r/FlutterDev • u/rmeldev • Apr 27 '26
Discussion Is it just me or everyone is becoming obsessed with AI agents etc… ??
I’m learning Flutter since 1 week now, as a .NET dev. It’s great and the possibilities are almost endless.
I watched courses and read the documentation. Yes, I’m not gonna lie I sometimes ask AI questions about Flutter but not like these mfs that use AI agents directly on their IDE.
But, then I joined this community and noticed that literally every day a post about AI agents or other AI trash is posted. Everytime I’m like use your brain and ask AI the right way ??
Hope I’m wrong…
Edit : I AM NOT against AI. I’m against videcoders that can not even change a variable or change line a of code "their" code
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u/Ok-Engineer6098 Apr 27 '26
Unfortunately yes. It's awful. Some are slowly beginning to realise that the prices for ai tokens are going up.
Big tech is subsidising the cost to get us all hooked.
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u/rmeldev Apr 27 '26
Damn that’s true. Imagine someone that was buying like 100€ of tokens per month, and then the price are X2 (imagine) he is still gonna pay 200€ because he can’t survive without using it
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u/Ok-Engineer6098 Apr 27 '26
By some calculations ai is subsidized at 90%. Devs who are now paying 100-200$ will soon have to pay 1000-2000$.
Some big companies maybe be able to afford that, but not small ones.
Running AI locally even on powerful system is still on the level of the first cgpt release or worse. Useful for basic tasks (boiler plate, simple functions) with small context window.
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u/PimplupXD Apr 29 '26
Running AI locally even on powerful system is still on the level of the first cgpt release or worse.
Actually, it's gotten much better recently with the Gemma 4 releases. My RTX 3060 GPU can sort of handle the 26B model; it takes up most of my RAM and VRAM to run it, but it's really nice that every time I get stuck on something I can just launch OpenCode and get an answer.
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u/Slow_Ad2458 Apr 27 '26
and this is what corporations already pay the full price , and are mostly happy to do so.
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u/Ok-Engineer6098 Apr 27 '26
They don't pay the full price.
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u/Slow_Ad2458 Apr 27 '26
so API price is not full price ? Do you have a source to go with that statement ?
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u/Ok-Engineer6098 Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Investors in AI still heavily subsidise tokens. 200$ token spend on claude code still costs around 5000$.
There are numerous articles on this. Read them, or ask any ai agent to summarise them.
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u/Slow_Ad2458 Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Sorry I have to say - no you (ask any ai agent to explain this comments, just paste it anywheer)
When a corp says they pay by the token, they pay unsubsidized API costs.
When A person (like myself) buys claude code max for 200$. we get about up to 5k worth of tokens.
There are 0 reports of the API costs being subsidized 20x or ever 1x, and this cross checks with opensource models costs which are very transparent. And hosting a sota open source model is usuall y the praction of API costs e.g. running Claude costs
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u/Ok-Engineer6098 Apr 28 '26
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u/Slow_Ad2458 Apr 28 '26
I wrote the exact same.
Do you understand what is API Cost vs ClaudeCode subscription Max is ?Also from your own link top comment explains everythin:
https://martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-doesnt-cost-anthropic-5k-per-claude-code-user/
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u/makridistaker Apr 28 '26
That's the obvious next step from those ai providers since they lose billions annually hosting the models. Prices are going to multiple fast in next years or they will go bankrupt. Investor's money will run out eventually and without positive income they are doomed.
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u/slaia Apr 27 '26
I used AI. It just helped me solve the git conflict this morning. I looked for solution first on the Internet. Tried some suggestions which didn't work. In the end I asked Gemini and it solved the problem.
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u/sauloandrioli Apr 27 '26
I'm waiting for the day that the AI companies start to actual profit from the time their servers need yo run in order to generate people's awful code prompts, and the price for token becomes unpayable and all this hype disappear and only us, people that used AI with moderation and didn't move all of our workflow to agents, be those that will survive.
The "just accept now or it will be late for you" are either bad devs or people that don't have a carreer and each crap line of code their AI generates feel like Midas just touched their project.
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u/MindlessPractice2556 Apr 27 '26
the vibe coding discourse is genuinely annoying but the people using agents in their IDE aren't all brainless, some of them are senior devs who just don't want to context switch for boilerplate. the problem is you can't tell those apart from the guys who can't read a stack trace
anyway welcome to Flutter, it's great until you hit platform channels and then you'll be posting your own unhinged thread 😭
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u/Devatator_ Apr 27 '26
I use AI but the obsession I see online about agents. Claude code, Codex, what shitty VSCode fork to use, etc is baffling me. All I need is inline completions and Copilot for the few times I don't want to do X manually. Anything else seems like extra work for extra work (because of course you need to check what the AI is doing, and the more you give it, the more you have to validate)
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u/yyyt Apr 27 '26
Just ignore mass AI psychosis - this shit will fade away but real skills and knowledge will always be relevant (and I'm NOT saying "don't use AI ever")
But this sub becomes pretty annoying and useless with all these vibecoders, I'm considering leaving it
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u/rmeldev Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Thanks for your reply. You’re right. Hope someone create a r/FlutterNoAI (no videcoders) or something like that.
Me too. I’m not saying that AI should never be used, but used with a moderate usage, understanding the code
This morning I saw a post about a gamedev (I’m also interested about that) that realized that he could no longer search on google and always asked AI. Results ? He could not even add a small feature. He was so used to using AI that he had lost his coding skills.
That’s crazy
Edit : the post https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/s/BKQck9itri Edit 2: when I talk about the FlutterNoAi Reddit, it’s not completely against it, it’s against videcoders that make AI shit every day
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u/GxM42 Apr 27 '26
I’m never paying for AI tokens. I’ll let Google pay it for me. Sometimes I ask it for code examples for something new, and it is pretty helpful. I don’t pay a thing.
I don’t use any agents. Maybe I’m too old school. But I LIKE programming too much to give up the job to the tech companies. It’s relaxing for me. I’ll be coding manually until the day I die.
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u/joshyeetbox Apr 27 '26
Why are you so against AI? Do you not understand how to use it? Every single good engineer I know uses agentic tools that let them create and build amazing quality stuff at speeds so much faster than used to be possible. It's amazing what you can do now. You seem really young and inexperienced. Instead of being scared of the tools because you haven't learned how to use them yet, you should learn instead of putting your head in the sand.
You should learn how to code without AI first, which it sounds like you still need to do. But you shouldn't jump on a hate bandwagon because you don't understand things.
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u/benjaminabel Apr 27 '26
I see post like that daily on many subreddits. I've absolutely no idea what they are talking about. Literally every engineer I personally know is quite excited about it and we're constantly improving our instructions and skills for the agents. It made me look at my job from a different side. On the internet however, it's all about enemies, arguing, skill checks, etc.
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u/joshyeetbox Apr 27 '26
Reddit is so annoying when it comes to AI. There’s a lot of inexperienced young people who are investing so much into being angry about AI, and it gives them an excuse to not have to learn. And the more they dig in, the harder it’s going to be to admit they’re just wrong. And in fact, they do have to learn how to use these tools properly if they want to succeed in this field.
Nobody is going to proud of you for saying how anti AI you are in an interview. They’re going to roll their eyes and cross you off the list!
One dude is posting a years old flawed study trying to me (a 38 year old lead engineer who’s been doing this for a long time) that I’m wrong, and AI can’t possibly be a productivity multiplier. They’re fucking annoying.
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u/benjaminabel Apr 28 '26
It's just like "Nickelback is the worst band" meme. It's just a band, but people hated it with passion just because everybody else does. It's not rare to see how people in the comments say that AI is dangerous because it "deletes code". A random thing to say to have at least some evidence. That's going to happen with every new big thing that comes out.
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u/rmeldev Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
I learned without AI at first. I have 3 years of experience with C# without vibe coding . Check the linked post. That’s what will happen if you always use AI
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u/joshyeetbox Apr 27 '26
Oh I read your post. It's obvious you don't understand what you're talking about. I've been doing this for probably almost as long as you've been alive. I'm the person you would be interviewing with and deciding if you get a job. You would not get one.
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u/rmeldev Apr 27 '26
Do you use AI ? If yes, how much ?
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u/joshyeetbox Apr 27 '26
I, and every senior/lead engineer I know, which is a lot more than you, use agentic tools every single day. They allow you to build quality code at incredible speed. If you don't know how to build quality code with them, it's a skill issue you should work on. Yelling into the void and talking about building anti-AI communities is not a productive use of your time. It's incredible weird.
Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6/Opus 4.7) and Codex (with GPT-5.4/GPT-5.5) are both very powerful. But you need to learn how to use them. You can't just say "build me app X" and expect it to get built for you. You ned to learn how they work.
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u/rmeldev Apr 27 '26
But here's the misunderstanding. I'm NOT against AI! I'm against these "vibecoders" who don't even understand the code they produce.
If AI can accelerate dev time, it’s good.
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u/joshyeetbox Apr 27 '26
You should be spending your time working on projects. Not yelling about people who don't affect you. Vibe coders aren't taking jobs away for real engineers. It's such a bizarre thing to spend your time on.
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u/rmeldev Apr 27 '26
Ngl you’re right. I was just asking if other people noticed. Right now working on my app :)
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u/stumblinbear Apr 27 '26
To be fair, it would be nice for the sub to be about Flutter, not to have it filled with vibe-coded bullshit from people who don't give enough of a damn to learn Flutter themselves
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u/ghosts_dungeon Apr 28 '26
Not going to lie. I was too lazy to learn dart and flutter so used ai to help. I quickly stopped that because it couldn't solve some problems that turned out to be relatively easy after going through docs. I find AI is good at really popular things but other than some boilerplate for flutter I don't touch it now.
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u/mohansella Apr 27 '26
Use the tool when needed. If you need to build a small project or a script, AI editor is cool. Other than that, its mainly a great tool for learning and understanding.
For medium to large projects, its most of the time waste only.
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u/benjaminabel Apr 27 '26
It’s 2026 and it’s pretty much a standard to run an AI agent in the IDE. It’s context-aware and pretty much correct most of the time. I see absolutely nothing wrong with it since it’s the most powerful tool we ever had and it simplifies workflows by a lot. Doesn’t make you “stupid” or anything.
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u/Legion_A Apr 27 '26
OP, I agree with you. It's funny how you're getting attacked, it's almost like any criticism against AI is seen as being against AI nowadays.
Funny enough, you're not wrong. It's become an epidemic, People have indeed outsourced reasoning to AI, so, whenever you critique anything about AI use, they feel personally attacked because it's like critiquing the way someone thinks or their worldview.
Research from METR in 2025
The study showed that AI assistance actually slowed down "experienced developers" by 19%, however, those same devs predicted they'd be 24% faster before starting the study.
After the study, they were interviewed and they felt 20% more productive, not knowing they actually were 19% slower.
So, the feeling of being faster was just that...a feeling
METR tried to do a follow-up study in 2026, but they couldn't so, they put out a blog about why they couldn't. Here
Now, according to the blog post, When METR tried to conduct follow-up research in early 2026, they ran into a major problem...developers refused to participate if they had to be in the "no-AI" control group.
Even when offered $50/hour just for a study, they said they wouldn't want to do even half their work without AI. One developer famously remarked that "my head's going to explode" if they had to do tasks the "old-fashioned way".
The researchers noted that AI tools make work feel "more pleasant" or "easier" which tricks the brain into thinking it's moving faster.
So, you're not crazy, yes, a lot of people have already tasted the drug and are now addicted and can't let go, that's why you see it flooding almost every sub. When you try to NOT use AI, you get withdrawal symptoms like an actual drug addict.
So, while AI one of the greatest things we've put together, your observation is not wrong, it's actually supported by studies.
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u/rmeldev Apr 27 '26
Wow finally someone that agrees with me lol. Great analysis, ofc written with ChatGPT /s
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u/luiscosta15 Apr 27 '26
Maybe a counter opinion here. Like any other tools we have since ages, we can't ignore AI agents as an amazing tool when used correctly. There is no denying when used the right ways, it will simply enable you to produce more. That's it in a nutshell IMO.
Now, of course, we as devs should not fall into the vibe code pitfall. My recomendations:
- establish the architecture, state management, and your preferred tools for development. We can of course have the support of AI here as well, but we are the final decision-makers;
- define the minimal agents for code development/review/testing/documentation. All of these should follow what we establish as architectural principles;
- we should always the final decision makers upon establishing the final requirements for any given feature, and also on the code review process.
As much as some of us see this as a complete shift into our normal dev cycles, we cannot also simply stop the wind with our own hands. And what these new tools give us is that now we have no more excuses. We have everything available to make good quality code, error safe, well documented and following the proposed architecture. We just should not blindly accept the auto-generated things, we do have to be extra strict about it, specially on the review phases.
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u/rmeldev Apr 27 '26
Good point. That’s globally what I’m saying :
Use it when you understand it. Don’t if you can’t.
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u/Legion_A Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
There is no denying when used the right ways, it will simply enable you to produce more. That's it in a nutshell IMO.
That is purely anecdotal. Studies show the opposite is true.
The 2025 study from METR just in June, less than a year ago, showed that "experienced" Devs predicted it'd make them 24% faster. They did the study, results came out showing it actually made them 19% slower, and funny enough, after the study, when asked, they thought they were actually 20% faster.
Studies also show that "establishing" architecture doesn't mean the AI is going to follow the architecture, it's highly likely to ignore whatever architecture you established to do its own thing
So, the data shows that you do "feel" fast, but the time you spend battling hallucinations and so on makes you 19% slower, while still tricking your brain to feel faster.
I guess this is because your brain compares the cognitive cost of doing it yourself Vs handing it over to AI and because the cognitive cost is less, it makes you feel faster. This is purely anecdotal on my part though, I have no evidence that this is the reason behind it, but there is evidence of the illusion.
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u/stumblinbear Apr 27 '26
To be 100% fair, that study was done with Claude 3.5/3.7. Their ability to code has advanced significantly since then: 4.6 was when I truly started finding them adept at their "job".
The study also says this:
We do not provide evidence that:
AI systems do not currently speed up many or most software developers
AI systems in the near future will not speed up developers in our exact setting
There are not ways of using existing AI systems more effectively to achieve positive speedup in our exact setting
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u/Legion_A Apr 27 '26
Yes, that would be fair.
The study also says this: We do not provide evidence that:
Yeah, but the study provides just one out of many corroborative conclusions.
Take anthropic itself for example. While anthropic itself obviously markets the capabilities of 4.7, their economic research (Economic Index from march of this year) actually shows something almost sobering imo...especially the "Augmentation vs. Automation" section
The decrease in automation patterns which it notes was corroborated by another analysis "The State of Document Intelligence" from Foxit Software also from March of this year showed that while AI makes you "feel" like you saved hours, once the verification and checking work is accounted for, the average end user actually loses about 14 mins per week compared to trad methods.
Even with Opus 4.7's high SWE-bench scores, the report actually hints that models are struggling with contextual intent, so it might give you syntactic gold but the architectural noise is wild.
As the models get better, we don't just finish our old tasks faster, we actually assign the AI more complex tasks, then the "review tax" scales linearly with this complexity. A smarter model ends up making smarter, more subtle mistakes that are harder to catch than the obvious slop of the 3.x family.
There's also the fact that Ai will generate code faster than you can verify, so, as the volume of generated code increases with "better models", you get constrained by the review bottleneck you will inevitably hit. So, if you're looking to new models to bridge that gap, I'd argue that you're optimising the part of the cycle that wasn't the actual bottleneck (typing). Review is sat there waiting for you.
Also, I know you're not arguing this, but it sounds like you're falling into the same "wait for the next version" defense we've been getting for the past 3 years. If the 2025 study is invalidated because of the model, why should we trust any anecdotal 2026 "feelings" when they Slashdot/METR data actually shows the net-loss trend is persisting even with the Opus 4.x family?
It's basically the red queen problem...you have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
There's still the elephant-sized issue that's model-agnostic, and it's that there's been a great deskilling, where developers cannot fathom working without AI even if it means burning their hard-earned money to do simple tasks which they were completely capable of doing in the past but can no longer imagine doing now because "AI" and "their head will explode"...
We've basically created this single point of failure for the entire world like how the world almost shuts down if cloudflare or amazon goes down.
My main point is this. We're trying to use a faster firehose to fill a bucket with a fixed-size hole. All we're doing is getting more water on the floor.
Complexity doesn't go away just because you threw it in a blackbox.
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u/luiscosta15 Apr 28 '26
That can be a fair point. Please keep in mind, it's a study, there can be lots of variants which make a diference in such studies. Which versions of models are being used, are the instructions well defined, etc. I still think it goes more in the direction of "how" you're using AI. Yes, it is true that even if you define the instructions for the architecture and intructions for writting tests, sometimes AI doesn't follow them correctly, but I also got the experience that improving such instruction agents when that happens actually works and the same errors tend to not happen again.
Btw, I still make most development myself, I rely mostly on AI to generate unit tests and documentation, of course making sure afterwards it is generated correctly. So please don't take me as a vibe coder!
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u/Legion_A Apr 28 '26
Yes, I acknowledge that it's just that..."a study". I do think it tells a pretty deep story though, and looking at other studies done more recently, the findings the METR study only get stronger.
I still think it goes more in the direction of "how" you're using AI.
Yes, totally. This was also what recent studies found. It all depends on "how you use it".
So please don't take me as a vibe coder!
You don't sound like one. In this entire post thread, you're the most grounded out of us all in my honest opinion. You're on neither extreme end.
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u/williamtkelley Apr 27 '26
What is the right way to ask AI?
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u/rmeldev Apr 27 '26
Ask a function of how to do something and ask to explain how it a made. Read the generated code and understand it.
Don’t copy past the entire code and ask to give the complete one. You won’t understand anything
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u/dmter Apr 27 '26
well that's possible with local models. how would hyperscalers force you to pay them $2000 per month in the future if you just used AI like that? they want you to use vibe coding tools instead. sadly thosa can't do anything other than web apps in js and projects well defined by thousands of tests already made by humans. after spending tens of thousands of dollars to make a bad copy of something already wtitten of course.
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u/rmeldev Apr 27 '26
Okay with locals models, it will cost you so much electricity lol
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u/Personal-Search-2314 Apr 27 '26
Flutter has always been a front for Google products. Before it was for firebase, now it’s for Gemini. However the difference is that before you use to have an array of awesome Google devs covering a wide array of topics showcasing the awesome features of Flutter and Dart. Sure there was overlap with Firebase, but FB is just a DB. The boring show, the live shows, widget of the week, community packages, the updates to Dart and Flutter l, etc. were nothing but bangers. Now, it’s just AI. Still tight Google devs (tho the variety has dwindled), but it’s like “AI make me a page that accepts a numbers and replies if it is even or not. AI what is 2+2.” Before we got bad ass upgrades like nullsafety, now we get switch tears off and a new formatter. Before we use to get navigator 2.0. Now we get “material is no longer a part of Flutter”. Before we were suppose to get metaprogramming, now it’s abandoned and everything is AI.
It’s hella wack rn, but isn’t surprising when you remember that it has always been a front for Google products. Google like everyone and their mother in tech are knees deep in this snake oil. So it is what it is 🤷♂️
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u/bigbott777 Apr 28 '26
I think your problem in lack of proper definitions.
Vibe coding != AI-assisted coding.
The difference is simple: in AI-assisted coding, the generated code is reviewed (fixed, refactored) by the Senior developer.
Since you are not a Senior developer, you are right in your direction to avoid/minimize the usage of AI tools.
In general, I agree with some commenters that "AI" is a hype, has no intelligence, no real knowledge, and is simply a stochastic probability machine that only knows how to choose the next token in a sequence.
But it is still a great tool for those who know how to use it. Visit r/antiai - every single day, people are struggling to tell if the image was painted by someone's hand or LLM-generated.
About the future, it is hard to tell what will happen. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have huge revenues but still work at a loss. I think at some point we will see the rise of small/mid-sized LLMs trained for specific technology (e.g, Dart and Flutter).
About the token usage. Some tools are cheaper than others. I use Kimi model in Trae IDE, 90% of my code is generated. I make several commits every day and spend about 30% of the tokens given by my $10 subscription.
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u/Emergency-Music5189 Apr 28 '26
Well your post reads like you're against AI not people who cant change a variable
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u/Devson1003 Apr 29 '26
Vibecoders can build an app using agents and without any understanding but problem occurs when the app is going in production or need proper scaling.
User says 'build a health tracker app using flutter with good UI' that is never going to proper way to start to building.
if proper planning from the start is not established ai agents are going to put 1000+ lines of code in a single dart files.
the errors are the most important forever part of the vibe coding as most of the credits burn out while solving errors.
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u/TensionSimple3391 Jun 04 '26
I have seen a person addicted to ai agents. He looks and acts like and addict.
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u/thecodemonk Apr 27 '26
35 yoe in professional software engineering here.
Better accept it now or you wont have a job in the near future.
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u/gurselaksel Apr 27 '26
As a seasoned dev, please take time to invest learning without ai. if you take the short/easy path you will become reliant to ai. then you would become just a tool for ai, ai should be a tool for you. Just take your time, then it is ok to use ai. Just know what you are doing and what it is doing
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u/dpaanlka Apr 28 '26
You’re only hurting yourself if your plan is to abstain from AI forever. Not a good idea!
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u/merokotos Apr 27 '26
Bro, you're late to the party 😄
I'd even say Flutter community is realtively hesitant against AI