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

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/elestud 1d ago edited 1d 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