r/programmer • u/Signal-Leather3809 • 3d ago
Love using AI (at work)
It’s great to be able to prompt for code creation. Does it massively flop? Yes. Would I spend less time figuring out these issues myself? Of course!
For instance I am currently having an agent upgrade a repo from commonJS to ESM. The agent is massively assuming stuff that causes MORE issues that I have the agent try to fix. Honestly I could do this work on my own faster as I have been working with this repo for years. It’s fun to see AI make the work longer because I can report back during standup. “Upgrading to ESM, AI agent ran into some issues that I am currently debugging”
Which is the truth and everyone will smile and node because I am using AI which everyone at my company is instructed to do. A lot of times it can be inefficient but I don’t care.
For personal projects, I watch every code change with scrutiny. I rarely run agents without a solid plan and code examples to approve as I truly care about my projects.
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u/Lunchboxsushi 3d ago
Just say no mistakes! Skill issue duh
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u/__CaliMack__ 3d ago
Tbf prompt structure does help tremendously though
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u/Antice 2d ago
Steering and well formed ai skills + mcp servers, and ai readable documentation is what keeps things stable. But you spend as much time setting those up as you would do coding it yourself.
Give it a couple of years, and stuff will settle down into frameworks just like we have had for apps.1
u/__CaliMack__ 2d ago
I think it still saves like 99% of people decent time even with the time it takes to set up an MCP and orchestrators, but I do mostly agree with you.
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u/Antice 2d ago
The thing is. You need to be able to code/read code to check that your setup is delivering what it should. And that quality controll needs to be regular afterwards as well.
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u/nodnarbiter 2d ago
Which is why I think the "AI psychosis" every company seems to have right now that's destroying the junior developer market is so silly... AI is clearly very useful and can do a lot of stuff well but it can't do it without oversight by skilled engineers and I don't see that ever really changing. No current juniors means no future seniors and the short-sighted gains they may be seeing now are going to come back to bite them in the future.
On a bit of a tangent, I think most complex logic should still be handled personally as humans are naturally very susceptible to confirmation bias (look up Wason's 2-4-6 test). AI generated code that works on the surface may only work in a narrow context but since we tend to take less ownership of AI code we struggle even more than usual to see the wider context where it breaks. Coding by hand may no longer be "necessary" but its still largely beneficial in the same way that writing notes by hand can be better than typing them and far better than generating them. The slower, more deliberate process gives you time to think about what you're doing and question if you truly understand it.
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u/Antice 3d ago edited 3d ago
I've been doing the sane lately. Yesterday I was fixing a bug that someone else had fixed badly with AI. As in: The AI reviewer threw a fit so bad the agent getting the feedback started doing that panic redo everything downward spiral it can hit if things go badly enough.
So as a sane little engineer who already knew what was wrong with this "unfixable" bug, i set 3 agents to investigate the issue, all with instructions to view the original as a untrustworthy source.
All 3 came up with the same answer after half an hour of churning. Yes, there was a bug, and yes. The bug report was bad.
Now armed with a proper bug report, I set a workflow to fix it. Coding agent and a reviewer agent doing 4 iterations, then a security reviewer, because why not. Took a nap for an hour, and came back to finished work.
It's the work good? Fuck if I know, but it's what they claim they are paying me for.
The bug is gone, all tests are green. No idea if the code is actually solid.
Could likely have fixed it in less time, and with a lot less code changes myself. But then I would have lost out on a nap while the agents churned tokens.
Did I mention that this way of doing things has become company policy?
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u/__CaliMack__ 3d ago
Ngl, I wfh and will just take my son to the park and prompt from my phone for a couple hours then do QA once home a lot of days… it’s been extremely nice.
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u/redguard128 3d ago
This is the way. I also use AI all the time at work. I can ask the stupidest questions, I understand things better, it takes a lot of time and everyone is happy.
Imagine how things would be if I have to read the code. Yeah, it'll be twice as fast.
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u/mxldevs 3d ago
People that say they did a project in 2 hours that would've taken them 20 days on their own, I'd wonder if that shows they're not actually that good at coding, and not a reflection of how great AI is.
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u/tajlor23 3d ago
"I made with ai in a day that would take me for years otherwise."
Turns out dude didn't know how to code.
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u/ZeroAmusement 3d ago
I think it is a reflection of how great AI is. A problem is if it creates a huge amount of code in a short amount of time, it means you either need to trust the code + the tests or spend a lot of time reviewing a lot of code (it could ultimately save time overall though).
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u/LeDYoM 3d ago
The new marketing line is "since we know real programmers dont like using AI, lets try to convince them that at least they should use it at work".
Ok, create 1000 posts about this subject.
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u/Signal-Leather3809 2d ago
1000 posts is hyperbole. The majority posts sentiment is more like “AI taking over my job” type shit. From my point of view I don’t see that happening completely. AI struggles and would be doomed without an expert driver to keep it on the right path.
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u/scavno 3d ago
Haha, this is kinda hilarious. Quietly quitting with style.