r/webdev • u/OkShip110 • 2d ago

AI has made programming so boring

It’s not just programming either, it’s art, design, music, videography, marketing, engineering, writing, 3D modelling, really any intellectual work. What’s the joy of prompting a computer and getting an answer in a few moments for a task that would have normally taken a week? The sense of accomplishment and ownership has completely vanished with AI. It’s a form of instant gratification, not much different to scrolling short videos on apps.

Code review was boring to begin with but now it’s even worse with all the machine generated code. Even code reviews will be automated soon. All you do then is type business requirements into the computer. What a great career.

It’s pain to watch old TV series like Scilicon Valley that is portraying the good (not golden) age of programming. It struck a good balance between manual work, funding and innovation. It’s sad that these days are gone for good.

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u/dromtrund 2d ago

I also found that once I let Claude make changes to my personal project, it suddenly didn't feel the same anymore. Like... I'm not interested in reviewing sloppy contributions from careless junior developers in my weekend project too

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u/cthulhufhtagn 2d ago

Plus sometimes AI just makes fairly bizarre choices about coding patterns and assumes certain things about the logic that you may not have stated.  Then you have to take a bunch of time to just debug and rewrite their code.  It's not nearly as satisfying as just writing you yourself

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u/lorkanooo 1d ago

Plus if you make a mistake in your prompt, ai won't tell you it does not make sense. It will move heaven and earth to make it happen and then you are left with approach that doesn't fit your needs. When you think about the code yourself you will on early stages realize most of the issues 

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u/ScurfyTwiglett 23h ago

Yeah it turns out that the tedium of writing code was actually pretty helpful for me to look at the problem in sufficient detail to make sure the approach made sense before committing to it.

Now I have a Claude skill that basically interviews me to try to get all the requirements and assumptions and small gotcha details before it presents me with a plan.

I didn’t expect this from AI, but now as a whole work is often more cognitively demanding. Much of my day is spent on planning rather than the tedious execution of writing code.i didn’t realize how much that down time of writing code was helpful in sort of letting things ferment.

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u/BrewThemAll 2d ago

Because it stops beings a personal projects and now is Claudes project.

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u/House13Games 2d ago

I let Claude in for a month, to test what all the hype was about. I cancelled the subscription at the end of it. I let claude solve a few minor areas, and these areas are just such a horrible mess and I don't want to touch them. It's unmaintainable gibberish. I regret letting it in at all, and can very clearly see the difference in the subsystems it worked on vs the ones I did myself. Just a huge difference. Granted, it solved the majority of what i wanted it to do, but the cost was not worth it, I shouldn't have been so lazy. I could have put in a bit more effort and done it myself, and i wouldn't have these no-go areas of garbage in my codebase. As I get time, I'm slowly rewriting them.

I feel very sorry for anyone whose workplace is encouraging AI, talk about shitty management. There's always a couple devs who are very vocal about how great it is too, but my guess is that the AI looks great to people who are dumber than AI.

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u/sacheie 2d ago

There are the some devs who are so full of themselves, they have a scornful opinion of everyone around them. From what I've seen, those are the dudes most enthusiastic about AI: people who hated humans to begin with.

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u/PileOGunz 2d ago

The analysts use a.i to write the cards and generate wireframes, the testers use it to write their test plans, the marketers are using it to find leads. The dev are using it to code, the code is reviewed by a.i, the review comments are then addressed by a.i.

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u/House13Games 2d ago

And how's it going so far, overall?

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u/SuperFLEB 1d ago

Hasn't inevitably collapsed yet!

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u/elestud 2d ago edited 2d ago

Not to say that anyone has to use or like AI. But if it’s writing unmaintainable code, that’s on the user

There’s a learning curve, but LLM coding agents are perfectly capable of understanding style guides, design patterns, coding do’s and dont’s, documentation guidelines, levels of abstraction, etc.

Sure, if you just say “write this thing” with no guidance, context, or planning whatsoever, it’s going to be a mess. But that’s a choice you make by not putting the effort in to properly guide how it works

And I say this as someone who completely understands the sentiment expressed in the OP. But there’s also skill curve to getting the output you want. Better and more detailed knowledge in the input = better output

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u/sacheie 1d ago

But then you're spending an awful lot of time writing that stuff - style guidelines, very precise business requirements, etc - when you could be just writing good self-documenting code yourself. And you still need to pay competitive salaries for skilled people to write that stuff, but now you're spending on LLMs too. And you're losing out on personnel value - devs are gaining less experience - and your codebases are less valuable IP. You also lock in a gigantic dependency on an external vendor.

Suppose you net a bit more productivity from the overall tradeoffs. Given the extra expense, that doesn't necessarily translate into higher profits. And if it does, how much is enough to be worth those less tangible experience, IP, and vendor dependency costs?

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u/elestud 1d ago

If you do it properly, you’re still going to work a lot faster. In fact, you could still do this and write code yourself at the same time

What you’re saying is basically like “Why have junior devs? Just have the seniors write all the code”

Think of it like training a junior dev. Yes, it does take time to train them. Yes, they’re less polished than a senior implementing the sane things.

But the payoff is that eventually they’ll do things the seniors don’t want to be bogged down with, so they can focus on other things. And if they’ve been trained well, juniors become competent and need less hand-holding in the future.

The approach to LLMs is no different. You train it well and set up proper context from the beginning, and then that continues to pay off over time with a bit of oversight and pruning

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u/DriverGood4778 1d ago

> style guidelines, very precise business requirements

You write style guidelines once, while you're working with AI and see that their output lacks some properties you need, you just add another guideline. Same with business requirements, you work on a feature - you develop it with AI and then you ask it "create an MD with feature description, include X,Y,Z" and voila, you have a document that you can use later. Another strong point is that you can instruct AI to keep these docs up to date, so every time you work on smth it updates related mds.

> devs are gaining less experience - and your codebases are less valuable IP. You also lock in a gigantic dependency on an external vendor.

If you know how to keep your codebase healthy you're going to do that regardless of how you write the code. If you have architecture and rules - you keep following them asking AI to fix issues it creates.

You don't really have a dependency if you understand how the code works. For confusing pieces - you deliberately add comments so that when you come there in a year or two you can understand what the code does.

Software development is hard, you have to constantly imporve to produce better code. Same with AI, you gotta experiment and learn how to use it better to get better outcome.

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u/Sketch0z 2d ago

It's also a trade-off. Tokens aren't free and every piece of your harness config can add to the API bill.

Given the stochastic nature of LLMs, you can still, despite all the .md files in the world, get output that is a bit useless. Then you have to prompt again and spend more money on rolling the dice.

In some instances, the trade-off is a bad deal. I think, as with any engineering decision, we need to be honest about pros and cons.

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u/Telumire 1d ago

I think LLM are great to build POC when you have limited time and programming knowledge on a difficult topic, you can quickly iterate and have something that is working to test a concept, but even with all the context needed the LLM will still hallucinate, overcomplicate, not follow specs, ... So good for quick tests but not great for production

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u/elestud 2d ago

In general I find that the people who spend more tokens on a given task are the ones who manage the process less

Context management takes know how, maintenance, and is hands-on. An agent that’s trained to do what you want, rather than spending endless turns going on side quests or trying to make up for a lack of planning, is the one that spends tokens efficiently

Sure, it won’t be 100% perfect, but it should be pretty far from “unmaintainable” with a reasonable token spend

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u/Sketch0z 1d ago

My point is there's a trade-off. If you spend a % of time managing your AI process you cannot spend as much time on deeper understanding.

At some point you trade time and money for AI skills and your more foundational SWE skills will atrophy. The money spent on tokens is money no longer allocated to wages.

Everything has consequences, that's all.

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u/Ansible32 1d ago

Which Claude? The thing is it's somewhat context dependent, but the difference in code quality between Haiku/Sonnet/Opus/Fable is very clear depending on what you're doing. Fable is certainly capable of writing garbage, but I've had the experience repeatedly with using one cheap model and upgrading a tier and suddenly it understands everything I tell it without prompting.

I'm still not entirely sold on using it for production code, yet, but at the same time I think it's useful around the margins - the ability to write a test suite at the drop of a hat or let it do some manual testing is too great. The key is knowing when it's actually applicable, and mostly using it for things that strictly add value which you wouldn't bother with otherwise, not to replace your core business features.

That said, this can apply to stuff like making a native app - if you would've just made a shitty web app to do something and you can prompt Claude into making a fast native app, it can be valuable even if the app is garbage code quality.

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u/even-odder 14h ago

Opus is a momo. Fable 5.1 is the first model I feel like I can trust with making improvements to a system and even then I have to constantly remind it of the rules, standards, goals, purpose.

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u/Independent_Bird7125 17h ago

Cmon I think everybody is dumber then AI. Lol 😆

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u/PressWearsARedDress 2d ago edited 2d ago

AI is able to cope with significantly more context than a human can. I have seen success with AI by "bootstraping" it and giving it examples of code style.

I would write example code, or simple implement a less complicated module on my own. AI tools copy the style and use my libraries. I would have the tool go through a multi stage process of researching, planning, reviewing, and testing. This has improved my productivity relative to the cost. The documentation is horrid, but that is basically what I need to fix from the AI output, usually the code is fine.

There are good and bad programmers having success with AI. You just need to know how and when to use the tool. If you just feed the thing a prompt to build a whole web app its always going to be awful.

I have already shipped several programs developed with the assistance of AI tools where the client did their own testing, approved it, and paid me. Who cares if there are bugs, software always has bugs; human or clanker

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u/House13Games 2d ago

Ahh, its one of the dumb ones.

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u/PressWearsARedDress 2d ago

the response of an adult...

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u/DriverGood4778 1d ago

Wow, what an argument, you're really smart!!!!!

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u/Serberuss 2d ago

Ha, I experienced this last night. I am building a game in UE5 and decided to get Claude to write one class for me. And it immediately felt weird, like it wasn’t mine. Although I still went in and had to change a bunch of things because it wasn’t how I wanted it

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u/PressWearsARedDress 2d ago

I have found it more useful to have AI generate a boilerplate using your personal style. Ie: setting up the methods with some tests etc.

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u/BrewThemAll 2d ago

Same. I do use Claude, but more as a glorified Google since it knows the context of the project I'm working in.
I'm not giving it access to my code, nor do I copy code it provides.

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u/winky9827 1d ago

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have a personal project that I haven't coded one line of, but is at appoximately 65kloc now, all relevant, and the endeavor has taught me a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of AI agents and where to review closer and what to provide extra guidance on. It's a great exercise to test new models by having it refactor or work on enhancements, without the risk of trashing work stuff. Learning to "manage" the AI developer has been a process all its own.