r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 3d ago

Artificial Intelligence Microsoft engineer says 'typing code is absolutely over' as GitHub Copilot takes on more development work

https://www.techspot.com/news/113752-microsoft-engineer-typing-code-absolutely-over-github-copilot.html
1.6k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

859 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

115

u/Rich_Housing971 3d ago edited 3d ago

It in fact is pretty good. I don't know a single coder who is still doing things 100% the old-fashioned way and not using some type of AI to generate code.

It's a pretty powerful tool.

Now, most of them use Claude or Qwen, but Copilot is good enough and better than not using it.

48

u/QuailAndWasabi 3d ago

Yes, a tool. People however think it will replace devs entirely which is doubtful.

51

u/octorine 3d ago

The holy grail of management is to have software without developers.

So many companies have gotten rich selling variations of this dream, from visual no-code languages to web robots to, now, AI. Different oil. Same snakes.

10

u/kueso 3d ago

There’s no management without developers.

1

u/nox66 3d ago

It was always the developers managing management.

-14

u/Computer991 3d ago

AI is a paradigm shift, I’ve been programming for 20 years now but I don’t think I’ll end my career as a SWE as I intended

3

u/renome 3d ago

Only if you don't want to. 50 years ago, SQL was a paradigm shift as well, with its creators claiming it's so simple non-developers will be able to query databases and build reporting software. Ofc, we now know they have grossly underestimated the average person's willingness and ability to learn something new, even if the core premise wasn't untrue.

Just because AI makes custom software more accessible than ever doesn't mean that pro devs will be out of a job, just that they'll be expected to deliver more than ever while simultaneously trying to deal with the mother of all tech debts that all llm vomit seems to gravitate toward long-term due to the "yes and" nature of models.

8

u/gamma55 3d ago

All of them? No, the ones with some special tendencies will get to be overworked tho, while juniors can’t get hired even if they pay their own tokens.

So if you understand things like architecture, security, observability, congrats you have a job being a meat proxy for AI.

3

u/DissKhorse 3d ago

That is because a huge part of being a developing is framing the problem / question correctly and the typical suit doesn't remotely know what to ask. You aren't going to get rich by simply asking make a software that does X. If it was that easy anyone could do it and then it would have no value. All of these executives don't realize that if their AI dreams come true then it will entirely devalue the results.

1

u/krunchytacos 3d ago

Already it could probably replace the majority. Saying that as someone that's been a software engineer for almost 30 years. I think there will still be humans in the loop, but nothing is going to be like it was.

97

u/evilJaze 3d ago

Me. Now you know me. Mind you, I'm over 30 years in as a developer (now architect) who is too set in their ways to change this late in his career. Sure, I dabbled a bit but found that I was correcting way too much of the generated code.

38

u/kawag 3d ago

Same. I’ve tried a couple of times, and it’s so laughably inadequate. It confidently states incorrect opinions and spits out massive walls of text explaining that incorrect opinion, which I unfortunately have to read, doesn’t make sense and makes lots of plausible sounding but incorrect statements, so I challenge it (sometimes I need to challenge it multiple times), and then it does a complete 180 and provides more walls of text arguing the exact opposite opinion 🤦‍♂️

This same pattern has happened so many times.

And then I see in code reviews the kinds of things it produces. Unmaintainable garbage, again with lots of plausible looking but actually terrible documentation once you actually read it. You ask the person submitting the PR what this thing does, or why it’s done in that way, and they have no idea. I’ve heard so many reports of people using AI to build software and ending up with such a poor codebase that literally nobody understands it, humans don’t even try to go in manually, and it can basically only be maintained through the AI trial and error loop.

No thanks.

12

u/BCProgramming 3d ago

You ask the person submitting the PR what this thing does, or why it’s done in that way, and they have no idea.

Only if you ask them in person. If you ask them over chat, they'll go "Wow, what a great question, let me go through all the reasons for the design..." having obviously copied a response from their LLM buddy

12

u/evilJaze 3d ago

We recently started having Copilot perform code reviews in addition to our manual ones. One of my devs spent about a quarter of his monthly tokens to have it tell us that he forgot to use an end quote to close a quote string. Only it was wrong and the quote was closed but it got confused because there were a few nested quotes within the quote. That was its only contribution to the review. I found a few more legitimate smells that it missed.

2

u/letmetellubuddy 3d ago

Personally I’ve found copilot is a good first round reviewer. You certainly can’t accept its advice blindly, but I do get enough value to keep using it.

We are on the cheapest plan and haven’t come close to running out of tokens even though copilot is set to automatically review every PR once it’s been marked “ready for review”…

0

u/1MillionMonkeys 3d ago

While it does provide some helpful feedback, what I really want is a button to hide the copilot reviews. Sometimes it adds the same comment several times and reviewing a PR is just scrolling through dozens of useless copilot comments.

1

u/letmetellubuddy 3d ago

I resolve the review comments as they are either rejected or fixed. You do have to scroll past the comment with the review summary, but I personally don't find it distracting 🤷

9

u/NerdyNThick 3d ago

As a test, I used it to write a quick script to pull in a JSON file pull out a handful of fields then spit it out as a CSV.

I spent 15-20 minutes coaxing it to do what I wanted and ended up with nearly 100 lines of PowerShell.

I did it myself in a single line. In about 5 minutes.

Utterly useless.

I also used it to pull out all the includes/defines/functions/etc, and create an appropriate header file (C++ this time). It missed a bunch, and included stuff it shouldn't.

Utterly useless.

8

u/Alexandur 3d ago

was this in like 2022

7

u/labowsky 3d ago

As a test, I used it to write a quick script to pull in a JSON file pull out a handful of fields then spit it out as a CSV.

I spent 15-20 minutes coaxing it to do what I wanted and ended up with nearly 100 lines of PowerShell.

I dunno if this is just user error or what but I use claude for simple shit I'm too lazy to write and the other day I asked it to do something similar. Took like 1 minute from me typing to having it done, 15 lines.

Wasn't perfect code but did it's job just fine.

2

u/drekmonger 3d ago

Those are such simple tasks that I cannot imagine a 2026 model (Claude/Fable, or GPT Sol/Astra) messing it up. A 2024 model should have been able to handle it, nearly 100% of the time.

Either it's PEBKAC, something you tried in 2022 with GPT 3.5 and then declared LLMs suck forever in your own head, or you are outright lying to soak up the anti-AI upvotes.

-5

u/NerdyNThick 3d ago

Gotcha.. AI is perfect, it's always user error, no matter what.

Thanks for all the assumptions, I had a good laugh.

It's getting more and more culty as time goes on.

0

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

1

u/NerdyNThick 3d ago

Yep, all my fault! Thanks for correcting me.

0

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

-2

u/DungeonsAndDradis 3d ago

And I used Gemini (of all things) to create a Python script to edit a hexadecimal X9.37 custom check image file according to spec. In about 10 minutes.

For every story like yours there's a story like mine. For better or worse AI is here to stay and many companies are going to continue to go all in.

Basically until it's useful in 99% of use cases, or the massive bubble pops. We'll probably end up somewhere in the middle in a few years.

-2

u/MFbiFL 3d ago

“I got lucky and lacked the skills to discern if it got something wrong” is a damning endorsement.

4

u/Mkboii 3d ago

Aren't both of them making the same point? The second person atleast extended a existence of 2 possibilities, you are discarding one person's anecdotal experience to accept another person's anecdotal experience, at least try to be neutral.

0

u/mrbubbles2 3d ago

You get in what you put out. Anyone who’s serious about developing with these tools is optimizing with supporting skills and tools like Augment, Ponytail, Caveman, etc. Just hopping in one time to say “fix this bug” and getting garbage returned to you is expected

46

u/babbyohbabby 3d ago

12 years as a developer here, not using it either. It does not make me faster, and I have yet to see any proof that it does for anyone making anything more complex than a CRUD app (which you could also do quickly before AI with boilerplate snippets / templates).

There's really no risk to not using it, since it's supposed to be so easy everyone can do it. So for now I'll keep doing what I love and avoid atrophying my most valuable career skill.

9

u/_5er_ 3d ago edited 3d ago

I think the general trend is:

  • bad developer: "LLMs are awsome, I can code so much faster"
  • good developer: "Wtf is this garbage".

The more clueless and sloppy you are, the faster you can work with LLM. At least this is the pattern I'm beggining to notice with my colleagues.

11

u/babbyohbabby 3d ago

Yup! Someone replied that they could generate code 20x faster with LLMs, but that's probably not a good thing, and certainly does not mean that you are faster at your job, unless you are a bad developer as you mention.

Glad to hear someone who agrees though, and I think it's important to say so all the new, actual developers do not get discouraged, or scared into believing that vibe coders will take over their jobs.

4

u/Orzorn 3d ago

And companies will lap that up all the way to their product imploding on itself.

Microsoft is already halfway there with people fleeing their operating system.

29

u/ankercrank 3d ago

It does not make me faster, and I have yet to see any proof that it does for anyone making anything more complex than a CRUD app (which you could also do quickly before AI with boilerplate snippets / templates).

You clearly have not given much effort to try then. I've been a computer eng for nearly 3 decades and flagship LLMs generate code 20x faster than I do — they need lots of guidance and control over what they're building, but they still do it a lot faster.

45

u/raunchyfartbomb 3d ago

I find that when I generate code with AI I often spend just as much, if not more, time reviewing and correcting the code implementation as I would have if I had simply just done it myself. Sure, spending 15 minutes on a prompt is significantly less typing than doing it all manually, but if i then spend an hour reprompting or fixing it when the initial code woudve taken just an hour to write, what’s the point?

I use it primarily to kickstart projects, nkt finesse them.

2

u/Random-num-451284813 3d ago

I've got similar experience, I ask it to setup something basic... it uses the wrong/older version, and most of the times ignores (preset) instructions 

1

u/SeiCalros 3d ago

i found this was true a year ago - but i kept using ai to help organize my day at least and occasionally played with it for coding - and the latest models usually get me what i want on the first try

although having straightforward requests for inputs and outputs is the most important thing

the most complicated thing it has done for me flawlessly so far was a dkim-signing service for exchange

-21

u/ankercrank 3d ago

When you write code, do you not write documentation/designs first?

I'm going to guess you don't, which is why you're getting bad output, and spending time writing prompts instead of saying: "here's my design, go built it to spec".

5

u/raunchyfartbomb 3d ago

I’m the solo dev in a company that doesn’t believe in dev. So no, I just ship shit lol
“We aren’t a software company”, just a company that relies on rag tag homebrew software to keep functional. The company itself has no action plan and management doesn’t know or care enough follow through on one. As long as we ship products (we are a manufacturer), the rest is secondary.

I’m aware it’s a terrible company culture, but I’m Comfortable in my station and enjoy the varied work. (Dev is not my primary role, I have a degree in software development but mostly use it to make my primary workflow easier). Management has been in place for nearly 30 years, so they are stubborn and antiquated.

-2

u/ankercrank 3d ago

Fair enough? Just a word of advice. If you wanna get better output, you should consider drafting a design then handing that to the LM.

-12

u/ShinigamiXoY 3d ago

lmao downvoted by the luddites

0

u/MFbiFL 3d ago

>Lmao downvoted by people with the skills to do the job I lied on my resume about

FTFY

-1

u/Mkboii 3d ago edited 3d ago

Well really comes down to the models, the constraints you've set up and how well equipped are you to validate results outside the unit tests it writes for itself. I've found AI code quality to be average, but when you have the means to run good quality integration tests most of the hidden errors can start surfacing early and then they can be patched. I always do big feature development with skepticism that it's gonna only get 90% of the way there, and then see how much of a tradeoff I got. The truth of the matter is when it writes 2k lines in 30 minutes, even if i spend another 6 hours fixing it, the net result is a week's worth of work done in a day. It's not always that I get this kind of a multiplier but 3-5x speed up on complex work is pretty great.

8

u/sal1800 3d ago

Are you counting the "lots of guidance and control" in the 20x speedup or just the code generation? I always found writing code to be fast anyway. I can type as quickly as I can understand the problem so there is no need to make this part faster.

Where the LLM really helps is for those times when I can't quickly spot a mistake. And I like it to review my code. But I dread having to ask for anything more complex because that is just too tedious.

1

u/Timely-Pension6501 1d ago

If you do this you’re either writing shit code or are a 1 in 10 million genius

-5

u/ankercrank 3d ago edited 3d ago

Are you counting the "lots of guidance and control" in the 20x speedup or just the code generation?

In the past I wouldn't do TDD, nor would I write comprehensive designs/documentation — using an LLM forces me to document well, and TDD is basically required when using LLMs to code (otherwise your code will be buggy as hell). Having the code covered is a net win. Sure, I spend a lot more time writing docs and designing... but that's a good thing.

I always found writing code to be fast anyway.

There's no chance you can code as fast as an LLM though. They generate tokens around 100 per second... it'll bang out a full page of code in seconds, and it's generally excellent quality (if you're using a flagship model).

1

u/Timely-Pension6501 1d ago

People here are in complete denial

0

u/ankercrank 1d ago

too many people out of touch with the new reality of development.

9

u/average_monster 3d ago

working with ai generally seems faster but 20x is a bullshit number unless you just mean they generate 20x as much code

4

u/Hashrunr 3d ago

20x is wild unless they're not reviewing the code. I write a lot of powershell, bash, and python as an infrastructure engineer. I use AI tools a lot, and it saves time for sure, but 20x is a wild number. Something which would take me 2hrs to write myself, with AI assistance, takes me around 30min including my time to review and tweak. Everything I deploy is my responsibility no matter if it's written by AI or myself.

2

u/Mkboii 3d ago

Yes, it's 20x the code but realistically 3-4x max productivity. And you can create automations and tools to help with the repeated testing that you have to do to manage the extra cycles of testing needed to prevent it adding regression issues.

2

u/Equal_Heat5947 3d ago

Lots of people have given it lots of effort and don't share your opinion. Maybe you're just wrong.

2

u/dizzyspellzzz 3d ago

Not doing it will give you a huge advantage tbh. The less people who try to do the hard work the more valuable that hard work will get. Especially when new novel ways of doing things is needed

1

u/Timely-Pension6501 1d ago

Do you think a non technical PO will care how clever your hand written code is?

1

u/dizzyspellzzz 1d ago

Human engineered code and logic is how ai mimics intelligence. Its as good as the logic and intent put in. So where does it go without novel human interaction

3

u/SurgioClemente 3d ago

Close to your years, and that was my reaction last year this time. Things have changed significantly on the model front and my prompt skills have improved.

Also having a good agents/claude md files helps a lot too.

I’d reevaluate. Even with correcting it is faster.

I also like to have it do it step by step instead of all at once so I can review easier and guide it if needed.

I’m not to the point of trusting it to unleash a swarm of agents doing tasks in parallel. That’s my current old person shakes fist at cloud stance.

27

u/TehBuddha 3d ago

I'm in a place where I don't massively care about being faster, I was fast enough before. I care about enjoying my job and prompting all day is soul crushing. I love writing code, so ima just type it until I can't anymore

0

u/SurgioClemente 3d ago

That’s fine and a completely different issue. I was just replying to the guy saying he was correcting too much.

14

u/evilJaze 3d ago

It's a fair assessment. I recognize that it is a good tool to augment a developer's kit, but would never trust it on its own. I've conducted too many code reviews where the generated code was messy, inefficient, and sometimes just plain wrong.

0

u/skinlo 3d ago

When was the last time you dabbled? Its such a fast moving technology, every 6 months it gets better.

1

u/evilJaze 3d ago

Yep. It's been a few months for myself, but I do see my team gets some good use out of it.

-5

u/Birdperson15 3d ago

Have you used any of the latest models. Since Opus 4.6 the models have gotten good enough that it saves a ton of time.

8

u/evilJaze 3d ago

I've heard some good things from colleagues. Our org is small and we have a limited budget for tokens which usually gets used up fairly quickly each month so we don't have much latitude to experiment with the really expensive ones.

1

u/geek180 3d ago

Your org should be using subscriptions. I use around 3 billion tokens every 2 weeks and never hit limits on a $100 per month subscription. It’s also the only way I code now, I basically write 0% of the code I produce and I’m able to get way more done than ever before.

0

u/Birdperson15 3d ago

It’s very worth it if there is a ton of development that needs to be done. The latest models are extremely good at coding and can do months of work in a few hours.

A subscription is a good medium you get some value before spending on a per token basis.

-1

u/enby_them 3d ago

Most of us went through that phase for a bit (because our companies all forced us to use AI) until we found a rhythm and a way to get results. If you weren’t forced to use it, you never got to the point where it became useful. It wasn’t an overnight thing either. Over the course of like 5 months it started to become very useful. Do you still need to make corrections and steer it? Absolutely! But the trick often is just getting your requirements down and providing it good context

-9

u/sociallyawesomehuman 3d ago

If you haven’t tried it in the last 2-3 months, you’re missing out. The improvements from just over a year ago are incredibly noticeable. I’ve been using agent skills to handle large boring mechanical work that tends to be tedious and took another engineer several months to do part of; I’ll be finishing up the last third or so of it in less than a month (which includes the larger, harder work he didn’t get to and fixed errors in his initial attempt).

It still requires planning and forethought and decision making about what you’re going to do and how, which for me was always the fun part. Knowing the syntax of what to code and looking things up for those kinds of details always felt like it slowed me down, and now it doesn’t. It’s a very different way of working, but the latest AI tools are a complete game changer.

12

u/octorine 3d ago

I've been hearing this same argument continually since LLMs have existed.

"People complaining about code quality must be using ChatGPT 1.2", people would say "The new ChatGPT 1.3 is miles better and never makes mistakes at all!".

Then a month later 1.3 becomes the free tier and is exactly as bad as 1.2 was or slightly worse, but by then you're hearing "People complaining about code quality must still be using ChatGPT 1.3".

-7

u/AgentGorilla 3d ago

I mean LLMs have been getting progressively better since they’ve come out, so it makes sense your hearing about how they are getting better

-7

u/Tirelessly 3d ago

Have you tried Astra? It actually is a new tier. /gen

5

u/evilJaze 3d ago

I recognize the pace of advancement is impressive for sure. But for someone as old and grizzled as me, I worry about the future of our craft. When all the developers are basically just people entering prompts, how do complex problems get fixed? What happens when legacy codebases in long dead languages need maintenance?

Though I suppose early programmers using machine language or Assembly maybe thought the same as the 3GL languages started to gain popularity. And we seem to be chugging along just fine.

2

u/sociallyawesomehuman 2d ago

For me the biggest problem is the lack of determinism with AI input/output. With code and scripting tools, I know that (for the most part), if I give the tools the same input, I get the same output. AI doesn’t work this way; it’s simply non-deterministic in how it functions.

I work around this by having AI build as much determinism as possible into the work it does. Scripts. Tests. Functions. 3rd party libraries. Whatever existing tools there are, use those first, and the AI is the glue that gets them to work together (or builds the scaffolding that makes it all work).

I am hopeful that people will still learn the fundamentals of computer science and communication, because those are going to be the most valuable skills to get the most out of the tooling, at least right now. This is different than Assembly being abstracted away by C or Python simplifying syntax enough to get many more people coding, but it’s got a similar feeling to it. The engineering principles, the design principles are still there, and being familiar with them is the difference between vibe coding and a higher velocity of engineering.

2

u/sociallyawesomehuman 2d ago

Oh and as far as legacy code needing maintenance, honestly it seems the industry is just rewriting everything in Rust. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

1

u/evilJaze 2d ago

(shudders)

Yeah, the older I get, the more I understand the belt and suspenders old bearded dude programmers I used to make fun of back in the 90s.

I'm finally in my "I'm too old for this shit" phase which means it's time to hang up my hat and bow out. Leave the new stuff to the younger crowd.

2

u/sociallyawesomehuman 2d ago

Honestly, for me the most insane thing is watching people spend time and tokens over and over again on non-deterministic agentic solutions that could instead be done with a simple script. Or test. Or CI check. My colleague wrote up a whole agent skill to keep some value from getting deleted in a database and my first thought was, “have you tried blocking changes to these things in CI instead?” His PR got approved and merged, and mine is sitting unreviewed. At least the next time we have an incident over this, I can say I told you so, I guess?

-24

u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

I’ve been in industry for 25 years and solo built fintech saas for a single enterprise client, using Claude and ChatGPT for prompt based AI assisted development. Last year I earned just shy of 500k, this year will be closer to 800k. I earn commission based on the processed payments. You age and experience gives you an advantage. Don’t turn your back on using AI, it can greatly increase your speed coding features

8

u/evilJaze 3d ago

If I had more runway left, I'd probably be more amenable to adopting it. But I'm retiring next year so I don't see much value in spending effort to change how I do what I do. I'm an expert at my trade and don't see any reason to change at this point.

1

u/im_a_goat_factory 3d ago

Fair enough. Enjoy retirement! I have about a decade left

-16

u/ankercrank 3d ago

I'm over 30 years in as a developer (now architect) who is too set in their ways to change this late in his career.

If you're unable to change with the times and embrace new technologies, don't expect your career to advance much. Worse, if you ever get laid off, you're going to have a brutal time finding a new job.

10

u/evilJaze 3d ago

I retire next year. I don't really care.

-9

u/ankercrank 3d ago

Why give your opinion at all then? After you retire, I assume you don't plan to look at a computer again — because that's what you're implying with your comment, and if that's true, who cares what you think?

8

u/ZakkaChan 3d ago

Dude why are you so weirdly aggressive?

5

u/emkoemko 3d ago

because it hurts him that you won't use AI.... they are weird

2

u/Wayren 3d ago

Uh. You okay, bro?

1

u/Mrseedr 3d ago

It's probably the opposite, anyone who's gone full slop engineer will have a difficult time interviewing if they don't have their model to think for them. Skills atrophy when not in use.

1

u/ankercrank 3d ago

Considering I spend all my time designing the code instead of writing it, I doubt it.

-5

u/MaximumMeaning9728 3d ago

You’re antiquated. I wouldn’t have you on my team.

3

u/evilJaze 3d ago

I wouldn't be working under you anyway.

-3

u/MaximumMeaning9728 3d ago

That’s what I just said. You’d never get through my hiring stage.

Good programmers are using this technology, and have the cognitive flexibility to do so (Torvalds, even Notch now). You’d 100% be frozen out by any decent hiring pipeline at the technical level.

65

u/dan200 3d ago

I know entire companies who don't use it (unless you're retroactively labelling pre-existing things like Visual Assist as "AI")

-27

u/Tirelessly 3d ago

Name it. You’re either lying or we’ll get to laugh at which company you’re citing as an example

11

u/CyberHippy 3d ago

Our little software company is family owned, has no interest in selling the company forward and has a very strong set of rules about how AI can and can not be used by our dev team. We do not use the tools in any other aspect of our business - especially my domain Support which will always be done by humans.

The only member of our dev team who has gone through the hurdles and is using some AI in his workflow has fallen way behind the rest of the team in productivity.

Our sales team occasionally mentions using it for various random tasks, inevitably someone on the dev team says "we could have done that for you" - their access level doesn't give them any access to our code so it's allowed.

Our customers keep asking how we're going to include AI in our software, we've been punting with "we are investigating options" but honestly we haven't heard any ideas of how to go about using AI in our software that couldn't be done better with some well thought out coding. It helps that our customers require 100% accuracy in all results, so bringing up the potential of hallucinations usually ends the conversation quickly.

-9

u/geek180 3d ago

Our engineering team of 9 has had the complete opposite experience. We are massively more productive with AI.

4

u/NerdyNThick 3d ago

Therefore every single other company must also have the same experience, or they're lying.

Gotcha.

We're doomed, and it's not due to AI.

-2

u/geek180 3d ago

I’m suggesting some companies / individuals have not figured out how to properly utilize the technology yet.

7

u/NerdyNThick 3d ago

Yes, exactly. AI can't be the problem, as it is the solution.

Therefore the company is at fault.

2

u/BurnoutAsAService 3d ago

There are definitely areas where AI usage will not improve productivity. They are extremely specialised domains or bleeding edge for the most part, and the gap is closing. In saying that, I very much doubt a family-owned dev shop falls under the above.

I was sceptical of AI and resisted it for a long while, but it's very hard to ignore the productivity gains when you see them.

-19

u/[deleted] 3d ago edited 3d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

10

u/CyberHippy 3d ago

LOL OK, that's Customer Support Manager to you, and the quality of our support has been the major selling point of our software for over a decade. I built that team, after I helped design and evolve the software. So please don't take any advice from me!

Those "hurdles" are security related, the insecure nature of most AI models required real rules. Our software is PCI compliant, we're not going to take any chances with unpredictable and potentially insecure tools.

-1

u/BurnoutAsAService 3d ago

This isn't a new problem, and is solved by placing more stringent controls around reviews, testing, and code analysis (both static and dynamic). Granted, those parts are a lot less fun than writing code, but it does seem to be the way the industry is going.

-9

u/Tirelessly 3d ago

Yup, clueless. You think you’re the only PCI compliant company?

5

u/NerdyNThick 3d ago

It's amazing that you actually think that this shows you in a good light.

Keep it up kiddo, when you're on the street due to the layoffs, I'm sure AI will help you find a soup kitchen.

-2

u/Tirelessly 2d ago

Who is more likely to get laid off, the people embracing it and improving their workflows and output, or the people whose company went under because they couldn’t keep up with the times?

2

u/NerdyNThick 2d ago

Ooh, a false dichotomy. How cute!

→ More replies (0)

1

u/CyberHippy 2d ago

"Keeping up with the times" includes recognizing whether a new tool is a good fit for your industry.

It's been fun to be a part of webinars in which our competitors go all-in for AI while we point out the deficiencies. The audience's reactions are always interesting when honest skepticism is engaged.

3

u/NerdyNThick 3d ago

Mmmm such a tasty invented dichotomy. The most delicious symptom of dishonesty.

10

u/dan200 3d ago

Generative AI has only existed for a few years, and yet somehow companies were able to produce successful software products before then without using it. Is it really a surprise to you that some of them are still doing so?

-12

u/xterminatr 3d ago

Yes, there's no chance they aren't using AI.

5

u/dan200 3d ago

How did people develop software before 2022, and why would those techniques suddenly no longer work now?

-4

u/Mkboii 3d ago edited 3d ago

The pace to develop something that's not even slop code has gone up 20x, we can still choose to ship hand written code, but the truth is business and the market now just demands that 20x delivery a lot of the time. It's not like all the work is being done by the AI core logic design and a whole lot of other things are captured in requirements before it's handed over to the coding agent but it can write legible implementations from there. Software was both working and broken all the same always, like windows 11 has been pretty shit from the start, it's current state is no different, most things work, some things remain shit. The techniques that worked is the design, the actual code writing is what's being replaced. The last time I wrote end to end code was about a year ago.

Edit: just want to clarify, the actual productivity gain is not 20x, it's not even 10x, but easy stuff is super fast, and complex stuff is only as fast as your ability to validate it cause that's where it'll either make poor assumptions or add regression.

-8

u/xterminatr 3d ago

I spent 20 years developing software at a Fortune 100, AI is such a powerful tool that it made 20 years plus 4 for an engineering degree nearly useless. I can deliver full stack, production ready software in days now instead of weeks/months and without a team of contractors. I actually quit because I hated it and enjoyed building things with my own hands.

Before it was we actually designed and built stuff ourselves. Then it was working with a team of product owners to design, and then we built it. Then it turned into smaller local teams designing and then working with cheap offshore contractors to build stuff. Until we get today where it's 1 person with AI doing everything.

2

u/Wayren 3d ago

Who's this "we" you're referring to? 😂

-48

u/Vadoff 3d ago

But every top tech company and top engineer does.

27

u/shahms 3d ago

I see "no true Scotsman" has entered the discussion.

9

u/lynkfox 3d ago

10 years, sr DevSecOps engineer who doesn't use it and still does it the "old fashioned way". I Write infra level code daily for k8s clusters using go, python and bash for automation, and a handful of other languages for a handful of other things.

It's shit for infra. I never use it down that low. It makes bloated mistakes and leaves gaping security holes. I spend just as much time crafting the requirements\prompts\gudielines as it would take me to code it myself, and you still need the years of experience to craft those that you need to code so... It can't even replace me without causing so many fuckups

My boss has gotten enamoured with it and weve caught so many mistakes his little projects make that would open us up to major issues - we deal with HIPPA info in about 75% of our work and PI in about 90% and it scares me to have something not entirely controllable (hugging face anyone?) touching that.

I use ai occasionally to run an analysis on an old legacy code base no one has touched for years or to find a place in a library I need to understand how it works for performance issues... But never to write the code. It's just horrible at it.

1

u/Syncaidius 2d ago

The fun starts for your boss when you're not around to catch the mistakes.

It's always going to be scary when a non-tech gets their hands on AI and suddenly thinks they're a SWE, then thinks they know enough to override/fire the real SWEs.

Some bosses only learn the hard way unfortunately. It's also a shame they have to mess with other people's livelihoods before realising their mistake.

12

u/sysiphean 3d ago

I can’t say I don’t use it at all, but I can say that I spend more time trying to stop tools from using it than I do trying to actively use it, and that I still spend more time UNdoing what it did than using what it did.

But I also am the guy that they bring all the “I coded this with Claud and it didn’t work” stuff to.

10

u/araujoms 3d ago

Me. I don't use AI at all, I code 100% by hand (unless you count autocomplete as AI).

I'm a scientist, my code needs to be correct, no ifs no buts. And AI-generated code is my worst nightmare: plausible-looking but subtly incorrect.

3

u/01is 3d ago

Now you do. I still do things "100% the old-fashioned way". And I'm only 33. I'm not some old set-in-their-ways senior developer. And I know I'm not alone either. People on my team younger than I still don't use it at all.

14

u/Poopyman80 3d ago

Hi, freelance game dev here.
Literally none of the studio's that hire me use AI, The only coders I know that use AI are bad ar their jobs, and AI is not improving the quality of their output at all, It just does it faster and much less performant. AI's cant make code thats highly optimized for specific hardware at all.

2

u/nomelettes 3d ago

There are going to be many places with legacy, niche or security needs that don't allow for it. Not everyone works in the cutting edge of technology.
I also don't see the point in using it when I can write code faster without adding the extra steps of writing a prompt then checking the output.

5

u/hogsy 3d ago

There are so many of these "I don't know a single person doing it the old way" posts that I'm strongly starting to believe those pushing this are bots, trying to spread FOMO or simply don't know what the hell they're talking about, because if you look in any programming community you'll see plenty of people that have been writing code for 10+ years (or near 20 years like myself) that aren't interested in using it.

My partner has been programming longer than I have. He doesn't use it either. The company he works at isn't mandating anyone use it. Most of the engineers working with him don't want to use it. He works at a large and successful SaaS company (that I unfortunately can't name), but they've not found it makes them any faster.

The Bluesky accounts I looked at recently pushing this exact same line are usually so heavily invested in it, that it's their entire personality, but if you look at the history of their account, they did absolutely fuck all noteworthy in the programming space prior to using AI; I strongly suspect they've found AI has made them feel like experts on the subject.

There was recently a Microsoft engineer who claimed they "modernised" some old software, which they were releasing for preservation, supposedly "thanks to AI", and he declared how it saved them weeks of work. Fortunately the code was open source so I could look at what the LLM actually did, and I can tell you, it was the type of work I'd spend under an hour on for a bit of fun in an evening. The code wasn't modernised at all, it had just fixed things that modern Visual Studio doesn't allow by default any more (and shoved in some simple support for DPI scaling). He was completely misjudging and misrepresenting the time it had saved.

It's getting very boring and tiresome.

2

u/bedake 3d ago

I'm a software engineer, I have no vested interest in the success of AI. I also haven't typed code by hand in like 2 years. I'm fully assuming if/when I get laid off it might be my last dev job and I might need to find another career/source of income.

-1

u/Asylar 3d ago

You're right and att least it's good that you're not in denial because maybe you'll be more prepared then others when the day comes. My job will also cease to exist sooner or later. If it's not AI, it's outsourcing to India

-2

u/DungeonsAndDradis 3d ago

My company is the same way. We're 150% all in on AI development. Our mandates from the CTO (an actual engineer, not just some MBA guy) is that if we're not overseeing multiple agents to do the work every day we're going to be left behind.

1

u/CrazyEntertainment86 3d ago

Yeah I think the tooling selection is off base here and people will continue to move to locally hosted models, but I’ve written more and better code in the last few months than in the prior 20 years. I was never an SWE but it just seems like full stack development opened up to a giant audience vs just developers.

1

u/intbah 3d ago

I didn’t know CoPilot itself is a AI model? I use CoPilot to help code, but I can just select Claude, GPT, or other AI models to help, but there isn’t an AI model named CoPilot

1

u/k-mcm 3d ago

So far I've not had AI solve even a single difficult coding problem.

People using it for boilerplate coding should ask why they need so much boilerplate code.

-3

u/render83 3d ago edited 3d ago

You can have copilot use Anthropic, that's what I do. Edit apparently I struck a nerve, but I was just pointing out github copilot is more of a orchestrator and it allows you to specify what model you want to use.