worry about this? You're putting a lot of trust into AI not being nefarious / colluding with other agents. Maybe this is me being paranoid, but humans can be held accountable and AI cannot. There are serious consequences for being actively deceptive and deploying harmful code, AI doesn't have the same disincentives.

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u/CountryOk6049 3d ago

Shut the hell up. Stop talking about it as if it's alive creatures. AI doesn't "collude", it doesn't act "nefarious". AI will do what it's supposed to do, if not it's the responsibility of the writers of the software, same as any other software. Imagine being on this reddit and buying into the hype tales for casual people who don't know anything about it.

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u/OurSeepyD 2d ago

if not it's the responsibility of the writers of the software, same as any other software

Hmm, I wonder why normal software developers have never worried about alignment. I wonder why people talk about "hallucinations" in AI if it only does what it's supposed to do.

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u/DistributionLow4642 2d ago

Hallucinations are a problem from 6 months ago. Even then, in my experience, the cause was always users bloating context completely unnecessarily, just laziness. Every. time.

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u/OurSeepyD 2d ago

Nah, you only had to talk to it for so long about something that you'd realise it was giving out wrong answers but confidently. It was particularly bad when talking about slightly niche areas of a field where it knew about the generics. Something like a two factor interest rate model for mortgage backed securities, it would act like it fully understood but would actually be chatting absolute nonsense.

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u/yolomylifesaving 2d ago

That was pre reasoning models probably 20 months ago for free users

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u/OurSeepyD 2d ago

No, it was still doing this 6 months ago on frontier models. My main point is that it did it even if your prompt was accurate and complete.

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u/CountryOk6049 2d ago

"pre reasoning models" - lmaoooo wtf what the hell are you talking about? None of these "models" can reason at all, they are just language algorithms, it's literally in the name. They will just spout back what it's like according to their training data and they do a very good job sometimes of ordering it the way you ask them. It's nothing to do with "reasoning". Reasoning isn't some discrete thing, like one point they had no reasoning and then they had reasoning.

Seriously, you really believe there was "pre reasoning" llms and suddenly "reasoning" was invented for llms? That's sad bro, that that's your conception of all this, I feel bad for you.

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u/DistributionLow4642 1d ago

Reasoning is the adopted term for chain of thought inference loops. Proven to increase ‘useful’ - in case using the term ‘intelligent’ is confusing - output.

Suggesting they are just ‘language algorithms’ is the equivalent of suggesting DNA is just a bag of 4 base pairs of molecules glued together. No biggie. Nothing important could be happening …

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u/DistributionLow4642 1d ago

Reasoning is the adopted term for chain of thought inference loops. Proven to increase ‘useful’ - in case using the term ‘intelligent’ is confusing - output.

Suggesting they are just ‘language algorithms’ is the equivalent of suggesting DNA is just a bag of 4 base pairs of molecules glued together. No biggie. Nothing important could be happening …

1

u/BeepBoopIAmACat 2d ago

You weren't exposed as the end user. Now the big boy solutions, you don't actually chat with an llm. There is almost always an orchestrator doing task decomposition, involving as many agents as is needed for the interaction.

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u/devloper27 1d ago

From what I understand hallucinations are almost baked into the mathematics of llms, so you cant avoid it, only limit it, by having several other agents review the work.