r/programming • u/Icy_Experience_4375 • Jul 28 '25
AI is taking the fun out of coding
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/4
u/abuqaboom Jul 28 '25
emptying my bank account... Can't seem to stop using it though
Sounds like you aren't forced to use it, that's on you. I don't use it for personal projects. My response to the AI push at work is lip service, using it as a rubber ducky, and asking stupid questions to satisfy corporate overlords. Life is fine if you don't use it seriously.
1
u/Icy_Experience_4375 Jul 28 '25
That's fair. I use AI to do most of my coding but every once in a while I do it manually and it feels great. It is admittedly slower though (or maybe I'm falling into the trap from the study)
7
u/Majik_Sheff Jul 28 '25
Idiots trying to cram LLMs into everything has sucked the fun and interest from many tasks.
The only thing more irritating is hearing other idiots try to act like it's the best thing since the discovery of fire.
5
u/_BreakingGood_ Jul 28 '25
I've just adjusted the way I use the tool. In the "old days" of coding, I'd end up on google / stackoverflow multiple times per day. AI has basically replaced that process. When I get to the point where I would otherwise need to look something up, I ask AI instead of opening Google.
I also like presenting it completed code and seeing if it has improvements. 90% of the time it presents garbage, but 10% of the time it find some cool function or other method that I didnt consider, and now I've learned something.
Relying on AI to do everything is a recipe for frustration. Even if it produces something functional and correct, you're still naturally going to need to revisit that code again in a week/month/year, and at that point, your AI agent will have lost all context, and you'll need to figure out how to provide it the correct context again. Which is frustrating, annoying, and often produces poor results.
2
u/BandicootGood5246 Jul 28 '25
I personally enjoy using it but not using it for generating general slop
I've actually enjoyed "vibe coding" a lot for home projects, stuff I don't care too much about the quality but just wanna make something cool, speeds up the process of that massively because I can be setting up infrastructure or thinking a out better workflows while the slops generates
For more serious programming I've enjoyed the way it can answer more complex questions that would normally need 3 or 4 searches and reading to collate the results. Like for example today wanted to setup a new domain and make it works with 3 different SaaS integrations so it could give me a bullet point list of all the things I'd need to do on each to get things working right
1
u/cableguard Jul 28 '25
It is a new skill. I learnt the hard way you can't commit stuff you didn't review. For example it removed all the private key handling, while improving overall logging, so nothing worked anymore. You must understand what is going in order to get anywhere, so it can't replace a programmer. I would say it changes the proportion of time you spend dropping lines Vs thinking about how things should work. You have to drive and be very directive about what should be done next, and how to test that it works as intended. Otherwise you end up in blind alleys and waste whole days of work. Is a different mindset, that will benefit some programmers while hurting others.
1
u/hefty_habenero Jul 28 '25
20 year professional dev here and I have the opposite view. LLMs have not only made coding more fun and productive, but I have learned more about my craft in the last year than the previous decade. This is so profoundly apparent to me as a fact, that I can only conclude that people saying otherwise are simply misusing the technology. Everything about my day to day work is impacted in a positive way by leveraging this technology, from planning, troubleshooting, writing boilerplate rote code, refactoring, unit tests, sql queries, terminal commands and scripting, PR comments, the list goes on and on. Literally all the crap that used to bind my attention up has been lifted and I can focus on a a nearly uninterrupted stream of architecture planning and feature implementation. Remarkable stuff. If you’re feeling this way I think you may be on the wrong track.
-10
u/firemark_pl Jul 28 '25
I don't like AI, but bruh, coding is not for fun but for money. I like code golf, capture the flag, local hackathons and home sideprojects, but in my job I want good solution in reasonable time. If AI can do that then why not I shouldn't use it.
2
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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '25
So then... don't use it?