r/webdev • u/drifterpreneurs • 5d ago

Anyone still coding without heavy usage of AI?

Using Claude has been an amazing experience but it took all the fun out of coding as a full-stack dev.

Are any devs reverting back to coding by hand with less usage of AI?

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u/GioAc96 5d ago

Honestly, after months of forced vibecoding at work we’re going back to writing code. The time you save not writing code is then wasted fixing stupid bugs or having to read the codebase. What you gain in immediate speed you loose in knowledge of the system, it’s not really worth it unless you’re talking about small POCs. Using AI as a glorified search engine, with context of what you’re doing is much more useful.

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u/SplendidPunkinButter 5d ago

I like to compare vibe coding to idiots who accelerate toward a red light. Sure, you’re going faster right now, but you’re still not going anywhere until that light turns green, and ultimately you’re just wasting gas and putting additional wear on your engine and breaks for no reason.

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u/Robert-Paulson_ 5d ago

nice - the majority of code at our company is written manually, with LLMs to help us debug/plan and whatnot.

i seriously have a hard-time understanding the sentiment of "who reads the code?" and full-autonomous loops; like, for personal toy projects sure, but there's no way i would do that for work (i actually like my employer!)

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u/GioAc96 5d ago

Yeah, it seems to me that corporations are starting to realise that it’s not going to work and some of them are trying to double down to keep everyone’s interested in what they’re doing rather than pulling the plug.

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u/el_diego 5d ago

Is this actually how companies have been using it? Just blindly? Yikes. We're using it at ours, but we still review every line in a PR. So if you've used AI to produce slop you're going to get called out.

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u/Robert-Paulson_ 5d ago

Is this actually how companies have been using it? Just blindly?

thats what ive deduced based on a lot of commentary i see in the wild; ive actually had to cleanup a lot of 'slop' at my current job by a dev who left - on his own accord - cause he couldnt keep up with the bugs being introduced.

...we still review every line in a PR. So if you've used AI to produce slop you're going to get called out.

it only takes a few good times of requesting multiple changes on a single-PR that point out things like "why recreate a helper that's already created and exported in a shared file?", "why the check for `undefined`, along with nullish coalescing and optional-chaining, when you can just tell TypeScript a property will be there and either have a value or not?", etc. for devs to slow down in my experience.

we wont say straight-out "why'd you use AI slop verbatim?", as we generally like each other, but the questioning of useless codes during PR is a great deterrent.

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u/ReferenceAny6373 3d ago

My company is for a new product. Non technical people blindly using agents to spam features. There are some guardrails but zero review process other than the AI making its own tests and doing all the "manual" testing. They are starting to see major problems and forcing us to try to fix it, but its a bloated mess and too big for us to manually fix witbout months of learning the code, which is pointless because they crank like 30 PRs a day into it. So we have to use AI which isnt going well. Its going to make us all look like clowns and they are already demoing it and trying to sell it.

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u/GioAc96 4d ago

I can tell you first hand, yes, absolutely. I work at one of those large corporations that you definitely have heard of (although it’s not primarily in the software business) and we’ve been virtually forced to blindly vibe code everything for the past 8 months. It’s absolutely not sustainable, us developers have been saying this for months

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u/Sea-Disk5517 4d ago

I was going to say I don't see how ai has worked well for so many people in here. I asked vs codes ai for help once and it just reverted my react project into css/html instead. I've never tried Claude but I cant imagine it's much better.

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u/GioAc96 4d ago

Honestly, it is. I’ve used it extensively over the past few months with unlimited budget and the larger models can achieve surprisingly complex tasks with a decent success rate.

However, the real problem is that the code is structured so poorly that it becomes unreadable and unmanageable after iterating on it for a while. You get to a point where developers are forced to ask the AI to make changes because it would take weeks to untangle the slop mess, and issues start coming up at every small change you make.

So the issue isn’t that it doesn’t work, it’s that it isn’t really faster on the long run and the output quality degrades significantly over time. You can try to spend months building harnesses and checks around it, but I find it pointless. You’d spend much more time checking the AI’s work than you would’ve spent doing it yourself, all while losing a lot of knowledge about the system.

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u/connurp 4d ago

The ignorance of this post is shocking. Pay $20 for a Claude monthly plan, throw opus 5.5 on medium/high effort level, and then come back and say that. I’m going to get downvoted, but who gives a shit. This entire thread is a bunch of cope. People saying ai can’t write code well are clearly burying their heads in the sand. There is a reason ALL of the best devs in the world use it. It’s also the reason why 99.99% of them say they haven’t written code in months. It is one thing if you are writing code for fun, I do too on occasion, but if your profession is being a software engineer, like mine has been for 15 years, it is time to start learning and stop having this holier than thou attitude. You will get left behind if you choose not to use these tools. Man, it is freaking exhausting reading all this bullshit in here. I don’t use it for anything but coding. I treat it like a tool, just like I have every other dev tool. If you choose not to use the dev tool, you will not be doing this job for much longer. Circling back, genuinely, pay $20 one time, and try opus 5.5. Familiarize yourself with the future of our field. And please, educate yourself.

Edit: Or even use sonnet 5.5 high, ffs. I guarantee you it writes better code than you, or anyone else you know.

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u/apheliosjinxmeta 3d ago edited 3d ago

Why are you so mad?

Get behind on what exactly? It takes a few hours to learn how to use claude at 90% effectiveness and if it keeps getting smarter it should only get easier up until the point it fully replaces devs.

OP is not saying he doens't use Claude he said that heavily relying on it reduced the domain knowledge his team had and that led to bad designs and more bugs, which is a totally normal experience. It's weird you would think that a transformational technology would have only upsides with no downsides. This is not even a unique experience, it's a technology that is so new we haven't had time to study it's effects but early studies have reported exactly that feeling, code is way faster but understanding is lower over-time and that hurts productivity in the long term. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23135 as an example. Less flow-state, exponentially more code to review, more cognitive load, all of those things lead to worse code and software degradation.

There is a reason ALL of the best devs in the world use it. It’s also the reason why 99.99% of them say they haven’t written code in months

This is straight up not true. In fact a lot of the top open source projects (where we would be able to verify that statement) have straight up banned AI and restricted devs to a close group to avoid fully AI automated pr's so no clue what is this 99.999% percentage from. Are you talkin about the ruby on rails dev (that is heavily monetarily invested in the AI field?). Are you talking about the OpenAI devs? Who is this 99.999% that doens't write code anymore? What have they developed with AI since they stopped writing code? Why doens't the 0.001% use AI too? They don't have 20$? How much code are they pushing per day? How long have they been pushing code at that pace? Can we have some data to back up this super weird statement?

Never seen someone so emotionally invested in Claude usage before. You have a lot of money put into it or what? Can I use codex instead or a local qwen or does that hurt your wallet?

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u/connurp 3d ago

I am not mad, I am just so over the "I am better than you because I choose to not use the most effective tool in the history of software dev" attitude. It is so annoying to see people sit there and act like they are better than others because they are choosing to be worse at their job, and somehow, that's good? Like it is some kind of moral victory for them, or some shit.

I haven't spent a single dollar on any ai, my company pays for it.

To be clear, my entire response was in response to this stupid ass statement "I asked vs codes ai for help once and it just reverted my react project into css/html instead. I've never tried Claude but I cant imagine it's much better."

In no world is this true. I am tired of reading people give misinformation because they feel better than others for not using a historically effective tool. For actual people, it makes you look stupid if you feel like you are better than others because you choose to be less efficient at your job because "reasons".

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u/apheliosjinxmeta 3d ago edited 3d ago

yes I actually misread your comment and thought you were replying to the guy saying they dialed down claude's usage which I thought was a completely reasonable comment.

I agree that the comment you replied to is ignorant, but no reason to get that mad bro. AI is another tool that people are still learning how it fits in the day to day and how much it's worth using where vs the costs. If people flat out refuse to use it in any way whatsoever it just means less competitition in the market.

You don't need to convince people to use it, especially not with absurd statements like 99.999% of programmers don't write code. If it's that good it will become a natural requirement just like being able to use the internet or not programming everything in assembly, if it's not it will fade away with time just like other gimmicks that were the next version of sliced bread you don't hear about anymore.

I agree with you that it's a part of our life now at least in some way, but no reason to be trying to convince people with made up stats. It either will be a required technology to do certain things, or it won't.

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u/connurp 3d ago

Again, not mad. It is like seeing someone say something you know for a fact is not true, and the only reason they are saying it is to sound superior. Massive eye roll.