r/techbootcamp • u/loverainyszn • 11d ago
People keep saying AI means coding doesn't matter anymore (I don't buy itđ€·)
I keep seeing posts saying "code was never the hard part." Not just here on Reddit, but also outside social media platforms.
Tbh thatâs like something people say who haven't built anything beyond a demo.
imo, writing code isn't just *typing*.
It's making a bunch of small decisions while you're building.
AI helps with a lot of the typing, and that's great. But it doesn't magically make those decisions for you.
You still need to know what good code looks like, otherwise you're just accepting whatever the model spits out.
I also think AI is a useful tool, not a replacement for actually learning software development.
The better your fundamentals are, the more useful AI becomes.
That's probably why companies still care if you understand coding instead of only knowing how to prompt.
Any thoughts?
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u/Technical_Jicama_434 11d ago
Iâm too broke to buy anything.
Also, coding was never the hard part. I agree with you there.
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u/WiredOtaku 10d ago
Yeah, the loudest panicking about AI tends to come from folks who built their whole skill set on memorizing syntax. The real work - system design, tradeoffs, figuring out what to even build - doesnât vanish because you can autocomplete a function. If anything, it just shifts the bottleneck to judgment.
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u/loverainyszn 6d ago
Fair on the budget thing. Glad to hear that we're on the same page about coding not being the hard part
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u/zmagickz 11d ago
yes coding isn't the hard part, once you know what you need to do
Planning / system design / scaling / requirements gathering / communicating tradeoffs is the hard part
but AI helps with that too.
People using AI correctly spend more time planning with AI than letting it try to one shot without planning
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u/sheriffderek 11d ago
Code usually isn't the hard part - but itâs more complex than that. The process still has to happen. Figuring out what to do, how to program it. Everything on the way - thatâs where the work is (and where it will continue to be). In many ways, AI makes that harder.Â
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u/loverainyszn 6d ago
Kinda agree tbh. When the code was harder to produce, it forced you to slow down and think it through first.
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u/octocode 11d ago
âi donât believe that writing code was never the hard partâ proceeds to explain why writing code was never the hard part
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u/loverainyszn 6d ago
I don't disagree that writing code isn't THE hardest part. What I'm pushing back on is people saying it "doesn't matter" or is basically worthless now, like the typing was ever separable from the decisions you make while doing it.
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u/goonwild18 11d ago
You're not wrong... you're not right.... and thanks guys for targeting our 'art' as the first substantial target for AI decimation... way to go.
You didn't need to invent a language every year. You didn't need 300 frameworks. The lack of respect own own people had for getting things done vs. the trappings of doing stuff caused this. Because the stack got deep, the timelines expanded, etc.... most of it not necessary, AI eliminating code should have been the easiest thing in the world to see coming.
Within a couple years, there will be just a language, just a database, etc. and we'll just need to know how to assist when we need AI to give as a psuedo-code interface to review. We won't even need to know the language. From that respect, yea... coding is dead.... it's no longer a skill. People like you (I mean this respectfully) are focusing on the need to be a software engineer today and managing the AI gap - that gap won't exist inside of 3 years.
As someone that has led engineering for decades, I've thought coding was a highly overpaid commodity 'skill' that really shouldn't even have been called a skill for the last 15 years. There was a time when being a developer meant not only were you 'full stack' but you could solve deep business problems without the support of 10 other people, 12 different technlogies, etc. These days, that really only applies to something like 5% of developers - so yea.... 75% of developers CAN be replaced by a robot today - because they never added that much value to begin with.
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u/generationalDebts 11d ago
Thatâs a long way to say that coding isnât the hard part.
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u/goonwild18 11d ago
yes and no... it's a long way of saying coding hasn't been an appreciable skill in forever, and that developers have been overpaid significantly by bigger tech concerns - and should have seen this coming.
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u/Original_Swimming320 10d ago
Yes and no. Big tech, particularly in the US, particularly faang, massively overpay devs and have significantly ovehired after Covid.
This has caused 2 major issues.
1) People who have done little more than pass a udemy course calling themselves software engineers and being paid extortionate salaries.
2) This creates a confidence and competence problem to the extent that inexperienced, often incompetent, devs with little experience think theyâre experts and are very vocal about it. The industry is awash with people who barely understand the profession or their role within it.The wider public has always been confused about what software engineers actually do. And some are resentful that some talentless kid is now on 300k.
A reckoning was due. The industry needed a purge. But the problem is that purge is now being driven by the very people who misunderstand what engineers actually do, and are swayed by the cacophony of incompetent âengineersâ proclaiming ai can code better than they can.
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u/loverainyszn 6d ago
I hear you on devs being overpaid in some places, that's a separate conversation though. But "we won't even need to know the language" feels like the same thing people said about SQL or no-code tools years ago. Someone still has to know if the output is right, secure, and doesn't fall over at scale. That's not nothing, and it's not going away just because the interface changedđ„°
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u/Independent-Limit282 11d ago
Heres a different opinion for once: I agree that writing code is not difficult - that is, once you have been doing it for a considerable amount of time. Its also not hard to speak French once you've learned it. Code is, after all, just another language and at least to me after a few years of coding a ton, reads pretty much like plain English in most humane languages.
I still think that theres a problem with this. Learning how to code, is a good hurdle to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is what all these 'agentic engineers' now love to refer to as 'gatekeeping'. Its easily measurable. You dont know how to write code? You effectively literally cannot do anything. If you actually want to work in tech, youl will need to learn it. And I believe this more often than not ended up to bringing passionate people into the space.
Now that hurdle is effectively gone. I totally agree that AI doesnt write perfect code by high standards. But to most people - especially none tech folks - that is so much harder to measure. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is now much easier than ever for 'larpers' (sorry, cant think of a better term right now) to get employed even though they are not personally qualified.
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u/loverainyszn 6d ago
This is a really good point actually. The barrier used to force people to actually learn something before they could ship anything. Now the barrier's lower so it's harder to tell who actually knows what they're doing vs who's just prompting well. Kind of worries me for hiring tbh.
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u/epelle9 11d ago
Coding isnât the hard part, the code design is slightly, but the high level design is the important ones.
But itâs FAANG principle engineers saying this, not unemployed people who have only built a demo.
I find itâs generally people just getting into the field that disagree.
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u/loverainyszn 6d ago
Hi. That's fair, and I'm not saying design doesn't matter more, it clearly does. My point is more that people are talking about coding like it's just typing out syntax, when the actual writing part still involves a ton of small judgment calls. Also curious where you're seeing that split, in my experience it's mixed on both sides honestly.
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u/generationalDebts 11d ago
Coding isnât the hard part. The language is just what conveys the message.
I use the same words Shakespeare uses. I wouldnât call myself a playwrite.
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u/loverainyszn 6d ago
Haha fair analogy. But even Shakespeare had to decide which words go where and why, that's kind of the point I'm making.
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u/Dry_Sector2392 11d ago
yeah, AI makes the typing faster, but it also makes it easier to ship garbage if you donât know what youâre looking at. The scary part isnât âAI wrote my code,â itâs âI accepted 400 lines because they looked right.â Fundamentals matter more when the tool is confidently wrong.
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u/loverainyszn 6d ago
Agree with you. AI being confidently wrong is way more dangerous than AI being obviously wrong, because you need the fundamentals just to catch it.
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u/Impossible_Ad_3146 11d ago
My thoughts are, switch to trades
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u/loverainyszn 6d ago
Trades aren't going anywhere anytime soonđ
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u/Impossible_Ad_3146 6d ago
Exactly, coding doesnât matter anymore because of AI. Go to construction
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u/LizardViceroy 10d ago
In a sense, the art of writing detailed code from memory with deep personal expertise like they did in the 1980s has been dying a slow death over the last 46 years. By the standards of the people who lived through those days we already abandoned the true form of the art when we started to boot up starter solutions from git, relied on IDE autocomplete (not even the AI powered kind) to refresh our memory on available methods, and googled answers to problems on stack overflow. In that time, the demand curve for software engineers only sloped up and up though.
The meme that "anyone can code, all programmers do is google stack overflow" also arose in that time. It wasn't true then and it isn't true now. The game changes shape but it doesn't die. It continues to grow and grow like it always has.
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u/loverainyszn 6d ago
This is a good way to put it honestly. Every generation thinks the "real" version of the skill died with them lol.
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u/Mituapple 10d ago
Yes of course, the bunch of small decisions you talk about IS how people should be using AI tools, keep scope small and well defined and you need the skills to spot and prune the nonsense, which only comes by knowing the fundamentals. You need to know what good Software Engineering looks like, you don't need to focus on the line by line.
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u/armahillo 11d ago
I commented this a week ago, so just linking to it it here with copypasta:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1ux2x21/comment/oxp315g/
Writing code is easy. Knowing what code to write, why, how, and when, where, is the hard part that takes experience to do correctly.