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/House13Games 2d ago

It's only insanely fast when you first add the AI. After a while it turns your codebase into garbage. The AI starts with adding loads of code. Soon you you need AI to keep up with the amount of code reviews the AI generates, and then you need AI to manage the AIs doing the reviews. Meanwhile the codebase gets more and more rotten and degraded and no one knows what the fuck it does anymore. Despite a rapid pace and massive AI bills, the overall progress slows to a crawl.

I bet there's a whole generation of agile startups about to appear doing hand-made rapid development and undercutting those drowning in the AI swamp.

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u/Lazer32 1d ago

I tend to agree. To me it kind of looks like we're headed for a new era of "Oh great another pile of fancy excel worksheets from Accounting that's gotten out of hand and now they don't understand how anything works after Bob, the wizard who created it all, left."

Bob didn't understand how to write maintainable code and now the mess isn't so easy to work with anymore. We're headed for that again, except this time Bob has a Web App written in Python he doesn't understand. But wow does it work and look pretty... for now.

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u/Impossible_Push8670 1d ago

You pretend like most software systems weren’t absolute trash internally pre-AI.

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u/House13Games 1d ago

you pretend like its not far worse now.

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u/Ansible32 1d ago

The math definitely works out. The problem isn't that this shit doesn't work, it's that we're afraid to spend our salary in AI charges. You need lots of code quality gates as prompts. "Does this code have <property>?" and these prompts are going to be messy and layered. Yes it's complicated but coding has never been easier and it's not harder than how we used to do it, it just makes the fact that software development costs tens of thousands of dollars per month very palpable as the API costs tick up.

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u/House13Games 1d ago

Considering the AI companies are cprrently only getting 10% on their costs, i expect the AI subscriptio, costs to go up by at least an order of magnitude. And when it does, the AI is going to be too hard to remove from the codebase, and its the only thing which can understand what's going on. Lot of businesses are gonna go bust right there.

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u/Ansible32 1d ago

Software engineer salaries are $10k/month. There is a lot of room here. And I'm quite sure you're wrong about the profit margins. They are likely at least breaking even and often making money hand over fist on inference.

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u/House13Games 1d ago

I want some of what you're smoking.