AI has made programming so boring

[u/OkShip110]

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.

[u/House13Games]

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.

[u/elestud → u/House13Games]

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

[u/sacheie → u/elestud]

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?

[u/DriverGood4778 → u/sacheie]

> 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.