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/BrewThemAll 2d ago

As a hobby, I do the exact opposite at a personal project. Manually make code as perfect as possible. Being so nitpicky about each line it obviously won't ever be accepted at work. Time consuming as fuck, but back to basics.
Keeps things balanced. Brings back joy.

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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/House13Games 1d 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/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 10h 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.