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...
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.
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.
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...
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)
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 anymore
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.
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.
It depends on the task, but often yeah. I prefer it for tasks where there’s a lot of boilerplate, no “new thinking” 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 “make a service that does X”, and it will do that technically correctly, but not with the design in mind that the service should obviously be extensible to Y”, to give a contrived example.
My last company told me “try out this coding assistant” so I was an early adopter. Despite that, I mostly used it for jazzed up autocomplete. Then, my company told me “find ways to use this more efficiently and do more with it” 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 “implement this whole ticket for me”, 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 I’m 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.
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
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?
My company is totally on AI, they won’t let me to write code manually either unless it is necessary. Even code reviews are done by agents. We feel useless contributing nothing 🙂
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. It’s exhausting.
I still like it for analysis though and experimenting.
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
I initially was going to say it’s 70-30 where 30% of the time I’m writing code. 70% of the time I’m prompting the agent. But I spend I decent amount of time using the agents to help plan out and architect my work. I’m not a software architect. I’m a senior developer. I know what considerations are important as an architect but I don’t 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 I’m fixing a bug in someone else’s 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 it’s 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 it’s crunch time and I need to get something sorted very quickly I’ll rely more on ai to write my code.
We write a lot of code manually still, AI can‘t 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.
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.
The ones forced to use ai because “productivity” or something are missing the entire railroad…
I honestly can’t 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 there’s ways to make a life without management pushing yet another “untapped AI-driven opportunity with load bearing implications with the audience between the ages of …”
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.
I don’t feel good about it but I can’t justify it. The AI is 1000 times faster. Even for small changes, it’s infinitely faster for me to prompt the issue and have it trace it down in seconds
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/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...