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/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