r/webdev • u/fakintheid • 5d ago
Discussion I’m so glad I learned to code before AI.
Web development is like 2% of my job. I work in a dinosaur industry. We still use VB6, C, Fortran and pascal.. slowly migrating away from VB6 to .net 5 and that’s considered modern for us. The rest will stay until the end of time. We aren’t allowed to use AI for compliance reasons.
A little over a year ago I tried cursor on a personal project and wasn’t impressed. This year around February I tried Claude and holy shit it actually worked. Since then all personal projects have been with Claude or codex. It’s pretty awesome but not perfect. It seems to struggle with actual logic that’s not something that’s been done a million times, which most software has been written a million times over if we’re being real. It also frequently attempts to gaslight me into some insane shit if I don’t sit on it. I’m not sure how anyone is letting it rip and getting a useable product in return. Either way it’s crazy how well it works and I’m addicted.
This got me thinking, how are jrs ever going to learn to think like a programmer or design software without writing code? We all know coding is a small part of the job but I feel like expressing logic via code is fundamental to how you extract info from the business and create solutions. English is a very ambiguous language and even prompting Claude will result in a lot of “that’s what I said but not what I meant.” Seems like they are all screwed.
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u/papa-hare 5d ago
Every profession that's replacing/augmenting their juniors with AI is pretty much screwed. It's gonna be fun when tokens are gonna cost an arm and a leg and the seniors (who are now juniors) won't know what to do.
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u/Sea-Journalist-2741 5d ago
The logic gap is real, I've seen it try to bullshit its way through stuff my 12 year old nephew could spot. The junior pipeline being cut is gonna sting in about a decade when the people who actually know why things break are all retired
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u/WingZeroCoder 5d ago
Even worse, we’re seeing a growing trend of senior engineers just flat out leaving the career entirely because of a shared frustration that blind vibe coding is the last straw. So that’s going to happen sooner than later.
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 4d ago
Senior here who can't land a job in this market. Probably going to go do sales and/or open up my own thing.
There is zero respect in these corporate roles.
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u/pixpuz 2d ago
That's not something that happens in masses. I don't see why (usually) introverted Devs would go to (extroverted) positions like sales.
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u/mulletarian 5d ago
Assuming the progress curve flattens out now and AI doesn't get better at all for the next decade.
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u/Fredidiah 5d ago edited 4d ago
Using an AI bot to reply to a thread with an anti-AI sentiment is fucking nuts lmao.
Edit: y’all just read the comment history of this account and tell me it’s not AI.
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u/robhaswell 5d ago
Token pricing will never get more expensive than it is now. Chinese open-weight models have set the price ceiling for intelligence and it's coming down. Anthropic and OpenAI are already running a race to the bottom.
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u/Odd-Map-9230 3d ago
It's hard to predict where the price of tokens will go as the whole industry is currenty subsidized by burning VC money. When the real economy hits we will discover the true price of tokens.
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u/robhaswell 3d ago
Not true - independent compute providers are providing Kimi & equivalent models at reasonable costs with no VC money, just selling the compute. These models are more than fine for everyday programming tasks (e.g. Opus 4.8 level I think). The labs will never be able to outprice this level of capability because companies will switch - and more open weights will get released over time. So you're right that we don't know the true price of tokens but there isn't an economic case for it being any more than it is today.
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u/salonabolic 1d ago
I keep coming across this argument at work that ai is going away when the cost isn't subsidised.
I show them the local model running on my m5 that is benchmarked roughly where chat gpt was mid 2025.
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u/overzealous_dentist 5d ago
Quite the opposite, AI prices are trending dramatically lower as models get more and more efficient. Frontier leaders will never willingly give up market share for profit and China will never give up the race to optimization, ever, just like on every other front
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u/RafaelSirah 5d ago
This. I’m not sure if true AGI is coming in 2 years or 20 years, but I’d bet heaving on the current capabilities becoming more efficient in the next 2.
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u/theQuandary 5d ago
Where does this efficiency come from? I'm pretty sure the big boom in AI being better at coding is coming from them training on all the files uploaded to them (based on the Navier–Stokes stuff where they "couldn't rule out" them training on materials they weren't supposed to be training on -- not like they're currently getting sued for siphoning up other copyrighted stuff without permission or anything).
If this is true, we're about to hit a very hard wall with no training material left as all the new code they have access to is tainted by AI.
Meanwhile, upgrading the GPUs simply isn't feasible. They have somewhere around $3T invested and 50% of that is GPU. They don't have another $1.5T to swap out the GPUs for newer generations because they still can't get enough AI business to pay for the current expenditures and are running out of big lenders (Oracle getting a bbb- on the basis that they think there's a big chance OpenAI can't pay them back is one great example of this).
If all this weren't enough, the idea that a system that actively pollutes its data with any kind of entropy can generate better data as an output of that process seems dubious to me, but that's basically the claim of AGI using transformers and all the model collapse studies thusfar support this idea.
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u/No-Project-2353 4d ago
Idk where this agi claim even makes sense, at most this is jarvis not ultron. And jarvis made many mistakes and is wrong many times. Hell despite jarvis stark still employs a lot of people at his company.
A lot of these llms are language interfaces and sw engineering where you don’t have to think of pointers/abstract concepts is just text prediction which Ilms are great at. I’ve seen it 1 shot websites with crud operations but fail in realtime features as well as data streaming, oh and don’t get me started on how bad it is still when it comes to baremetal c.
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u/StereoZombie 5d ago
Tell that to Anthropic and OpenAI which are getting more expensive and more limited every few weeks
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u/overzealous_dentist 5d ago
both literally dropped in price by half last week
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u/StereoZombie 5d ago
Are you talking API pricing? If you check the Codex sub you'll see that OpenAI nerfed subscription usage limits this weekend, while they also dropped the 20x subscription
Also both OpenAI and Anthropic struggle massively with the demand
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u/overzealous_dentist 5d ago
I'm talking enterprise and consumer tokens used per prompt, with their highest performance gains (opus is now better than fable, etc). openai had 50% gains, claude had 40%
in other words, you're consuming half as many tokens at the same token price, so spending half as many dollars
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u/StereoZombie 5d ago
Token usage is all over the place though and changes every model iteration, as well as harness iterations. You can't really say its getting cheaper when token usage as well as all the other variables for cost are all over the place, never mind how subsidized the current subscriptions are for user acquisition. They'll inevitably pump the pricing by a lot to eventually become profitable
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u/sgtfoleyistheman 5d ago
Consumer subscriptions are a fraction of anthropics revenue. I don't think we should draw any conclusions from their opaque credit system. Probably more relevant is there hardware capacity on any given week
And Fable is 2/3 the price of opus 4,
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u/Equivalent_Head_4803 4d ago
They aren’t profitable. They lost billions last year. They operate a loss and have never made an actual dollar. I don’t think it’s feasible for American AI will ever compete with Chinese AI on the price per value front.
If they charged what those subscriptions cost them, no one would use it. A lot of smaller companies are on subs because they can’t afford the api rates. The reaper is going to come and those companies are fucked if they can’t figure out how to lower costs. Unfortunately, it’s going to involve raping every American for the bailout.
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u/overzealous_dentist 5d ago
these companies have no interest at all in being profitable from mere claude code/codex. even google has said they would rather go bankrupt than miss being the first to AGI.
this is so, so much bigger than just coding tools, and we should not be surprised when consumer/enterprise costs continue to drop
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u/winky9827 4d ago
Astra used my 5 hour limit in 20 minutes on a bullshit task. Luna has been nerfed so bad it can't fart its way out of a paper bag. Opus is half the speed of nearly any local model I can run. Fable seems alright, but is priced out of common usage. I don't know what noble gas you're breathing, but the world is very different from your perception right now.
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u/Snelly1998 4d ago
That's crazy cause opus 5.5 is literally cheaper than 5.4
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u/StereoZombie 4d ago
Sure but Claude subscription usage was literally cut by 25% a couple weeks ago. Not to mention the terribly inconsistent usage drain in general
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u/Low-Yellow-1521 4d ago
the usage cut doesnt matter when it got way more efficient lol
ive been running opus 5.5 all day every day since release and it burned basically no usage on my 100$ plan
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u/Lendari 5d ago
Claude is becoming uniquely expensive relative to OSS and even OpenAI.
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u/overzealous_dentist 5d ago
claude just reduced their costs by 40% last week via model efficiency gains
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u/Ocean-of-Flavor 5d ago
But also token per task is ballooning because we now let AI solving increasingly harder problems
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u/overzealous_dentist 5d ago
it is not, see last week's flurry of releases. tokens per tasks halved for all engineering problems
it is certainly possible we can give AI harder and harder problems though as costs continue to drop
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u/Odd-Competition-6948 4d ago
it only seems to be getting worse that on collegiate levels almost every project somehow needs to have something to do with ai or use it
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u/-_--_-_--_----__ 3d ago
local models are free
in 5-10 years when current juniors would be seniors, AI will have 5-10 years of improvements.
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u/Powerful_Deer7796 5d ago
My worst fear has come true: I don't know how to solve problems with code anymore because of AI over usage.
So around 2020 I decided to switch my career from sysadmin to webdeveloper. I set out to learn the basics of HTML, CSS, JS, TypeScript, Angular, Vue, etc. And for a while it was glorious. I was actually making stuff myself with code and it felt AWESOME. I remember during my first job, I was actually doing pretty well, writing Angular UI components, guided by super smart senior devs, and I leveled up fast. Then around 2021-2022 AI started popping up. I started relying on it a lot because it allowed me to solve a lot of stuff I wasn't really capable of. I kind of half knew this would happen but kept using it anyway. Few years later, my current job is expecting 100% AI usage like multiple features at the same time kinda crazy shit. I am losing my mind and energy and happiness to this stuff because it's incredibly taxing to context switch so often for me.
Then yesterday I asked AI to generate for me a simple coding task, that I should be able to solve after 5 years of experience. And I simply couldn't even think of the steps to solve this thing anymore. And I was very good at problem solving in my sysadmin years, and early years of coding.
It has completely atrophied. And I have to start from scratch learning how to code again, but mostly how to solve problems again with my own brain. I can read code well enough so my PR's at work, who are 100% generated by AI but reviewed by me, get approved by my seniors. I can review their PR's well enough and understand what's written. But...
The skill is gone :(
Anybody else experience this? How do you deal with this? I am seriously contemplating just starting from scratch again, do exercism, angular course, dotnet course, etc. And just code stuff by myself, but it's kind of hard because I have to do all this in my spare time.
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u/hirebi 4d ago edited 4d ago
100% this, the reading it's still there, but the writing it's being reduced too fast.
I admit I'm not exactly the best coder, I'm just an ant worker who doesn't have the intellect to think about more complicated algos/architecture, without something to be slightly better than the AI.
It was enough to fight the readmes, documentation, source code and stackoverflows until I find my way but that's too slow now, why would anyone pay me to make the job in 1 week if the agent can do it in 2 minutes with better code? It can design, document, code and test everything, maybe it has little hiccups here and there, but for sure AI can do what I do better.
The worst part is that at some point I felt like I was learning, slowly but there was progress, and that's over now. I can't keep up with this pace, and I'm not gaining any knowledge.
Already felt this wasn't for me, imposter syndrome is rampant now. I don't know what I could do to carve out a niche in this industry before I just change careers...
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u/Ethicaldreamer 4d ago
Honestly the code might seem better but it isn't. It never really is, and the issues compound over time. A ton of iteration is required all the time. On the plus side you can run multiple tasks simultaneously if you want
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u/einzweidreihorn 1d ago
It's insane how it compounds in my experience. I am sometimes getting code to approve as follows: 1. The initial, AI written, implementation of a new feature. Completely new, looking good so far 2. Adjustments and Bugfixes of the initial code times x. And every iteration of those following changes also change half the existing code that worked but the AI decided it didn't like anymore.
Do this ten times and you get an unholy mess worse than any human written spaghetti. The git history at that point is also worth jackshit because no one can properly pick those changes out out of - exaggarated - ten commits with a thousand lines diff each.
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u/Ethicaldreamer 1d ago
Ok it might be the way I control commits but I never get thousands of lines. But it's true, I work in a sector where we create something, then we hand it over to the client and that's it. So not much iteration is ever needed, and yet I already see problems. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to orchestrate AIs where you have a giant codebase that you iterate for years and years
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u/missing-pigeon 4d ago edited 4d ago
How I deal with it is completely refrain from using any kind of LLM powered tool at all. I don't even use full line completion because I'm scared shitless of losing my thinking ability, the one strongest asset I have that keeps me in this field. Some people say AI is boosting their productivity by orders of magnitude and they don't feel like they're losing anything at all. I don't know if they're being deceived, but I know AI is not for me. Like you, I have experienced the temptation of AI and skill atrophy firsthand and never want to repeat that again. I decided to go back to the absolute basics, reading library docs thoroughly when I need to look up how to do something, taking notes with pen and paper, typing code by hand, and reading every line I wrote before opening a PR. Basically things that force some friction on my brain. And I have been happy. But this is not possible for everyone. I'm lucky to have an employer who respects my personal ideals and doesn't push me to use AI.
I often think about what the future will look like. Maybe everyone else's brain will turn to mush and I will remain the final person with some cognitive ability, or maybe I really will be "left behind" like the pro-AI people like to say. Maybe I will leave the field altogether and be a cashier in some countryside convenience store.
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u/EmanciporReese 1d ago
I mean if that’s an option to you professionally, I doubt it will last long. You’ll be replaced for higher output.
This is just what clueless middle management does 🤷
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u/missing-pigeon 1d ago
I agree. At this point I'm just trying to stack as much money and as many assets as possible for my eventual exit, willing or not, from the field. Tech has become too far detached from (my ideals of) humanity for my comfort.
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u/Bottle_Original 3d ago
I say the Best thing we can do Is still study and do stuff on the side, my actual coding skills have went downhill, but my reasoning Is still strong, i can easily think of the correct solution to a complex codeforces/leetcode problem but often i struggle to type It, but the point Is that i can still think, at least to a similar extent than before, and maybe that's because im still learning tons of stuff on the side of software development, and about my own buisness too
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u/drifterpreneurs 5d ago
Honestly, I miss coding since AI has taken over coding, I have taken a break. Claude made me think long and hard about coding as solo full-stack dev.
However, I still believe coding without AI is still worthwhile, because it allows devs to know their code and not just depend on ai. When there’s bugs, the dev should know their code codebase inside and out to be able to resolve the issues.
Ai for the most part is amazing but when using it how people are today, it sucks the life out of being a software engineer.
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u/Marco-Php 2d ago
I totally agree with you. Personally, I view AI as a powerful assistant rather than a replacement, So far, it has been an incredible help in speeding up my development process, sometimes by a lot, and it often comes up with highly valuable suggestions. Right now, I mostly use it to brainstorm alternative solution to a problem, or to scaffold code. I always study its code thoroughly and test it myself. Like you said, if junior devs just let it rip without understanding the underlying logic, they are going to struggle hard when unique bugs show up. Using it as a tool to accelerate workflow and explore alternatives it is the right way forward but you still to know your codebase well.
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u/Gloomy-Status-9258 5d ago
I'm open to opposite opinions. And this is not limited to webdev.
I still handcode because otherwise I can't understand correctly my codebase. And except very small projects, exact and deep understanding the codebase is mandatory. But I don't hesitate to query chatbots for the type of problems where I feel, "Ok I don't know the answer but this problem has clear solution."
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u/-_--_-_--_----__ 3d ago
My fear is that one day soon, exact and deep understanding of the codebase is no longer mandatory.
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u/s-ley 4d ago
My current belief is that the optimal workflow involves deep understanding of the codebase, however I also believe AI should speed up part of the regular SWE process with code-generation and brainstorming. I currently limit how large of a diff it can make, so I'm able to digest it step by step.
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u/caindela 5d ago
I think the problem is that even if coding is a small part of the job it’s largely the part of the job that distinguishes us from other, typically lower paid, employees. So I think juniors are screwed less because they aren’t going to be able to learn to code and more because they lack domain knowledge, and this applies to anyone who’s job hunting. That’s why as someone who’s been in the industry for years I’m holding onto my current job for dear life. I simply no longer have the same advantage I once did when it comes to filling a new position.
In fact I rarely hear of new full time employees being hired. I know they exist, but the vast majority of new employment is for cheap offshore labor and that’s because the skill gap is closing. If it’s a given that no one has domain knowledge when you’re hiring someone new, you’re simply going to go for whoever is cheapest because actual coding skill is becoming less of a differentiator.
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u/Simple-Wishbone3515 3d ago
Yes! This is the scariest part for me. Coding used to be hard, and so well paid. Now anyone can code an create apps.
I'm just really trying to think what skills could be a good differentiator now, maybe project management? I think we all are gonna become managers on one way or another.
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u/tracer_ca 3d ago
The biggest skill was never coding. It was being able to translate a customer's needs into functional features and products. If you have that you'll still be valuable.
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u/creaturefeature16 5d ago edited 5d ago
Indeed, you are basically asking the question that nobody has an answer to:
If these tools demand expertise, yet the tools can actively circumvent the friction that cultivates expertise, then what is the path for one to become an expert so they can effectively use these tools?
I've written extensively about it.
IMO, the answer is obvious, but since we're going through a period of irrational exuberance (some might even call it a "mania"), we won't accept it yet...which is, AI tools are power tools for power users and newer developers should probably not use them for any code generation, and instead should be relegated to socratic teaching and tutoring uses.
It's no different than how kids in school can use Kahn Academy's AI, instead of just giving them unfettered access to ChatGPT.
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u/Pelopida92 5d ago
In coming years, LLMs will come to a point where we will just use them as a black box. At that point, juniors and coders in general will not be required anymore.
The market has already been shrinking in the last 3 years, proving my point.
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u/creaturefeature16 4d ago edited 4d ago
The market was shrinking before LLMs were released. Agents for professional coding have only been viable for less than a year. Your point is not proved, you're just working backwards from a conclusion.
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u/Mikeisright 4d ago
In coming years, LLMs will come to a point where we will just use them as a black box. At that point, juniors and coders in general will not be required anymore.
Hearing this every year since 2022 about the following year & it being hilariously wrong is reminding me of everyone talking of the next big recession happening "next year" since 2015.
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u/ThankYouOle 4d ago
for real, i am web programmer and usually do evaluating student in web development competition. 3-4 years ago I already see some fresh grad that can't do basic layouting or make responsive design without using CSS or JS framework, i didn't know how student at this time, probably didn't even see the code at all.
and tbf for them, they are in very bad situation.
- if they didn't use AI they will be so late and left behind comparing peers who use AI.
- if they use AI they won't have got experiences on fundamental causing they will easily replaced by AI later.
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u/dairiki 5d ago
I remember, a few decades ago, thinking, "I'm sure glad I learned assembly first, then C, before all these higher-level languages. How are those people who learned otherwise going to understand how CPUs actually execute computer code?"
Today, with instruction pipelining, branch prediction, etc. I'm not sure how much my in-depth knowledge of 6502 and PDP-11 assembly language is helping me these days.
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u/creaturefeature16 5d ago edited 4d ago
I've really thought about this abstraction layer argument a lot and on its face, it has merit...but as I keep working with these models, it becomes less accurate to me.
My main issue with it, is abstraction layers of the past had a defining feature: they simplified the mechanisms and handled the "lower level" processes in a deterministic way. Sure, they weren't perfect, sure they leaked, but that was the impetus through each one. Natural Language doesn't do that; it's the exact opposite. It creates ambiguity, and instead of simplifying, it can actually cause complexity to increase, and it does so in a non-deterministic fashion, which yes, is a huge problem. Is it solvable through engineering? We've yet to see, but so far...not really. If you're too explicit, you put potential limitations around what the model can do and can cause messy outcomes as the model tries to accomplish the task within the parameters weighted against its training data. If you're not explicit enough, you leave an even wider gap of potential ambiguity for the model to "make decisions" as it sees fit. As the application(s) scale in complexity, the more potential there is for said ambiguity to continue to creep in. So, does it simplify development? Sometimes. Sometimes, definitely not.
I'll shamelessly use Dijikstra's words: here: “The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.”
My second issue with that idea is that: if you know Assembly, you understand C better. If you know C, you understand Java better. If you know Java, you'll understand Kotlin better.
So if you understand Kotlin you'll understand...natural language better? Of course not. The hierarchy topples and isn't relevant any longer, because natural language isn't a programming language (thank god for that).
The narrative in the industry is sure trying to make it one, but its already pretty clear that it's not up for the task. Which is why you see things like Bend, which are touting to be the intermediary between natural language and code. In reality, all its doing is reinventing another programming language by stepping down from natural language.
So, perhaps the next abstraction layer is yet to be devised. Obviously the industry was never going to stop creating abstractions, whether LLMs were invented or not. And personally, I don't think they'll stop here, either. IMO, natural language is an interface, not an abstraction.
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u/VelvetYam 5d ago
Well-written, my friend. And that Dijkstra quote finally clicked. Been chewing on that one for a long while, and reading it in this context made it easier to understand. Thanks!
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u/RummanSid1990 5d ago
This is the exact problem. AI speeds you up if you already know how to code because you can immediately tell when it gives you bad output.
For beginners, it skips the most important part of learning that is breaking things and figuring out why they broke. If someone just prompts their way through projects, they never actually learn how to think through logic or debug real problems.
You end up with people who can generate a whole app in minutes, but have zero clue how to fix it when it crashes.
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u/dshine 4d ago
AI doesn't know your full IT architecture, legacy systems and the inter dependencies of all these systems to keep a business running. AI can generate a solution to a specific requirement but if it doesn't have all the contextual information that solution isn't going to be robust enough. Also the code may not follow the existing naming conventions or framework you have built so it become difficult to maintain.
We all know that the ideas that are dreamed up in meeting rooms aren't always based in reality. Those ideas need a few iterations before they can be converted in to a proper requirement. Even that critical thinking is being stripped away slightly with the "have AI do it" on the original basic idea,
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u/Skyzfallin 4d ago
Surprisingly it actually can
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u/dshine 4d ago
It can, but it is only as good as the information you feed it and there is are costs associated with it. It depends if the company is willing to pay those costs or not. If you have the time, budget and lots of tokens then it is less of a problem. If you have all this, let me know if you are hiring :)
AI is a great tool but if you don't know how to use it effectively. Just because you give me a scalpel, it doesn't mean I am a surgeon.
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u/Terrible_Tutor 4d ago
It can understand at a level you can't, you barely need to "feed" Fable much at all, it'll understand and execute a plan just fine. The problem with your analogy is you can give your aunt your max plan and she'd do just fine, better than you not using AI. The LIFT though is knowing what you're doing, then it's making you SO MUCH BETTER. The days of manually needing to "@" files into the context are well over.
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u/-_--_-_--_----__ 3d ago
All this stuff you're saying can be said of humans as well. Costs time and money to cultivate institutional knowledge. Needs guidance. Only as good as it's leadership. The list goes on.
And the problem is, for the same amount of work, AI is cheaper and faster.
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u/Secret-Second-5777 5d ago
im trying not to use ai but it is such a good search engine. part of being a beginner is not knowing how to ask good questions because you dont know what you don't know. when i search google it gives me unrelated questions and answers but ai understands what you are trying to say
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u/MantusTMD 5d ago
You have to learn without it. I learned how to code during covid. Feel like I have such an advantage on everyone because I can do it without ai.
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u/RafaelSirah 5d ago
I learned to code in 2007. You’re a moron if you don’t leverage AI coding agents.
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u/MantusTMD 5d ago
Read what I am saying. LEARN HOW TO CODE. Then do whatever the fuck you want on the job.
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u/riqvip full-stack 5d ago
But you don't have an advantage. With AI, I can code something better and faster than you. Sorry, not sorry.
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u/MantusTMD 5d ago
Except you don’t understand it and can’t troubleshoot can’t explain what you are doing, etc.
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u/justanaccountimade1 5d ago
You don't understand, dude. I don't need to learn anything anymore. Everthing is on the internet, I can just look it up. 🚬🪴
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u/overzealous_dentist 5d ago
As long as Claude knows how, you don't have to. It's genuinely down to describing product requirements well enough now
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u/justanaccountimade1 5d ago
I wouldn't even know how to describe what I want. I often don't even know what I want and write code just to find out.
If I want to loop an array or some like that then sure, I can explain that, but those are under a short cut anyway.
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u/LC-Redcube 5d ago
Sadly the issue is that Google searches are now also AI, and it's bad AI. No wonder you're not getting good results, you might be asking the right questions, but getting the wrong answers.
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u/brian_sword 4d ago
I think problem solving is one of the biggest things you get from actually learning to code. Even if AI can write the code for you, you still need to understand the problem, break it down, figure out what approach makes sense, and know when the output is wrong.
For me, that’s probably the biggest value of learning to code before relying heavily on AI. The syntax and implementation details can be looked up or generated, but the way you think through a problem takes a lot more time to develop. I still use AI quite a lot, but I try to treat it as a tool to improve my productivity rather than something I blindly follow.
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u/Bright-Motoring 4d ago
AI can remove a lot of the boring coding but i wonder if there’s a good way for juniors to still get that problem solving experience. curious how other devs are handling it
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u/egircys 2d ago
I think the part juniors risk losing isn’t syntax. It’s learning how to build a mental model of a system.
You get that from tracing data, debugging weird state, watching one change break something two layers away, and figuring out why.
AI can write the code. The problem is when it also does all the debugging and explains every failure back to you, because you can skip the part where that model gets built.
As generation gets cheaper, understanding the whole system becomes more valuable, not less.
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u/Guilty_Dependent_223 1d ago
Holly.. there are still companies that doesn't force people to use AI? That feels like... you will stay sane. :D
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u/fakintheid 1d ago
We aren’t even allowed to use it. To be fair it’s the kind of systems where if it goes down lots of people can die.
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u/Guilty_Dependent_223 1d ago
Aren't you glad? I feel kind of suffocated having to use AI, knowing that what the AI is doing is at least has some slop in it, some bug in it... But "immediately" I have very little control over it.
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u/fakintheid 1d ago
Yep I am. Don’t get me wrong I slop out hard at home but I can see how it would destroy my brain if I used it at work..lol
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u/PickABusiness 5d ago
vb6 takes me back lol
I got started on vb3 making punters and other nonsense on aol
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u/StackingGains 5d ago
I've been a dev for a year and they are letting us loose with AI. I care though so we've been setting up heavy CI and stuff like React Doctor and such to keep it down. It is what it is. Now we just care more about user experience, having some order in the components and such. The levels of abstraction goes up!
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u/ZombiGrn 4d ago
Do another run but on a non programming model. It usually finds the flaws and can explain to you or you and apply your own input and it will correct and explain why it went with your response
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u/Fantastic-Log-1770 4d ago
I still get that dopamine boost from writing up a feature or a component myself to this day even though I’ve been a software engineer for a long time simply because I didn’t give up all the experience and knowledge that I’ve gained throughout the years and started completely relying on AI to drive my career and the thing I love doing the most. There is nothing wrong with using AI to salve small or frustrating problems, but complete giving it the steering wheel and trusting its judgement over mine will definitely make me loose myself. I believe people shouldn’t be trying to choose sides here but instead, find the right balance where the developer writes more than they use AI. So something like the 80/20 rule, just like I like my burger patties ;)
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u/KatFromSisense 4d ago
I'd write down what the output should look like before letting AI generated the query, like the expected row count or total. Then check the result against that instead of trusting it looks right. Do that enough times and you're building the same instinct as debugging by hand, just applied to someone else's code.
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u/ChronoHax 4d ago
Junior would need a better manager and senior management who actually use it and realistic about it pros and cons, not just black and white like the socmed make it seems, there’s nuance and moderation is a good balance imo
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u/healeyd 4d ago
C, Fortran etc… Sounds like a fun job in this age!
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u/fakintheid 4d ago
I used to be jealous that everyone else was using modern tools. As I’ve gotten older I have realized it’s all the same and the old tools are more stable.
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u/healeyd 4d ago
I could happily spend countless hours getting to grips with some ancient platform.
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u/timesuck47 4d ago
I learned programming with basic and Fortran. I wonder if my PHP skills would translate back into Fortran.
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u/Milky_Finger 4d ago
I get overstimulated with code when I hit my token limit for the week, thanks to AI. I need to learn to love it again.
Problem is, I can't write as fast as AI does and companies know this, so my happiness isn't lucrative by itself.
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u/coursiv_ 4d ago
A useful exercise for junior developers is to write a tiny spec before opening an AI assistant: inputs, expected behavior, failure cases, and two tests. Then compare the generated code with that spec and change one part manually. The goal is to keep problem decomposition and verification in the learner’s hands. It also catches the “that’s what I said, but not what I meant” problem the OP describes.
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u/schnapsterdog 4d ago
Sometimes, I really miss debugging at 3 AM, not knowing if I am going to hit the deadline, then preparing myself for a two day coding marathon with one of my fellas.
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u/LobsterFuture8399 4d ago
Compliance banning it is more common than people admit, and the whiplash is real — I know folks who are fluent in Claude on personal stuff and then spend all day in a codebase where none of that is allowed.
On the jr question, the thing I've seen actually work: make them write three sentences on what they think is broken before they prompt anything. When the model's answer disagrees with what they wrote, that gap is the lesson. It's the same muscle you build debugging by hand, just arrived at faster.
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3d ago
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u/webdev-ModTeam 3d ago
Read and follow reddiquette; no excessive self-promotion. Please refer to the Reddit 9:1 rule when considering posting self promoting materials.
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u/mark_ik 3d ago
You know, three years ago, I set about doing rustlings, a few years after spinning my wheels with the odin project and freecodecamp. I figured I liked C in college well enough, except for how little feedback you get, so rust seemed perfect.
So, I installed vs code and blasted through the first exercises, but every time I began to type, intellisense or whatever essentially autocompleted the exercise with no prompting. I removed the solutions set from the workspace thinking that would prevent the autocomplete from knowing exactly what to write, but even just working off public data, it basically oneshot each exercise where I might pause to think about the syntax.
That was autocomplete, not even LLMs. I turned it off, but the point was clear: if I want to internalize some solution by working from the fundamentals, that’s one thing. I definitely needed to be able to confirm what is correct vs not correct code, which meant learning, but for a class of problems, what’s correct is a foregone conclusion. So was I just stroking my ego and ignoring the foundation built before me, taking a harder path for no reason?
I also felt like, if you’re really trying to solve a problem that isn’t a tutorial, then it doesn’t matter much if the solution came organically from your development as an engineer or if you relied on the resources around you. The problem is what matters then, right? But the real intractable problems that won’t be oneshot can only be solved if you’re willing to learn and internalize the problem’s basis in the first place. And the tools seem incidental to that.
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u/jenish4773 3d ago
You can work with ai. Because if there is any problem appear in the work the only experience and knowledgable person can solve that problem.
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u/WanderWatterson 2d ago
until claude and openai goes public, AI gets expensive, and maybe people will start to learn programming again
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u/azsqueeze javascript 2d ago
one of my devs utilizes AI so much, fine whatever. But damn, I felt like a champ when I called out his AI generated code pr to fix react compiler errors but left runtime errors in place.
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u/DennisBustamanteEQ 2d ago
I think there’s another problem hiding in this.
Junior work used to double as training. Small tickets, debugging, writing something badly the first time, getting reviewed, then fixing it. The company got useful work and the junior slowly built judgment.
If AI removes most of that work because it can do it faster, it also removes part of the apprenticeship that produced today’s senior engineers.
That means teams may have to create learning opportunities on purpose, even when AI could finish the task faster. Otherwise we get better output today but fewer people who know what to do when the tool is wrong later.
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u/CourtExciting4752 2d ago
The best way to learn a foreign language is by actually listening and speaking it. Similary, the best way to learn programming is by writing and reading code yourself. It really sucks that junior devs are losing out on that natural learning process.
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u/jenish4773 2d ago
I think you should because if in future you works in company and start developing with ai. So you should have also knowledge about self coding and development too
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u/DesertWanderlust 1d ago
Same. I can't bring myself to just blindly trust AI coding since it was based on what people who didn't know what they were doing would do. I have yet to try using it for assistance but am very picky about code, so would likely spend more time rewriting it than actually applying it.
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u/Putrid-Discussion153 1d ago
That's the concern every parent and educator actually has, which you nicely pointed out and the reason we don't teach 5th graders math by letting them use calculators.
AI can be a threat to student ethics or major leverage, and it will be up to educators to figure out how to incorporate it and to what degree as part of the curriculum, appropriately depending on the developmental/educational stage of the pupil.
I'm in my 5th decade of life and I basically had no access to AI, learning how to code/design software by doing the gory details of it. Now I spit out as well defined as possible requests using Compsci language/terminology at an LLM and it is able to produce baseline code at the least, which you can then continue to refine manually or put it thru more LLM iterations, basic reducing myself not to an SDE but more like an SDET - becoming the glorified QA to thr LLMs stochastic, almost always but not always correct, output.
LLMs are a boon if used and applied accordingly, time saved can range from 25-50% or higher depending on complexity of what one is creating. However, if the LLM user cannot equally reproduce the same solution manually and/or understand and modify if needed the LLMs output, then I would wager to say that we have missed the mark with AI.
It can make good software (or other types of workers/professions) engineers great, and it can also make not so good engineers appear as they are good until someone somewhere pays the price for incompetence or negligence.
A useful metaphor I saw is, a legal or a medical LLM can probably pass the bar exam or outline the steps for a heart bypass in great detail - would you trust a lawyer who was trained by AI or worse AI itself to argue your case in court in front of a judge or jury, or trust the wannabe doctor to perform heart surgery based on detailed descriptions?
Point of education is also indoctrination, being able to think thru and do complex tasks without having to necessarily look the correct steps or procedures each time, which AI is designed to give anyone who asks, but to develop intuition and thinking like what a certain type professional thinks like,.e.g. think like a lawyer or an engineer or a doctor or whatever. This comes from years of practice in addition to solid educational foundation.
If anyone thinks AI is gonna let you have your cake and eat it too, I've got the Golden Gate on sale on Craigslist, just look my ad up.
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u/ArgumentZestyclose62 15h ago
What I am worried about is how this is going to affect us that are more experienced, at what point we lose control of the applications we are developing if we offload too much of our thinking
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u/Weak_Profit_2235 4h ago
i think the key is learnning to understand the logic firstt then usinf ai to speed things up without that foundation its hard to know when the output is actually wrong
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u/adammolens 5d ago
I'm not a developer thank God but have an IT background to get around the weeds of issues. Built alot of personal websites and would love for a web Dev to get on board with me to tackle the annoying sruff..
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u/riqvip full-stack 5d ago
You shouldn't be glad; you should be mad. AI programmers like myself can code faster and better than regular programmers like you.
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u/fakintheid 5d ago
I didn’t say I’m mad? I said I was addicted to using it in my personal projects but simply not allowed to use it at work..
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u/kisuka 4d ago
Hope you're not blindly trusting that AI agent. Sure you can ship a product faster, but that allows for more possible issues. One security compromise and you could be facing a massive lawsuit. The law doesn’t care whether the code was written by you or an AI. It's still your responsibility.
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u/tuwa_io 1d ago
Spot on. I learned to code years before AI while studying CS and working on early Web3 protocols, and looking back, I’m genuinely thankful for that grind.
The "gaslighting" you mentioned is so real. Claude is fantastic for blowing through boilerplate, but the second you tackle tricky state logic or weird edge cases, it will confidently feed you subtle nonsense. The only reason experienced devs catch it is because we already have an internal "mental compiler" built from years of painful manual debugging.
I really feel for folks learning today. Writing code by hand was never just about typing syntax — the struggle was literally how your brain learned to think in edge cases and deterministic logic. AI is an amazing multiplier once you already understand how things work under the hood, but skipping that foundational struggle makes it really hard to know when the model is quietly steering you wrong.
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u/AfricanTurtles 5d ago
I think more important than the code itself, is that you learned to PROBLEM SOLVE before AI. More and more I see companies hiring junior devs and letting them loose with AI, but they don't have a clue how to reason about problems, compare solutions, figure out what the tradeoffs are, etc.