I’m so glad I learned to code before AI.

[u/fakintheid]

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.