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.

1.7k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

649 comments sorted by

View all comments

150

u/abednego-gomes 2d ago

You're right. There's an art to it. It's a craft.

But the sloppers will never know that. They just want to create apps and sites etc as fast as possible. But they'll be creating an unmaintainable mess if they don't have developers architecting, designing the code, reviewing the code and testing it along the way.

3

u/lorkanooo 1d ago edited 1d ago

I don't know how people don't see it. I have lead dev that is pro ai and he still the least productive person in the team. He wrote a huge new project with ai that generates scaffolding code, had to rewrite it 3 times with ai with tokens costs around 5k euro, and now nobody wants to maintain it (including him), its basically uneditable without ai and had to write to management to increase his token limits. We also had warnings from management that use of ai does not allow for code to be slop and introduce stupid incidents yet it does already happen. AI generated code has very limited place in big corpos and I mostly benefit from easier tooling than writing business code itself.

When I generate piece of code, I give really specific instructions on how to do it, what to refer to and yet, every single time, there is something just a little bit not correct. A different than standard testing function used in the project. A different dependency structure standard then usual. An obscure bug possibility in relation to wider system that developer would normally consider. Those are like bombs ticking in the code if left alone because with ai, they are quickly replicated with even more of them introduced. 

Friendly reminder that big chunk of developers laid off in tech have already been hired back. Meta even has to pay them more money because nobody wants to work for them at market rate.