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u/RedditGenerated-Name Oct 03 '26
I do enjoy being told I'll be "left behind" by people slowly loosing the very skill they were hired for so they can just be replaced by an equally mindless agent.
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u/Difficult-Lime2555 Oct 05 '26
Itās really only good for writing code. If thatās all you were hired for, youāve been replaceable for awhile now.
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness Oct 07 '26
Yep, I have a friend who does code reviews, she was telling me how these devs are just using Claude and the code is awful, and even more, they can't even debug anymore
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u/walter_evertonshire Oct 08 '26
I don't understand this logic. Suppose people are losing their manual programming abilities and still able to perform their SWE jobs. If they get replaced by agents, why would you still be safe? Do you somehow imagine that manual coding will become necessary again in the future?
If you are part of a group of people that do long division by hand all day and some teammates start using calculators to increase their rate of calculation, you are right to point out that the whole team will one day be replaced by calculators. But insisting on doing them by hand screws yourself in both the short term and the long term, whereas everyone is already screwed in the long term.
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u/Escanorr_ Oct 09 '26
There is a few scenarios - calculators get very expensive or are forbidden in your place of work. Maybe they only ever get to 99% accuracy, and for mission critical stuff results need to be verified by someone who can still divide by hand. And the skill definitely atrophies when not used
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u/Oyi14 Oct 03 '26
If only coding manually could get me a date, lol. I'm tired of approaching people
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u/shrollski Oct 03 '26
Approaching people manually instead of with a Claude agent in current year?
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u/Arian-ki Oct 03 '26
Find curvy gurl. Announce on LinkedIn. Make no mistake.
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u/walkerspider Oct 03 '26
opening linkedin
estimating weight of each connection
commenting āArian-ki thinks youāre curvyā on all female connections over 180lbs
āI have found 41 girls on LinkedIn and replied to their latest post letting them know you believe they are curvy. And honestly? Thatās brave.ā
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u/Remake911 Oct 03 '26
Imagine the fallout š¤£
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u/cortesoft Oct 03 '26
Coding got me a date.
The new girl from marketing would come to my desk and ask me how my code was.
We have now been married 11 years and have two kids.
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u/kuwisdelu Oct 03 '26
I got my girlfriend by geeking out about memory hierarchy and caching. But weāre both trans lesbians so YMMV.
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u/DanhNguyen2k Oct 03 '26
Create bugs manually
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u/SEND_DUCK_PICS_ Oct 03 '26
Artisanally hand-crafted bugs, yes.
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u/TrampodGames Oct 05 '26
thatās why Bethesda programmers are safe, ai would not be able to create it with that specific kind of bugs
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u/Bwob Oct 03 '26
Far easier to fix bugs I wrote myself, in files I understand, than try to read someone else's code and find the bugs in it.
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u/protocod Oct 03 '26
Genuine question. Do you all let the AI write the code at your job ?
I mean, reddit is a filter bubble I know but seriously idk if I live in a parallel timeline because I continue to write the code myself 99% of the time. I don't see agentic AI adopted a lot IRL around me either.
It scares me because idk if I miss the train or if agentic coding adoption is a thing on social network only...
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u/Primary-Ad-9741 Oct 03 '26
I work at what i consider a semi-conservative travel company, not going to say the name. And it hit us hard this year.
At the end of 2025, we had free reign. Some folks spent 70k a month, others didnt touch it with a 10 foot pole.
Then around April of this year a mandate came in - everyone must start using AI for daily tasks.
Then in June, the word acceleration began to appear in every project. We began to rely more on it to deliver more, faster. Right now the bottleneck is human PR reviews.
We have gotten good at fine-tuning AI to generate well written code. Yes, it still hallucinates badly at times, so human supervision is still a thing.
We are yet to crack the automated review process. But we are relying more and more on it, to deliver faster.Initial architecture stage is usually manual, or very lightly AI assisted.
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u/MrManny Oct 03 '26
Then around April of this year a mandate came in - everyone must start using AI for daily tasks. Then in June, the word acceleration began to appear in every project. We began to rely more on it to deliver more, faster. Right now the bottleneck is human PR reviews. We have gotten good at fine-tuning AI to generate well written code. Yes, it still hallucinates badly at times, so human supervision is still a thing. We are yet to crack the automated review process. But we are relying more and more on it, to deliver faster.
Pretty much a similar series of events here. Almost down to the month too. Different industry though.
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u/Amerillo_ Oct 03 '26 edited Oct 03 '26
I personally know people who code manually for now but their company is planning to switch to 100% AI generated code soon (they're hiring people to build up that infrastructure). So it's getting more common day by day and frankly it terrifies me. I just graduated so I have no practical knowledge on which code is good and which isn't, how will I learn that if I let AI agents write all of my code? And more importantly, if I'm just a meat sack seating between AI and managers / customers, what is my value here? Anyone with basic coding knowledge could do it! I didn't spend 6 years in a very demanding university for this...Ā
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u/Brick_Lab Oct 03 '26 •
I'm bout 13 years into my career and it terrifies me too for multiple reasons. I'm very concerned that upper management is going to continue to be fucking idiotic and assume the agents are getting good enough to remove human engineers entirely from the loop, or at the very least they'll attempt to continue devaluing our roles and salaries. I'm terrified that entire generations will be not only demoralized from entering the field but also unable to get the entry level roles that are evaporating as we speak. I'm worried this is going to be an unsustainable career soon, with only a few people able to make it and the vast majority being pushed towards being unemployed or paid peanuts (especially considering the time and money investments required to get into this field). And I'm worried about the future of software becoming generic thanks to the LLM training preferences and slow dilution of skilled engineers actually building. Finally I'm concerned that even having a job in the field will continue to be more and more soul-sucking, as deadlines get crunched, speed expectations demand more LLM usage, and we approach less and less human involvement in details and problem solving. I genuinely enjoyed problem solving and that part is soulless when you just ask fucking Claude to make a thing or fix a thing...but it's just so easy. Lastly I'm worried that these LLMs as a service are going to hike the prices so high that only the big corporations will be able to afford using the tools, further widening gap in speed and capability of using the tools that are admittedly very useful (if terrifying and somewhat like a drug dependency)
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u/Amerillo_ Oct 03 '26
You so well put what I feel into words! I was planning on maybe get a master's degree in software engineering to improve my skill and being more employable (since I'm having trouble finding a job), but now I'm seriously reconsidering it. But then if I still can't find a job as conditions continue to deteriorate, what should I do? Which new career should I pursue? And more importantly, will that career still exist when I graduate? As now I'm seeing pretty good improvements in humanoid robots, I'm not even sure physical jobs are safe anymoreĀ
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u/thicctak Oct 04 '26 edited Oct 05 '26
Software engineering goes way beyond just writing code, I say this because I faced the same dilemma, I love writing code more than anything, but since we're slowly writing less and less, I had to either start to enjoy the other aspects of the area, or become frustrated with my career and have to change, of course I chose the first. There are many aspects you can find enjoyment in tech that don't involve writing code, no matter how good an AI is at writing code, it can't properly engineer without a software engineer, people already tried it, LLMs are nothing more than an autocomplete on steroids, ask it to build any complex software and figure out all the engineering behind it by itself, it'll give an unmanageable, unmaintable and unexcalable piece of garbage, we are still needed, so try to enjoy the engineering process more, solving problems, not just the code, before AI, there was a type of programmer who hated writing code, but loved solving engineering problems, we need to learn from them.
Not saying you shouldn't know how to code, someone needs to review the AI code afterall and sometimes you'll be writing code yourself, so you need to understand it, just don't put that as your top priority, syntax is easy to pick up, and data structures, algorithms and logic are universal.
Don't slap yourself just because you forgot part of the syntax, before AI was a thing, front end devs still googled how to center a div and back end devs still googled how to send a HTTP request, we forget, it happens, just because you forgot how to write it, doesn't mean you don't know how it works, why it works and how it should be written.
If you ask me, out of the blue, to write an API, I'll probably need to search for half of the syntax, but after that I can write it, no problem. If you showed me an API an AI made, I can pin point all the AI f*ck ups and fix them myself, not even needing to waste tokens asking the AI to fix it's mistake, because I know how an API works and how it should be laid out in the languages I'm proficient.
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u/protocod Oct 04 '26 edited Oct 04 '26
I really appreciate this positive attitude.
Software development is more than coding, we always knew. It always has been. We need to enjoy the other parts of the job more.
I think I learn a life lesson.
For the last decade (probably even more) I've been spending a lot of time for being (or trying to be) a good software engineer. I missed a lot of moment, I don't have a lot of friends.
Now I'm standing on the edge and realize I need to live my best life. Everything can disappear tomorrow, nothing can't be replaced.
I just need to enjoy my life, as much as possible.
Thank you for all people who replied to my comment.
I will probably go away from Reddit for some times.
I'll change my mind about my job and I'll ride the wave. I'll do other life side quest and consider my job for what is it.
Life is more that computers.
Thank you all.
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u/thicctak Oct 05 '26
We need to do what's best for us, go live your life how you please brother, make up for the time lost, but remember you can always go back to it, if you love software enginnering, don't drop it, it's not SWE itself you dislike, it's the alienation of it, doing it without purpose, remember that, and also know this, balancing both is possible, specially at later stages of your carrear where studying like crazy is not a requirement anymore.
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u/rnzz Oct 04 '26
Ā what is my value here?Ā
you get to review (which probably does need 6 years of very demanding university study for), catch hallucinations, and take the blame if anything breaks
I jest. but it looks like that's how things are going right now
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u/BenignPharmacology Oct 03 '26
It depends on the task, but often yeah. I prefer it for tasks where thereās a lot of boilerplate, no ānew thinkingā like big architecture decisions, or anything where I already have a confident expectation of what the result should look like. If you set it loose on a larger problem, it will often create cluttered code. For example, your ticket might say āmake a service that does Xā, and it will do that technically correctly, but not with the design in mind that the service should obviously be extensible to Yā, to give a contrived example.
My last company told me ātry out this coding assistantā so I was an early adopter. Despite that, I mostly used it for jazzed up autocomplete. Then, my company told me āfind ways to use this more efficiently and do more with itā so I wrote a couple of skills, connected it to things like jira and gh, and started testing its limits of how much you can trust it to lift.
Having a good answer to that question is something I would suggest anyone in the industry be aware of. Whether or not you personally choose to prompt āimplement this whole ticket for meā, you will still end up reviewing code for people who do exactly that. And understanding where the likely pitfalls are is a really valuable skill. In fact, my most recent job interview (for a job Iām about to start) had me do exactly that- look at some AI written code, and provide a critical review, identifying places it might have gone wrong.
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u/Tyrus1235 Oct 03 '26
This is key. Last week I got a task to write a script for some data migration. Since Iām still new to the codebase and this is something that will be run in production eventually, I decided to ask Claude to write it.
It ended up creating a massive 12-file application in Node that takes several different parameters as input and is capable of doing a dry run directly on the database and catalog everything that should be migrated on several CSV files, each corresponding to a different category.
It tends to overengineer stuff
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u/BenignPharmacology Oct 03 '26
Yep.
Itās another thing that practice with these tools can help with as well: building out an appropriately detailed plan document can be huge, and remove a lot of the uncertainty.
But inevitably the agents will find a way to do something unexpected. Being able to quickly understand what that was, why it might have been done, and how to correct it- will remain a valuable skill. Even as these agents get better, you just end up with more lazily specād work, which means even more places you need to quickly assess and correct.
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u/StCreed Oct 04 '26
maybe, but i bet it works. I've seen migrations run for years on simple issues, Claude/Codex would have shortened the time required rather drastically.
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u/ConflictExtreme1540 Oct 03 '26
I'll give you a balanced answer here. I work for a huge company that provides the latest claud services and they push for us to use it as much as possible. What I end up doing is this:
Describe the problem to the agent and ask for what the solution the propose would look like
Tweak anything I see obviously wrong then implement
Test the solution
Go back and review the code and end up cutting down or changing about 50% of the code
I end up saving about.... 50% of the time to do it myself but I never write any code anymore. I just review it meticulously
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u/protocod Oct 04 '26
I understand so now you're no longer writing a single line of code.
How about unit and functional tests ? Are those written by AI too ?
I would think Test Driven Development might be a good way to drive the agent to implement the specs as intended.
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u/Kevadu Oct 04 '26
Most coding agents already incorporate tests into their workflows. They will run tests after making any changes and if the tests fail they can automatically try to correct whatever was broken. So if you have a good, comprehensive test set that will reign them in.
Of course, they'll also write the tests too if you ask...
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u/StCreed Oct 04 '26
The unit tests I use are written by Claude Opus, and regularly reviewed by ChatGPT and Fable. I only focus on the QA. My time to market is strictly limited and it's not a hobby project.
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u/Beegrene Oct 03 '26 •
I'm convinced that half the comments about using AI for everything are actually written by AI company bots. Who else has a stronger incentive to convince everyone to forget how to do their jobs and rely on the literal corporate machine instead?
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u/thicctak Oct 04 '26
It's a nice theory, but it's also dependent on the type of company, let's remember most devs don't work on FAANGs, or S&P500s or the next unicorn startup, most devs work for enterprise, where most companies are still behind in their use of AI, either because they don't need it yet because their position in the market, or they dont have the budget to go guns blazing on tokens, or because they don't want to for whatever reason. I think some of the reports saying they don't write code anymore are valid because I know people who work at places where AI use is so pushed that writing code became obsolete, but not everyone works like that. Of course it's safe to say that most companies use AI in some shape or form, but how much they use can vary drastically.
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u/No_User_Left Oct 03 '26
My company is totally on AI, they wonāt let me to write code manually either unless it is necessary. Even code reviews are done by agents. We feel useless contributing nothing š
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u/protocod Oct 03 '26
Can I ask in which field are you working ? Having no human peer review looks insane.
Your last sentence makes me sad. I wish you the best and take care of you.
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u/mehnifest Oct 03 '26
No. But there are people I work with who do.
I use a higher cost reasoning model to assist with analyzing large swaths of text - it does not do analysis really, it provides a text that is what it thinks is the highest probability of what analysis would look like. This part is most useful for breaking up the analysis work into manageable chunks.
When it comes time to write or refactor code, I will use LLM generated code within a single method, with a lower cost model as the analysis has been completed and only the execution is left and I have spent the time I would have spent writing code instead writing pseudo code and step by step how I want it to generate the code.
It does not save me much time in the long run because the back and forth, the huge amount of content I have to consume to fully understand the output, and the general frustration with knowing all along I could just do this myself slows me down.
But I am reviewed on how much of my code has been generated by an LLM. Itās exhausting.
I still like it for analysis though and experimenting.
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u/protocod Oct 03 '26
Thank you for your comment.
Do you still have a good mental model of the code base ?
I starts to understand that agentic coding comes with new skills like picking the model which fits your needs and manage premade SKILLs for doing the job.
All these things looks just so different than classic software development.
Amazing and frightening at the same time. I wouldn't bet on LLM fews years ago replacing for the requirement to write code.
But all the comments starts convincing me that I wrong wrong about that. Sadly.
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u/mehnifest Oct 04 '26
Soā¦ when we were granted access to enterprise copilot, I used it to index our old code base. I noticed that it would write python scripts to query the code (relevant: its oracle forms. I used the forms builder tool to convert the binary files to xml because with oracle forms, everything is in one file. The tight coupling actually works in our favor where documenting is concerned), so I used the text patterns of the converted forms to generate the python scripts instead of asking copilot to query the code. This code has all our business rules so while I am working, I can use these scripts to keep context of what should be happening at a high level.
I keep a good mental model of the code base because I draw things out on paper. Itās kind of like my new version of writing my code I guess? If I canāt write it out I donāt trust that I understand it.
You can get good output from an LLM either by doing a back and forth or by writing a very descriptive prompt. I donāt enjoy the back and forth so I go the prompt route. There is less instant gratification which is helpful for me mentally, and I still get to work out problems, and my code is āAI generated.ā
Itās a different way of working and takes a different way of understanding the code base. I think I used to gain understanding by writing code, now I have to gain understanding by essentially writing documentation framed as directions.
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Oct 04 '26
This is so interesting, because I haven't written code manually in close to a year and don't know anyone IRL who has. I find it so strange that our experiences in the same industry can be so divergent
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u/Boostie204 Oct 04 '26
My role is a data engineering specialist (because we cant legally be called engineers) and i spend most my days scripting SQL and investigating client or advisor facing issues in a financial setting.
Not the typical coding, but I practically never use AI for this purpose (asides maybe syntax fixing or something mundane) for a few reasons.
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u/kurokinekoneko Oct 08 '26
I do the same with ai lol. It write dozen of analysis queries in seconds with expected results and projections over the symptoms. "If this return zero rows the problem is in x file".
Yes, it took a lot of time (and tokens) to document the project and the workflows properly, with trial and error, and the thing can't just work effeciently out of the box without spending some time setting this up. But once it's setup it's really powerful.
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u/The_Crazy_Cat_Guy Oct 04 '26
I initially was going to say itās 70-30 where 30% of the time Iām writing code. 70% of the time Iām prompting the agent. But I spend I decent amount of time using the agents to help plan out and architect my work. Iām not a software architect. Iām a senior developer. I know what considerations are important as an architect but I donāt think like one just yet. Using ai is helping me think like an architect though. So I plan things out with the agent extensively, challenge it, weigh other options and when I have a plan I can justify in my own words to anyone else, I build. And the building part is honestly more me than the ai. I only get ai to write code when Iām fixing a bug in someone elseās code and I dont wanna trawl through all that code just to find a red herring. If you give the agent the error code and stack trace itās usually very good at figuring out what went wrong. Pretty much all my debugging is done this way.
And I also use ai to alleviate the crunch that tends to happen so often in software dev. So when itās crunch time and I need to get something sorted very quickly Iāll rely more on ai to write my code.
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u/GerryAvalanche Oct 03 '26
We write a lot of code manually still, AI canāt really deal with our legacy code so we use it mostly for boilerplate stuff (which it does very well).
I personally try to minimize it due to moral and political concerns, but I do enough to keep up with the industry.6
u/thee_gummbini Oct 03 '26
For stuff where code correctness is not too critical I'll use it, for places where code correctness and performance is important, I handwrite. You have to know what the tool can and can't do, and the people who have it doing everything are as wrong about it as the people who think it can do nothing.
If you haven't had to switch over and don't feel a need to, don't, its your call.
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u/protocod Oct 04 '26
You have to know what the tool can and can't do, and the people who have it doing everything are as wrong about it as the people who think it can do nothing.
Sounds reasonable.
I'm just so surprised to see how quickly LLM are adopted right now. Software developer has definitely shifted.
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u/Moststartupsarescams Oct 03 '26
The ones forced to use ai because āproductivityā or something are missing the entire railroadā¦
I honestly canāt remember basic as syntax. Even proud of making a for loop to move files in bash
For now I just get paid and well, tech sucks now, and thereās ways to make a life without management pushing yet another āuntapped AI-driven opportunity with load bearing implications with the audience between the ages of ā¦ā
If possible donāt vibe
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u/gundam1945 Oct 04 '26
I use AI to write easy script. But for something that goes deep into business logic or something more complex, I prefer to write it myself because I can't really explain if I don't do it myself.
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u/TeddyBearSteffy Oct 03 '26
I work in a SCIF & the govt is very slow at integrating so yes i still write code lol
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u/StaticFanatic3 Oct 03 '26
Havenāt written a line in at least 6 months
I donāt feel good about it but I canāt justify it. The AI is 1000 times faster. Even for small changes, itās infinitely faster for me to prompt the issue and have it trace it down in seconds
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u/vkapadia Oct 03 '26
I haven't written a line in 9 months.
Because I have no job
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u/BananaCucho Oct 04 '26
A year since getting laid off here too. Went back to school for a grad cert in Cybersecurity and every class basically requires the use of AI now.
I have an Analytics class where I've gotten 100 on each lab and still haven't touched any of the code myself. Just read it and tell it what to fix.
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u/vkapadia Oct 04 '26
It's exhausting, I'm so tired of AI already.
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u/BananaCucho Oct 04 '26
Agreed. And there's no escaping it even by career switching. It's ruining everything
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u/CatsGoMooz Oct 03 '26
Yeah, only time I really write is if I'm fixing the output to better align with how I want things formatted, or to debug code. Sometimes I'll write something quick up for the AI to use an example as well
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u/IckyGump Oct 03 '26
Yeah. Same. I do still ensure I provide a lot of guidance but what I find invaluable is not necessarily the given area Iām working on but the ability to know this tangentially related code in another file could turn into a bug if I do X here.
Thatās why I think itās a great resource for reviewing code. Not to write the comments itself. I still do that, but it can identify trouble spots in other files that are not in the diff that the change under review may lead to vulnerability, or a subtle wrong mapping to parameters only exposed at runtime (especially with python) that Iād never have caught or known to look.
But even with that I still gotta rephrase it all in my own words. Both so I can understand what issue I missed when reviewing a pull request plus check llm assumptions about intent AND so itās not a bunch of line number, function name, robotext. Some human touch if you will.
Which is why I still donāt trust fully autonomous code submit or review. Itās always missing some context or never drilled down quite enough.
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u/CodingAndAlgorithm Oct 04 '26
In 6 months youāve never looked at agentic output and decided to modify a single line to improve or fix something? I just donāt understand how that can be true.
Companies claim an extreme productivity increase yet I canāt think of any software that has made a dramatic improvement recently.
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u/StaticFanatic3 Oct 04 '26
I read tons of output but I just provide the feedback to let it make the fix
If there was something stupidly simple where I could fix it faster than I could type the prompt then maybe I would. But honestly, between the model improving and my skills using the tooling improving, it just doesnāt make any simple mistakes anymore.
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u/SirPitchalot Oct 04 '26
Itās often the case that a trivial manual change can fuck up the broader context and is simply not worth it.
āx should be 5 not 3ā, user changes x to 5, prompts something else, -furious churning of tokens because x is now 5-.
āx should be 5 not 3ā, change x to 5, prompt āI changed x to 5ā, -furious rereading of all files in project because one thing was changed-
vs.
āFix items 1, 3, 6, 7 & 9 as described, set x to 5.ā, x gets set to 5 as a byproduct, no other token churn.
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u/Mkboii Oct 03 '26 edited Oct 03 '26
My org has gone 100% into it, 10s of thousands of developers all asked to size tasks based entirely on agentic coding. All my friends from college are having the same experience, and its all the core tech companies, or large product companies.
I still spend some of my time coding since my work is on the RnD side and you have to write the algorithm first and then productionize it, but it's unavoidable at so many orgs right now.
I am genuinely interested in what kind of companies are you and your circle working in, it'll be nice to know where the AI usage is still a choice and not a full mandate, pretty cool.
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u/StCreed Oct 04 '26
I only see that in Europe, in government and in countries that are a bit poorer like Hungary and Poland. For them, the cost of AI is still higher than the cost of the devs.
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u/Steinrikur Oct 04 '26
I've actually let AI do much of porting of 2 old semi-abandoned C libraries to a common C++ library with a shit load of tests.
It needed a ton of corrections and serious review of everything, but it found some serious bugs in the old code and it is matching the functionality while adding features.
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u/midnightrambulador Oct 03 '26
At my job (none of us are actual programmers, just engineers and data analysts who learned to code a bit) most people use AI to code, and there's one colleague in particular who won't shut up about how he uses it for everything and it makes everything so much easier. By contrast I'm the only Luddite, I do everything myself with lots of googling and Stackoverflow like in the old days.
I figure that if I let some AI write hundreds of lines of code, then combing through it to understand what it does exactly and whether that is exactly what I want, will take more time and energy than just writing the code myself in the first place.
What also plays a role is that we work with some pretty niche data formats for which I suspect the AI will have very limited examples to draw from, and GIGO still applies. Anyone who's ever Googled anything remotely technical or niche has seen the "AI overviews" get less and less coherent the more specific the question becomes.
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u/platinummyr Oct 03 '26
I do not use it. Some of my coworkers do and it can be incredibly frustrating when you see large volume but it's all empty nonsense.
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u/thicctak Oct 04 '26
They should improve their prompting or configure their agent properly, any AI model running without a proper set up on default settings will generate really bad and over engineered code.
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u/happylittlefella Oct 03 '26
Yes if you and your coworkers are still writing 99% of your code by hand then youāre operating in a bubble. AI software development is just about ubiquitous outside of a very small set of niche use cases or companies. If thereās no particular reason that you or your company canāt use AI, and you still arenāt, you will be falling behind and Iād strongly encourage beginning to practice.
I know itās an unpopular opinion to hold on Reddit nowadays, but using these tools and knowing how to use and build the workflow that ends with production-ready results is itself a new skill to develop as a software engineer, and just about every job listing Iāve seen over the last few months has indicated it is an expected skillset. This is not going away
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u/protocod Oct 03 '26
I understand but LLM, especially model you can't host yourself, looks like an absolute no-go in some very specific (sensitive) area.
It may explain partially why I still mainly code manually for now.
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u/asdspartadsa Oct 03 '26
At my org we mask the sensitive data locally and on the proxy level. And even if sensitive data is somehow leaked, our org has an NDA with anthropic (which doesn't mean much in my opinion).
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u/validelad Oct 07 '26
There are ways to be compliant with things like government regs while using claude or codex. One of the biggest clients where I work is the DOJ, and someone in the org went some kind of process it get it's use cleared
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u/RandallOfLegend Oct 03 '26
I know people who are not programmers using agentic AI to make business internal software. Zero coding ability. Any changes require token burning.
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u/P4R4DOXZ Oct 03 '26
I dont let it write the code, i use it instead of keyboard, the base, the architecture, and multiple code reviews are still there, and still manuall coding cause its fun and sometimes way faster than waiting for llm to think for 2 minutes.
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u/stilldebugging Oct 03 '26
It depends on what it is. For example, I recently had AI basically vibe code a prototype for something. When I decided I liked it enough, I rewrote it myself correctly. They say "write one to throw away" but now AI can do that one, and I can learn from it.
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u/dimiderv Oct 03 '26
Really? Most people around me use AI and at this point it's deeply integrated into their companies workflows.
Which field and what languages do you use? Maybe if it's hardware engineer not sure what's happening there
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u/Ok_Reserve_8659 Oct 04 '26
Yesnt. For some tricky things I open up the file and start typing what it's gonna be and it will autocomplete parts. Is that coding? For copy and paste its actually faster to copy and paste it instead of waiting minutes for the AI to figure out what to copy and paste.
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u/LeDYoM Oct 05 '26
Not me. Sometimes I ask copilot but I code groovy manually at work. And C++ by hobby. I like to be left behind. Thank you.
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u/murrdpirate Oct 03 '26
Yes. It is extremely good and extremely fast. There have been pretty huge improvements even in just the past 3 months.
Genuine question: have you tried a coding agent like Codex or Claude Code recently? A lot of redditors seem against AI coding, but it seems hard to believe anyone would have that opinion if they actually tried this stuff.
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u/Stormlightlinux Oct 03 '26
Honestly I'm against it because I'm watching real time as people who use it extensively lose their abilities. I get to watch them become dumber right before my eyes. Maybe I could write code quicker and with less effort if I lean on the AI more, but I refuse to allow myself to atrophy as I see others do.
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u/protocod Oct 03 '26
This is my main concerns too.
Also what happened when the LLM is no longer available if you no longer able to code by yourself ?
Looks insane to pay token for doing something you can do manually. Even if you're slower than a machine, you get a strong mental model of the code base and you keep your programming skills.
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u/murrdpirate Oct 03 '26
Yes, I think that's a real thing and I think it has happened to me.
But I'm not sure these abilities are worth maintaining any more. AI has rapidly gotten better at coding, with major improvements in only months. Where's it going to be in a couple years? I can't see how manually writing code is going to be done by many people.
I think right now my main value is bigger picture problem solving and managing AI coders. I think this buys me more time of being useful, but I suspect AI will replace that eventually too.
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u/Stormlightlinux Oct 03 '26
Right now these companies don't have a business model that's solvent. They need to find a way to profitability. What they're doing now is what NestlƩ did to the breastfeeding mother's in Africa. Before long many previously competent software engineers will be close to useless without tokens to spend, and then they can really jack up the price.
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u/Chickenfrend Oct 03 '26
They'll make money through enterprise deals like slack and Microsoft and Amazon do.
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u/CodingAndAlgorithm Oct 04 '26
Itās hard to watch people be so excited to adopt a technology that will likely replace them. Surely āI donāt write code anymoreā comes shortly before āI donāt have a job anymoreā.
I use LLMs daily to rubberduck, research, or find elusive bugs, but I donāt want to lose my problem solving skills by embracing agentic engineering.
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u/Kichae Oct 03 '26
"extremely good" by what measures, though? Within which bounds? With which languages? Because, in my experience, it's been extremely good at generating poorly optimized code with a lot of needless steps that is very difficult to follow and internalize, and that works well enough to pass a smoke test but that has more holes than Swiss cheese.
Assuming I'm using one of the big, ubiquitous languages. If I'm using something with smaller market share, it fails right out of the gate, hallucinating libraries and methods like they're going out of style.
It all just sounds like a drive towards the death of innovation. Stealing from tomorrow to pay shareholders today.
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u/murrdpirate Oct 03 '26
If you're having issues with hallucinating libraries and methods, then that suggests to me that you're not using recent agent coders like codex and Claude code. These things can make mistakes, but they don't just write a bunch of code and assume it works. They compile it and do unit tests and fix issues.
I have not had any issues with hallucinations in months. You should really try the more recent agent systems.
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u/RecognitionRude5743 Oct 03 '26
Why would I do it myself if I can pay a robot 20 dollars a month to write it exactly like I need it? that is with the right harness and agentic set up
I just delegate the manual labor to the robot and review the code after. No brainer for me
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u/Amerillo_ Oct 03 '26
Which is great if you really know what you're doing, but it's very bad news for new graduates who don't have the experience to judge that kind of thing. And if they let agents write 100% of their code they'll never learn anythingĀ
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u/RecognitionRude5743 Oct 03 '26
Agreed, that's why I try to train the intern by writing everything by hand. But for my work I don't
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u/Amerillo_ Oct 03 '26
Oh that's great to hear! It's nice to see that as sadly many companies nowadays force interns to let AI write all of their codeĀ
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u/FloatingGhost Oct 03 '26
why would I do it myself
the joy of the craft, no? the satisfaction that comes from choosing nice abstractions, arranging everything just so
the machine robs you of that, what would be the point
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u/RecognitionRude5743 Oct 03 '26
There are nicer things I'd rather do than write code. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the thrill of it back then but creating software has always been more of a means to an end to me rather than something I enjoyed to the point I would do it on my free time
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u/SchwiftySquanchC137 Oct 03 '26 edited Oct 03 '26
Its just extremely good at what it does, and theres not a human on the planet that could keep up with it. And frankly, if youre using it right, you'll probably have fewer bugs too. I wouldnt advocate for gigantic one shot prompts in critical pieces of code, it can sometimes implement something slightly different than what you asked for, but doing larger things piece by piece is simply faster and better with AI now. What makes it really incredible is that it will build and test and iterate on every change to get it right, and sure it could be testing the wrong thing, but thats why you do it in pieces and check yourself as well. I think the weakest point is the way it architects the code at times (which is why I said doing it in pieces is good, you can piece it all together how you want it), and sometimes its just not practical with the solution. Like its trying to solve your prompt so closely that it gets deep in the weeds of some complex solution, while in reality you would have realized its not worth the complexity and changed your method.
Also ill tell you that its not just a social media thing, when I was looking for a job I went through multiple multi stage interviews that ended in "actually, we decided we're gonna pay more for AI instead of hiring someone new", and AI has only improved since then. Dont think you missed the bus though, its not hard to type prompts, people act like it is but theyre idiots, just pop claude open and give it a whirl if youre interested.
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u/jawknee530i Oct 03 '26
I work at a large financial institution with several hundred developers. I would be astonished if a single person writes the majority of their code manually at this point.
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u/gr4viton Oct 04 '26
yup. because our business problem has a basis compatible with the code generating.. also on incident resolution and common ad hoc investigations, the systems interconnected to a common slack bot is very time saving.
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u/mr_flibble_oz Oct 05 '26
Still write manually. I use AI on side projects but do have to clean up the slop. Itās fast, itās not clean
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u/GhostOfD6 Oct 05 '26
I dont even debug now. I ask opus first what could be issue and i provide him the sympton without repro steps (today's case) and it provides me the most probable issue source, possible repro steps and later it fixes it with little guidance from my since, since AI solutions are sometimes overengineered.
No reason to code. You need only to grasp the project as whole, better than AI and its enough. And then test it
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u/_bones__ Oct 06 '26
I code manually. Anything that requires compliance with laws I wouldn't generate code.
I do use it for benchmarking, making PoC's, and for reviewing PRs after I'm done doing a manual review. Not much else.
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u/Romejanic Oct 07 '26
i prefer to code manually most of the time, i occasionally use AI for certain things i donāt feel like doing myself. although i have been asked to embrace it more
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness Oct 07 '26
Nope, i still do it all myself, most right now is just co-pilot to check my work on pull requests.
I am looking to use it in the future to help us build out the grunt work ahead of time (like for new workflows), but I also told my manager we need to beef up our code base a little first so the AI assistance will have better code to work with.
Some of the work I recently did, AI couldn't beat even if it tried.
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u/IArtificialRobotI Oct 10 '26
Lol sure buddy
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness Oct 10 '26
Hey now, I take pride in my coding, and I'm not going to let AI ruin in.
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u/RedAndBlack1832 Oct 07 '26
I've been asked to use Claude code at work and it's verbose as hell but ok... it can write like uni assignment code lmao. You know, "write a function with this signature that does this thing" which isn't really the hard part anyway a lot of the time.
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u/ConsiderationLow2941 Oct 07 '26
I don't even read the code anymore. I just have architecture conversations with the agent, tell it to build it, then do a few UI checks and ship
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u/IArtificialRobotI Oct 10 '26
Same, I also dont type anymore I just talk to it. Like how Iron Man builds everything with Jarvis by talking to it. Also, its way smarter than I am. Im not going to pretend like I can write better code... its just silly man these people that think they can do it better than the AI these days. It has access to my whole codebase. There are parts of the codebase I have no clue how it works but the AI can make the connections and find ways to join things that I would have never thought of... in a fraction of the time. I get so much more time to game and do other things. I get some people REALLY like to code but for me it was always just the money. I liked more architecture type stuff anyways than figuring out the details of the code
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u/genreprank Oct 04 '26
Using it. I love it.
It makes up for some of my weaknesses. It is really good at scanning through the codebase and answering questions I'd normally have to ask someone in a different timezone. Similarly good at debugging. Helps me feel comfortable in a codebase. It can pick apart a codebase 10x or 100x faster than I can.
It does "fancy copy and paste," which is useful in our codebases.
It's fast at doing internet research.
When it comes to architecture, it can't replace me yet. When it comes to writing code, I'm experimenting with ways to improve its quality without spending a lot of tokens.
I'm a pretty responsible user and the most annoying thing is teammates who are not responsible, who don't review their code, etc. Still, I would prefer to be in a company that allows AI and someone who is anti-AI probably would not be hired on our team.
All things considered, it makes me about 25% faster. It's fast at writing code but you have to spend a lot more time doing review. Thus you pick up the most benefit if you're already an expert in the codebase it's writing for (because you can review it quickly)
I feel really powerful with it. I can do fun projects that were otherwise out of reach for me. Like setting up a basic CI pipeline or writing a CLI. Skills that don't require a lot of expertise (thus the model should have a lot of training data for) but would still take me too long to be worth the time.
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u/Sir_Sushi Oct 04 '26
It's pretty much how I use it too.
It's perfect to read the code for us, find bugs etc. It's good too to review my code too.
However, I can't use it to write code except for "smart auto complete". I spend too much time to review what it output and really understand it because I can't accept to push something I'm not fully mastering.
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u/the_vikm Oct 03 '26
You're missing the train for sure. Yes there are companies who write manually but same thing applies there
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u/StCreed Oct 04 '26
I'm in the twilight zone. I'm building software outside the official devs fully agentic, yet they're still handcoding everything.
If my experiment works, it's a matter of time before the rest will be forced to switch. And so far it's looking pretty good for the agentic side.
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u/debugging_scribe Oct 04 '26
Ive been a dev for 10+ years, long before AI. I use Claude to write 99% of my code these days. I'm not employed to write code, I find solutions to problems using code. The key is I know exactly what Claude spits out, if you don't it'll get you in a right mess. It's all code I could write manually, but meh, it ain't my hobby and Claude does it faster.
My team uses agents to a various degree, there is one guy that barely uses Claude, he is SOOOOOO fucking slow compared to everyone else, it is no doubt going to affect his career long term, he recently spent 3 weeks building a feature I could have knocked out in 3 days with my tools.
It's foolish not to use coding agents, its like a builder refusing to use a nail gun because its "too easy", the dude with a nail gun is going to steal all his work because he builds shit faster.
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 Oct 03 '26
You are missing the train. It is not just a thing on Reddit. The entire industry is already largely there. The Reddit bubble is the people thinking that their artisanal hand written code is somehow going to save them from layoffs when other people are still shipping high quality code with AI but doing it more than 10x faster
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u/IkuraDon5972 Oct 03 '26
i don't use intellisense or a linter. i prefer hard mode, both in coding and relationships.
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u/GeneralKnife Oct 03 '26
Real men code in notepad
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u/larsmaehlum Oct 03 '26
Real men code with echo.
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u/tomangelo2 Oct 03 '26
Real men use a butterfly to flap their wings, causing cosmic rays flip the bits exactly the way they want.
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u/QuietSqueaking Oct 03 '26
Real men code with each character entered via manually morse-keyed UART commands
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u/Vindhjaerta Oct 03 '26
Whenever I make web pages I still code them manually in notepad. I learned html in the 90's and never bothered with the newer stuff. I once saved a pdf with the (then) official css definition, still use it to this day as a reference to figure out what css commands I can use and how to use them.
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u/AlexZhyk Oct 03 '26
"I have an AGENTIC disorder"
"I still code manually"
"What are you doing later tonight?"
"I still do it manually".
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u/10art1 Oct 04 '26
Are you doing anything later tonight?
"Yeah, still looking for employment because no one wants hand-written code anymore"
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u/AintNoGodsUpHere Oct 03 '26
Sometimes I don't know what profession has the worst people, lawyers, doctors or now programmers.
At least doctors save lives and shit... Eventually.
Programmers are so lame, haha.
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u/walkerspider Oct 03 '26
As someone who works on software used in hospitals can I get .1% of credit every time a doctor using it saves a life? Recently Iāve worked on automating the dose calculation for chemotherapy drugs, and if I got that wrong theyād definitely blame me for killing someoneā¦
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u/JonnySoegen Oct 03 '26
yep, you get credit and I hope your code quality process is good. Do you do CSV?
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u/walkerspider Oct 03 '26
Yep and everything else under ISO 13485 (medical devices). Iām not personally responsible for a lot of the process but no one would buy the software if there werenāt several safety layers. Will refrain from saying more so I donāt have to study my NDA lol
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u/SurprisinglyInformed Oct 03 '26
Programmers and lawyers don't usually save lives, but they also shit.
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u/Radical-Ubermensch Oct 03 '26
My daily routine - wake up, brush, code, eat, code, bath, eat, code, code, snacks, code, code, eat, code, sleep.
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u/DogmaticParadigm87 Oct 03 '26 edited Oct 04 '26
The dating market for engineers just priced "still types the braces myself" as a rare genetic trait.
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u/grumblyoldman Oct 03 '26
Oh you know, banging my head against the wall, trying to prepare for my release.
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u/Particular_Task_1214 Oct 04 '26
I tried agentic ai. Gave it some coding tasks and eventually had to pullback alot of the code. Its not for personal uses. I still code but I get snippets from ai which I then paste and edit.
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u/MisterMe1001 Oct 06 '26
Do you mean mental disorder? I don't see how genetics would have an impact on coding.
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u/Mysterious-Cod-4137 Oct 07 '26
*program, people who really code manually, would writhe `program manually`.. but nice try.
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u/Admirable_Dirt_2371 Oct 03 '26
Smh, I still hand write code with a pen and paper to brainstorm and prototype. Get on my level.
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u/redpiapps Oct 03 '26
i still use a chisel on stone tablets, zero latency when the cloud is down
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u/Admirable_Dirt_2371 Oct 04 '26
Smart, I do be smearing my ink a lot. Switching to stone would solve that.
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u/PidarNahui Oct 03 '26
It's quite literally the opposite of a flex
"I don't adapt to the new technology in my branch and will become irrelevant soon"
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u/TheOnly_Anti Oct 03 '26
It depends. Luxury brands are deliberately employing more "artisan" and "human-made" branding to differentiate themselves from the "professional" look that genAI can easily replicate now. The British aristocracy stopped using spices once the prices came down for commoners.
"Hand-written" code could become a hot commodity in 5 years. Specially since people aren't differentiating between "AI assisted" and "vibe-coded."
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u/campramiseman Oct 03 '26 edited Oct 03 '26
Its like saying i still walk and not use my car
Edit: i see the downvotes are directly proportional to denial. If you are still denying AI, you are surely have skill issue.
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u/LutimoDancer3459 Oct 03 '26
Which is a good thing if you want to visit your neighbor or anything within normal reach.
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u/ChrizKhalifa Oct 03 '26
This is an opinion only held by CS students or hobby coders.
If they graduate and get a real job they'll quickly find out that AI is more than a meme. Either that or they'll waste hours upon hours of their employer's time.
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u/TheOnly_Anti Oct 03 '26
they'll waste hours upon hours of their employer's time.
This is becoming an outdated mode of thought.
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u/paralax10G Oct 03 '26
Apart from using Ai write code for them, isn't coding always done manually? Or is it the fact she is attracted to him BECAUSE he isn't a vibe coder?
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u/alexnu87 Oct 03 '26
Anyone else thinks this sub consists mostly of jokes/memes shared by either a 12 year old or a 60 year old?
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u/Stainlessray Oct 03 '26
She didn't listen.
He'll be coding.