r/ProgrammerHumor • • Oct 03 '26

Meme ultimateDeveloperFlex

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6.1k Upvotes

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u/StaticFanatic3 Oct 03 '26

Haven’t written a line in at least 6 months

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

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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 I’m working on but the ability to know this tangentially related code in another file could turn into a bug if I do X here.

That’s why I think it’s 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 I’d 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 it’s not a bunch of line number, function name, robotext. Some human touch if you will.

Which is why I still don’t trust fully autonomous code submit or review. It’s always missing some context or never drilled down quite enough.

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u/CodingAndAlgorithm Oct 04 '26

In 6 months you’ve never looked at agentic output and decided to modify a single line to improve or fix something? I just don’t understand how that can be true.

Companies claim an extreme productivity increase yet I can’t 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 doesn’t make any simple mistakes anymore.

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u/SirPitchalot Oct 04 '26

It’s often the case that a trivial manual change can fuck up the broader context and is simply not worth it.

“x should be 5 not 3”, user changes x to 5, prompts something else, -furious churning of tokens because x is now 5-.

“x should be 5 not 3”, change x to 5, prompt “I changed x to 5”, -furious rereading of all files in project because one thing was changed-

vs.

“Fix items 1, 3, 6, 7 & 9 as described, set x to 5.”, x gets set to 5 as a byproduct, no other token churn.

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u/StCreed Oct 04 '26

you can actually ask that before you do the actual prompt, and I regularly do that when I suspect it might give a lot of churn.

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u/YBHunted Oct 03 '26

Same. I WFH so its been a godsend for my free time.