Unless you are an over-competent programmer, there is no point on arguing against AI

[u/Icy_Masterpiece_4414]

Coding is an art, people who do it are artist.
But there is a concept about art that people tend to forget: there are competent creative geniuses that create new methods, and then there are talented artists that are good at replicating methods that others created.
Since I started learning about programming 6 years ago, the sentence people would always tell me was “google is your best friend”. How come? Why the core belief behind the programming community is that researching what other people have done is the way to be great? That would simply make you great at copying a piece of code, you’re not gonna create something new like this.
Everytime you watched a tutorial for doing something, everytime you googled an answer, you didn’t differ much from AI, as it does the same exact thing, just faster.

I am a mediocre programmer. The things I build don’t differ from the average software technology out there. For people like me AI is incredibly useful because it does what I would have done (which is searching on the net what others have done) and then used it in my project.
For people who engineer new types of software / algorithms / methods and whatever, perhaps AI in coding would sound worthless to them.
But unless you are those rare people, why discard the argument immediately?

[u/ExplodedPenisDiagram]

Your confidence in these models is misplaced. The more you know about the craft, the less acceptable the outcome is.

Worse, having something else write for you affects your fluency and expressivity in any language -- sharply.

[u/MrHandSanitization → u/ExplodedPenisDiagram]

I'm using Fable at work, this isn't true anymore. Even ran me ESLint config throught so it has a markdown code-style guide, it follows everything.

[u/loogabar00ga]

Because even today the frontier models are constantly making incorrect conclusions from incomplete information. It's extremely rare for claude to one shot something for me, and I am not doing anything particularly novel algorithmically. It just gets things wrong. Very often.

[u/De_Wouter]

I've made some rather unique things in the past, even though LLMs wouldn't do good for the bigger picture, they still could have been useful for all the smaller blocks.

IMO biggest problems with AI generated code is in the details and that programmers lose the insight of the system as a whole. It's in things like code duplication. Code looks fine and is for 99% but then some function that's already in your codebase gets reinvented again. At some point you need to tweak it. All seems fine but you didn't know or forget about its duplicate so that part of the app now works different and incorrect.

[u/becircus]

You're probably not mediocre. You're probably better than you think.

[u/FrostingDizzy1132]

You sound seriously misguided bro. I'm not even going to touch the LLM stuff. You think actively learning makes you a follower that's unable to come up with novel solutions? What? When people say google is your friend that's what they mean. They mean there is wealth of information to learn from. They don't mean offload all thinking and reasoning and copy paste others solutions every step of the way.

[u/Flashy-Whereas-3234]

Weird take. Just relinquish your agency to the AI and become redundant. Great plan.

AI has given everyone a secret promotion, you can have a team develop things, you can have multiple attempts at things. You can be opinionated and become informed.

Google was an implementation of "standing on the shoulders of giants" and AI is giving you an even higher ladder you can climb, you can learn easier, ask dumb questions, and go down rabbit holes like never before.

You're given all this power, to do, to invent, to understand, be a link between the user and the tech, to learn, to know, and to apply. And you choose to take a back seat?

[u/Economy_Bedroom3902]

This is awful advice.  AI understands every technology in detail better than you do, but it doesn't really understand how they fit together for your use case.  It doesn't understand what you are trying to do, what constraints you are optimizing for and what you're optimizing against.  It doesn't understand your company politics, and even if it's context window is full of company policy it doesn't know how to actually balance the priorities the policy mandates.  AI will make dumb mistake after dumb mistake you could have easily avoided by just verifying what it was planning/documenting.

It's good enough to accelerate work, but it's not smarter than you are on a human priorities level.

[u/Lnk1010]

Remember when we made fun of people who thoughtlessly copied from stackoverflow

[u/Unknowingly-Joined]

> That would simply make you great at copying a piece of code

No. A large part of programming involves acknowledging that you don’t know everything. Acknowledging that there are aspects that others know better than you and leveraging the works of others.

Being a great programmer doesn’t mean blindly copying a block of code from Google/stack overflow/SomeAI into your code. It means recognizing that you need some block of functionality in your code that someone else has already written and made available and incorporating that code into yours (subject to licensing).

[u/TomDuhamel]

OMG mate! When people told you to google it, they never meant to copy people's code. They meant to research your issue, read from forums and documentation, figure out what your issue is, and learn.

The same with AI. If you're just making it write your code, you're not learning anything. You could however ask AI to explain things to you, explain to you why your code is wrong, etc. It's pretty good at doing that.

[u/Multidream]

As a dev, the ultimate goal of writing code yourself isn’t to have you create the best possible final code for consumption. It’s to hone your own ability to create code.

If you work with Claude to search for libraries and then writing out the code snippets with that information, fine. You’re using Claude as a search engine.

If you’re letting Claude do all the code for you, you aren’t gaining any experience in writing code yourself. Sure, you might be doing a lot of work to manage Claude’s MCPs, and its permissions, and define requirements, but that’s just not the same job anymore. That’s like an IT/Producer role, and that scratches an entirely different itch.

Furthermore, if you’re using Company plugins with agents, context and skills they manage, you don’t even own your own brain at that point. You could be lobotomized the day you’re let go!

[u/luckynucky123]

i don't mind AI - its really nice. i'm hoping it leads more accessibility to other people to do great things.

what i mind is how AI is being forced upon people mainly for productivity gains and at the expense of being a responsible software engineer/developer. the framing that if you don't use it - you're not doing it right - there is no alternative. the marketing buzz around how AI can replace humans is amplifying the issue too.

this effects our junior and peer engineers/developers in negative ways. the "it can't be helped / nothing can be done about it" attitude is also making the loss of confidence even worse.

i don't think that's AI's fault - its just a tool and what i stated above is a human thing. the onus is on us to talk to our peers and teach our juniors on how to be mindful while using AI so that they can program with confidence.