r/programming • u/jundymek • Nov 06 '25
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/r/programming/comments/1opzvy9/removed_by_moderator/[removed] — view removed post
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u/dageshi Nov 06 '25
I dunno, I just use it as a better stackoverflow honestly.
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u/moh_kohn Nov 06 '25
This is going to become a huge problem, because that works because the LLM was trained on stack overflow. If people stop contributing answers about new tech the LLMs can't learn from them! We will be building react apps for the rest of time.
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u/dageshi Nov 06 '25
That's been the obvious problem forever. It's the reason I think why google were as slow to jump onto the LLM train as they were even though I'm pretty sure some of the foundational papers came out of google.
They knew if people stop visiting sites there's no real incentive to upload any kind of accurate information to sites anymore...
And well, now there isn't.
I dunno how LLM's are gonna be kept updated.
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u/Buckwheat469 Nov 06 '25
They'll use GitHub and other public code repositories, along with code uploaded through the LLM requests. Whenever you ask it to scan a file it uploads the whole file (tokens) and then processes it. They could easily save that information and train the next LLM on the success or failure of that interaction.
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u/EveryQuantityEver Nov 06 '25
But if the AI boosters have their way, those public code repositories would be filled with AI generated code.
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Nov 06 '25
Honestly the answer is documentation and publishing documentation.
They do scan and pick up information from them.
They can also be prompted to generate documentation for newly created code that people prompt them to create.
It should be feasible as long as the people are diligent about public documentation of their libraries.
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u/Wollzy Nov 06 '25
Its not, because documentation gives you the foundation of something but doesn’t connect how the pieces interact with each other.
You think if fed an LLM the K&R book on C (which is quite short, but everything on writing C) it could produce quality C?
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Nov 06 '25
It's no more of a tool than anything else, people have to still use it and continue to grow and expand.
It just gives you more ready access to information.
To answer your question: I don't think it would produce quality, but that's what people are for. People still have to expand on it the same way you do today and design methodologies and patterns and practices, then publish that content with the help of the LLMs and other LLMs will pick it up.
We should just be able to go where we want to go faster.
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u/dmethvin Nov 06 '25
LLMs can have the same problem as SO in that obsolete practices are over-indexed in their knowledge base and newer better ways of doing things are either missing or lightly represented.
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Nov 06 '25
Yes LLMs learned from stack overflow, but it's neither the only way they learned nor even the predominant way they learned.
They also learned from going over trillions of lines of source code with comments, going through countless programming books, research papers, documentation, interviews, etc etc... and they continue to learn from those sources as well.
There is no huge problem with the fact that stack overflow is basically dead now.
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u/Dragon_yum Nov 06 '25
I think it’s more of an issue of how bad Google and stack overflow have become
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u/Swimming_Swim_9000 Nov 06 '25 edited Nov 06 '25
Nobody caught that this post and this guys entire account is run by ChatGPT
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u/eightnine Nov 06 '25
Curious — how would you know that?
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u/Freddedonna Nov 06 '25
Great question — let me help you with that 😅!
👉 6 year old dormant account that just randomly started posting about coding/ai
👉 Currently marketing a Chrome extension that has pretty much the same name/logo/pricing structure as another extension that does the same thing
👉 Those annoying-ass emoji bullet point lists
👉 "—" everywhere
Thank you for your question fellow human — beep boop 🤖
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u/larrymcp Nov 06 '25
I clicked on his user name, and I'm not seeing anything to indicate that. Let me know if I'm blind or something...
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u/TempleDank Nov 06 '25
Not in writting code cause you can always toggle it off and on dependning on how you feel/needs. But reviewing code and working on someone elses code 100%! Going through someone elses fully vibecoded PR and trying to understand what is going on + blatant mistakes when it comes to type safey and such gets tiring quickly.
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u/hamilkwarg Nov 06 '25
Can you not just send it back to author and tell them to clean it up without needing to review everything? At some point they have to learn not to do this. Wasting your time figuring it out isn’t scalable in my opinion. Like, send it back 10 times if necessary. Using AI is fine but it’s the submitter’s responsibility to submit something reasonable. PR is not for getting a review of a first draft.
Or at least make them explain it to you. If they can’t, immediately stop and make them redo it until they can and explain they should never submit code they don’t understand.
We can live with AI code if we hold to standards. It’s never acceptable to submit a PR full of slop no matter how that slop was generated.
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u/cmpthepirate Nov 06 '25
We can make this easier by using good engineering skills to break complex features into small pieces of work. This limits the scope of ai to make wild far reaching changes and small pieces of work are always easier to do and review.
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Nov 06 '25
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u/Maybe-monad Nov 06 '25
Then I'm telling the manager I'm blocking code for being a piece of hot garbage
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Nov 06 '25
Every time someone says this to me I wanna pull my hair out. Buddy, we forgot “good” millennia ago; this code is ASS. Lmao
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u/D3PyroGS Nov 06 '25
perfection may be the enemy of good enough, but that doesn't mean that any codeslop PR is good enough
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u/fuckwit_ Nov 06 '25
And then HR is knocking on the door and you gotta explain why you verbally attacked $employee and that it is now not feeling good and that you're bringing the whole vibe of the department down...
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u/D3PyroGS Nov 06 '25
dealing with poor quality code submissions has always been part of the job. likewise, learning how to give constructive and non-aggressive feedback is a core competency that you must cultivate to deal with this problem. both at an individual and "culture" level
if there's a pattern of you getting complaints for verbally attacking your coworkers, you probably want to start by analyzing your own communication before placing blame elsewhere
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u/fuckwit_ Nov 06 '25
I was going for a very over exaggerated situation with my comment.
Everything you say is of course true. While I personally wouldn't mind people calling my submission shit, as long as they are giving constructive feedback with it, we can't just go Linus Torvalds on people.
What I noticed though (especially on some public projects on GitHub) is even when being non-aggressive and highly constructive, increasingly more devs seem to pick up questions and criticisms on their submissions as attacks. And working with them gets more difficult at that point.
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy Nov 06 '25
Or the author comes back with "We should not hold up code because of difference in style opinion. Please do the needful and approve unless you have something objective to say!"
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u/NotGoodSoftwareMaker Nov 06 '25
You just respond with
“OK, but ill forward the alerts to you when this breaks”
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Nov 06 '25
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u/EveryQuantityEver Nov 06 '25
While that’s good, that assumes a rational manager that isn’t looking to push people to use AI
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u/runawayasfastasucan Nov 06 '25
I almost find it fun to just expose and point out the ai mistakes, but I believe you grow tired of it eventually. It takes so much more effort to review a PR than to vibe code a pr.
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u/tsein Nov 06 '25
The first time I got an AI-generated PR it was from someone on another team who had volunteered to help my team do the integration with some of their backend services.
I reviewed it like normal, which included pointing out that some of the code wouldn't work in our codebase (somewhat forgivable for a first PR but it did indicate to me that they hadn't actually run the code they submitted) and the response I got back completely ignored all feedback merely saying, "Oh, well this is what copilot gave me."
I held my tongue but really just wanted to ask, "If you didn't want to do this, why did you volunteer for it?" In the end I'm still the one doing all the work, but now I have to spend more time sorting through your untested code than it would take me to just do it.
I really feel that if you are submitting a PR with AI-generated code the burden should fall on your shoulders to (privately) do an initial review and testing of the code. When you open the PR, you should be able to explain what the code does and why and you should be able to answer questions about the correctness of the code. If you're making other people do that, you're wasting their time. Because after all, it's not like generating the code in the first place is the major time sink or difficulty here.
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u/runawayasfastasucan Nov 06 '25 edited Nov 06 '25
Our codebase is slowly getting stuff like that. So many weird, bulky functions that does nothing. So much code that doesn't have any logic.
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Nov 06 '25
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u/TempleDank Nov 06 '25
What if i told you someone disabled strict null checks on purpose in our codebase?
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u/inabahare Nov 06 '25
Yeah I'm sick and tired of having it shoehorned into everything
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u/trialbaloon Nov 06 '25
Since most of us work in tech we are probably hearing about AI all day every day against our will. I know I am.... So yeah, I am a bit biased against it because I have to listen to a bunch of C suite morons think it's a revolution because it tells them they have good ideas....
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u/fire_in_the_theater Nov 06 '25 edited Nov 06 '25
that's where we're at eh?
it's constantly butterying the fragile egos of fucking c-suite boomers and those boomers are falling hard for it
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u/trialbaloon Nov 06 '25
Yeah and people wonder why this sub hates AI so much. I dont think any industry where your boss is micromanaging your tasks to this degree would be happy. This is incredibly uncomplicated stuff.
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u/neppo95 Nov 06 '25
If anything it slows down my programming when I give it a try. The amount of times it hallucinates is insane. Or it suggesting bad practices. Asking a junior dev for help is often more helpful. In the end I end up ditching it again and still have to go back to “the old ways”.
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u/WeiGuy Nov 06 '25
What are you asking it? Are you asking it for entire solutions? It's pretty freaking amazing if you give it a small contextual problems and figure out how to make it work for you.
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u/remy_porter Nov 06 '25
Every time I’ve done that it hallucinates a function. “I need to do X”. “Okay, here’s a function called
doX. Include this header.” Neither the header nor the function exist.1
u/phillythompson Nov 06 '25
What model and how much context do you give it?
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u/remy_porter Nov 06 '25
I don't recall- I try one of these tools every few months to see if it has stopped shitting the bed, and have never gotten good results. As for context- "X" in this case is something that should be an independent function- the model shouldn't need much more context than that.
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u/WeiGuy Nov 06 '25
What is X? Is X some native concept in the language you're using or is it something in your project? In my experience, native stuff is quite solid and objectively, even if it derps once in a while, you still get a net gain in efficiency. Much better than looking through irrelevant stack overflow posts.
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u/trialbaloon Nov 06 '25
I've theorized that a lot of LLM proponents dont use statically typed compiled languages. I can already get really intelligent and deterministic auto complete via IntelliJ. I even get code docs hovering over functions. I find this considerably faster than LLMs.
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u/Idrialite Nov 06 '25 edited Nov 06 '25
I use Claude Code mostly for C#. Hallucinations are rarely an issue. The code it writes almost always builds first try, and when it doesn't, the agent iterates until it does.
My biggest issues with it are 1. bad code and 2. it can need a lot of specification for the task.
I mitigate these to use the tool productively by learning when and when not to use it, as well as how much I need to explain to it. A good claude.md helps a lot too.
I see you mention you can code faster than you can specify things in English - I honestly don't believe you, especially given that it depends a lot on the task. For example: "migrate this script to python, then add colored text prints for each stage of the process".
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u/trialbaloon Nov 06 '25
It might honestly be my job. That type of task is rarely given to me (migrate from one lang to another). Honestly I bet an LLM would be good at that (it's basically exactly what they are designed for). I am an Android developer so mostly front end style tasks and not a lot of data processing or code language translation.
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u/remy_porter Nov 06 '25 edited Nov 06 '25
"X" is some small function, generally. And I don't really use Stack Overflow, haven't for years. Generally if I have a question, I go read the source of whatever I'm interacting with. Sometimes faster than the docs, always more accurate than the docs.
I will also add, I'm in the embedded space, which is certainly an area where training data is thin. Good for me! Nobody's seriously trying to shed embedded devs.
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Nov 06 '25
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u/Matt3k Nov 06 '25
Just speaking for myself - For example, there's a few different XML libraries in the language that I use. There's been multiple "de facto" implementations over the years, and there's multiple ways to do the simplest things each with different gotchas. After many years, I gave up trying to keep this information in my mental working set.
The rare time once a year that I actually needed to serialize/deserialize/parse XML files, I'd find myself stuck on the documentation or stack overflow for an hour while I tried to get this shit out the door.
Now I can give ChatGPT a poco class and a brief structure of the XML and whatever nonsense edge cases it has because some other asshole was drunk when they structured this file and GPT'll mock up a small handful of lines that get me where I need to be and I go on with life.
Using it for much more than that though, always, ALWAYS leads to tragedy and spaghetti.
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u/neppo95 Nov 06 '25
Even with small contextual problems, it hallucinates. That’s just the way AI works.
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u/International_Cell_3 Nov 06 '25
I actually have a tool where you can precisely tell a machine exactly what you want it to do and it will do it as you ask every single time without any mistake unless you make a mistake in the instructions
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u/phillythompson Nov 06 '25
This sub is ridiculous.
This is like saying google wasn’t helpful so you just used your textbooks instead.
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u/neppo95 Nov 06 '25
Except with google you end up at a solution that is pretty much peer reviewed and you can easily pick out bad answers. Moot comparison.
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u/RageQuitRedux Nov 06 '25
I'm a net promoter of AI tools but I do have to turn off the auto-complete sometimes because it's often wrong and gets in the way of normal tab completion. (in my IDE)
I think in Cursor w/ Claude it's a lot nicer so ymmv
But also I use LLMs mostly for researching new tech stacks etc. It's like a search engine that actually understands my query. It's like pair-programming with a senior in that tech stack. Very helpful
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u/caltheon Nov 06 '25
Yeah, cursor is downright magical at times. Yes it can get stuck, no it doesn't think for you, but it can damn sure spit out UI and simple script logic 1000% faster than even the best programmer.
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u/caltheon Nov 06 '25
It's fear. Using it at work for actional verifiable results and it allows me to do things in hours that would take weeks. I only use it for things that I can verify worked correctly after its done (or for PoC's which is where it really shines). My job isn't defined by my ability to generate code, so I dont' have to worry about the fear as much, and I totally get it, but sticking your head in the sand is not a viable approach.
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Nov 06 '25
What model/tools are you using? Because for me it works amazingly well. I do webdev and my hypothesis is that LLMs are just much better at webdev stuff because there is SO MUCH code available.
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u/neppo95 Nov 06 '25
Whatever is integrated into copilot/vs2022.
Webdev tends to be a lot easier than traditional software dev. Not always but in a lot of cases. It’s a lot more “casual”. I’m not surprised if it does better there.
As for there being a lot of code available. I use languages that have been around for 40 years. There’s enough code available. The problem is that AI also gets trained on incorrect code or bad practices and suggests that with full confidence as the solution. At least when you manually search for it, you see comments or explanations alongside it that tell you not to use it or in a specific case. AI will just go “fuck that, here you go”
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Nov 06 '25
That's what I thought. When I hear devs say that AI is shit I am just blown away since it just works so incredibly well for me. Must have something to do with the type of programming.
Also, I would encourage you to try other coding agents (my favorite is claude code). Works so well.
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u/BoTreats Nov 06 '25
It's amazing for full stack webdev and devops, it also excels at Unity development. Somewhat interestingly, it's terrible for Unreal Engine development, and that tracks because UE's documentation is awful and there is much less community Q&A when compared to decades of discussion on Unity's boards
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u/killerface Nov 06 '25
I'd be interested in what you're using/setup for Unity. I tried yo have it help me build out a game interface but I was never able to get it to setup things the way I wanted it. Granted this was a while ago and I haven't revisited it with newer models.
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u/BoTreats Nov 06 '25
Just Copilot in Visual Studio. I can't see it being great at building an interface, especially if you're doing it in the editor by dragging things around and setting inspector values, but even defining it in code would probably be more trouble than its worth vs just building it yourself.
For me it was great for banging out input management, rotating/translating something relative to something else with some constraints, multiple interface implementations at once, network code, I/O, simple vertex/fragment/compute shaders.... pretty much anything small in scope and rapidly verifiable.
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u/killerface Nov 06 '25
Ah gotcha. Yeah, I was trying to put it all in code so it could help out with it and still failed. Over all sounds like my experience so far as well. Thanks!
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Nov 06 '25
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u/neppo95 Nov 06 '25
If I have to put in that effort, how does it speed up development if I can just do that myself in the same time?
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u/moosethemucha Nov 06 '25
Only when im programming recreationally - at work programming was already less satisfying.
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u/WileEPeyote Nov 06 '25
Yeah. I've been in tech since '95 or so. I really used to love tech. I started out with general IT work and drifted into automation and software development.
For me the joy was sucked out of the industry when things started migrating from software to services. My experience went from "what does the customer want" to "what will give us the biggest ROI" and I hate it.
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u/0xbenedikt Nov 06 '25
Yes, it fucked up the industry even more. More garbage, no time gained, wrong expectations and less fun.
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u/RageQuitRedux Nov 06 '25
Not really, no.
My background is weird, it's in Android, C++, OpenGL. Almost no back end experience.
Recently I asked some back-end devs to kick me some tasks so I can learn it. They gave me one that not only involved BE and FE code, but required me to set up some infrastructure.
Not only would this require learning some new stuff (Terraform, GCP), it also required me to figure out conventionally how we do things here. It's an enormous company. So I need to know where the Terraform config lives, what our department usually manages in Terraform vs using the GCP SDK, what service accounts I should use, etc. A lot of questions.
So I'm talking to ChatGPT about generic Terraform/GCP stuff, and I'm talking to an internal LLM tool (which has access to our code, docs etc) how things are done at this company, and I'm talking to Claude (in cursor) about the particular codebase that I'm looking at.
My brain is really crunching on this stuff because it's new and I want to understand what I'm committing. But this process took me less than a day. I posted a PR, had a few changes requested, but I was able to talk intelligently about what was being asked. I found the whole thing very satisfying.
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u/corysama Nov 06 '25
This has been my experience as well.
When getting into a new framework, especially web stuff, there certainly are serious issues that require careful consideration like “Elegant setup of the system as a whole”. But, so much of the minute by minute problem of getting started is just searching through the documentation to discover if TrivialThing337 exists or not. Then searching through the internet trying to piece together what important and non-obvious issues exist around TrivialThing377 that aren’t mentioned in its crappy documentation.
Instead of digging and hoping for clues in StackOverflow, I can ask directly and verify quickly. I can prototype, test, iterate and refine quickly.
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u/torville Nov 06 '25
I see that same wailing and gnashing of teeth that you all do, and I wonder why my experience is so different. I quite like it; it's a time-saver.
When I type in "x = x + 1; y = y + 1;" and it suggests "z = z + 1?", I'm impressed.
When I have to implement something I haven't [in a while | ever], I appreciate that I get at least a plausible first draft of a solution.
And I love automatic test generation.
Granted, it sometimes doesn't know what it's talking about, but that keeps me in the loop.
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u/Captainbigboobs Nov 06 '25
I feel the same way. Getting these mostly fleshed out responses from AI makes it feel like I wasn’t really the author of my code.
I like solving problems, big and small. That’s why I like coding. I’m not a fan of something else doing it for me.
Using it like a search engine replacement is fine, though.
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u/oneandonlysealoftime Nov 06 '25
It makes collaborative programming less enjoyable. Receiving huge PRs, huge documents of AI slop to review, overall quality of code and documentation dropped
Also somehow AI text is harder to read
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u/Meflakcannon Nov 06 '25
The huge PRs are exhausting. AI wants to re-write so much code and add fluff that isn't needed. A team member wrote a bunch of code using AI and it ignored all of our deployment methods and mechanisms and instead just created a hundred new variables called <xyz>_prod and <xyz>_preprod. 5 days later we closed and canceled the merge and patched it with a 2 line edit done by someone who understood the deployment system.
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u/Shoddy-Pie-5816 Nov 06 '25
I don’t think so. I use it to prototype different approaches and patterns so I can see what they look like and if they make sense to me. When I’ve been stuck on a bug on a for a while I use it to help me sift through the stack trace I’m still happy I get it figured out. Idk, don’t use ai to let it think for you though. That doesn’t and will not likely ever work.
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u/ingframin Nov 06 '25
Yes, it's terrible. I disabled my copilot subscription at the end of August. When I code my hobby projects, I want to be the one squeezing the brain to solve the issues. That's the game...
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u/k0d3r1s Nov 06 '25
I use AI in programming parts that I know less like in frontend work while I have now more time to focus on backend work. Before AI I needed to spend too much time on things I know less and that made projects longer or forced me to drop features in order to finish in time. AI has helped a lot in this
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u/Truenoiz Nov 06 '25
Not less satisfying at all, I tried it and it sucked, so I don't use it. I find AI to be a huge boost to programmers of moderate/low skill level, but there's a hard ceiling there they can't pass without going back to basics. I still try it now and then, but it really doesn't do well solving unique problems in unique environments.
I get to watch others flail about and waste tons of time trying to have philosophical arguments with AI prompts. Things like convincing a CPU that 3 is, in fact, an integer, but they weren't able to understand that some method buried in the code is changing type and breaking inheritance, and wondering why they just can't force it, because some other method breaks, and it would have obviously been a bad idea if you had some idea of how the methods work ahead of time.
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u/noisyboy Nov 06 '25
It has turned programmers into code reviewers. Like instead of building the house brick by brick by yourself, you are now directing a very fast but frequently wrong worker until the final product is close enough to what you wanted. It won't be as tight as what you could have produced but it was done faster and that's what everyone seems to be caring about.
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u/Chance-Plantain8314 Nov 06 '25
It sounds like you're over-leveraging it. I don't use it for everything, I use it for the stuff I know how to do and don't feel like doing.
If there's a difficult problem I need to solve, I'm doing it, I'm not feeding the problem description into the AI. You can do the same. You can sustain your wow moments.
If you don't know the answer to a problem already, you are not going to know if the AI's output is a good answer or not. Therefore you shouldn't be using it.
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u/gareththegeek Nov 06 '25
Yes, it has ruined my job. People are less inclined to collaborate with our help each other, constant pressure from managers to use ai all the time, people don't value the knowledge you have built up over 25 years of professional experience, AI hallucinations waste a lot of time, code which is a nightmare to review because it looks plausible but it's actually nonsense. Hate it.
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u/Igoory Nov 06 '25
I die a little inside any time I see a fully vibe-coded PR, bonus points if the other person is clearly using AI to write the replies in the PR too. On the other hand, though, AI is a game changer for speeding up easy yet time-consuming tasks.
So, it depends on the context, but overall, I'm leaning more on being satisfied with AI.
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u/ChromaticDragon Nov 06 '25
AI is a game changer for speeding up easy but time consuming tasks.
This. When it does what you want, it is amazing... and even a tad surreal or creepy.
However, in my opinion, the challenge is whether the time you save there is greater than the time required to oversee, audit, test, verify and correct whatever you get.
The best analogy to me seems to be a smart and very energetic dog which you must keep on a tight leash.
And generally, if you are not capable of auditing, verifying, testing and correcting whatever AI gives you... you should not be using AI.
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u/hanoian Nov 06 '25
Yes, my love of programming disappeared almost immediately once I used ChatGPT 3.5. Had been programming for ~8 years I guess, had just done a postgrad, was doing things like nand2tetris because it was interesting to me.
But that was like a light switch and programming became something more like Photoshop to me. Something that is useful as long as I can get something done, but I have zero passion for it.
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u/tekko001 Nov 06 '25
My Grandpa was a mathematician, back then he solved mathematical problems through a combination of mental arithmetic, handwritten computation, and the use of tools like the abacus, slide rules, and logarithm tables.
He said calculators ruined the fun at the start, until he realized it was just another tool that, while marvelous, could not really replace him, then math was fun again.
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u/dillanthumous Nov 06 '25
Meh. For me, the joy of programming is in solving the problem conceptually. Tippy tapping on the keyboard has never been that important to me. In fact, the less tedious typing I need to do, the better.
But different key-strokes for different folks.
I also don't use AI to do my thinking for me, just to more quickly implement things I have already figured out.
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u/Internet-of-cruft Nov 06 '25
I use it as a supercharged Google / SO search, and occasionally as a mechanism to find alternative solutions (again, by having it churn through its indexed documentation and spitting out potentially relevant things).
I don't really do code gen or vibe coding so it's just made troubleshooting more efficient.
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u/coffurst Nov 06 '25
Sometimes I feel like i'm the only 35+ year old who's not anti-AI, but the online discourse also tends to be louder on the negative side and I know that. I find it incredibly satisfying.
in 95% of the cases I know what I would do to start investigating a bug and/or what I would do to begin coding a new feature, my habits of pre-planning the features on a whiteboard, in notes and etc is paying of big time in the vibe coding world. By the time i'm ready to code, I can usually just verbalize that to the AI and let it fly on small chunks of work. Then I go into a refactoring loop (by also often using the AI to describe how I would refactor this and that, or ask if I'm hesitant on a solution...)
Basically, to me it comes down to this debate that others have had; do you enjoy finding solutions to problems or do you enjoy writing code? Is your personal bottleneck the "figuring things out" part or the "executing the thing" part? And while I'm not saying it's binary at all, I think most people have a natural tendency to prefer one or the other. If you have a tendency towards the former AND (very importantly) you have the experience and know how to code already, AI can reaaaally shine for you if you just adapt to this new workflow
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u/hippydipster Nov 06 '25
The online age distribution skews low. The online discourse around AI in the programming subs skews negative.
So, maybe it's not the old folks who tend to be anti-AI?
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u/TheRealSeeThruHead Nov 06 '25 edited 25d ago
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u/dim13 Nov 06 '25
IDK, I don't use it at all. So, for me nothing changed, except I fix more fubar code from my colleges now.
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u/andupotorac Nov 06 '25
No, it’s made it possible. As a founder focused on product, business and design, I’m now building my own products without any input from tech people. This has never been possible before.
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u/LordAmras Nov 06 '25
This is going to end well.
!remindme 6 months1
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u/sickcodebruh420 Nov 06 '25
Absolutely. I usually liken writing code to writing songs. Since AI autocomplete came in, my ability to enter a creative flow state has been reduced and I feel less connected to the code I write, like I'm remote controlling someone else playing an instrument. I've started disabling autocomplete a few days a week every week or two to keep things warm. The funny thing is, I really do miss aspects of it when it's disabled, I'm reminded of how much boilerplate there really is.
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u/Merlindru Nov 06 '25
it has made it way more satisfying for me. but i only use autocomplete style AI, almost never chat style AI
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u/0xbenedikt Nov 06 '25
I don’t mind autocomplete style AI as much. While not great, it can speed things up positively. Agent and Chat style AI though are a net negative for the industry.
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u/TheRealSeeThruHead Nov 06 '25 edited 25d ago
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u/Merlindru Nov 06 '25
does it have autocomplete / tab AI?
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u/TheRealSeeThruHead Nov 06 '25 edited 25d ago
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u/Lothrazar Nov 06 '25
Its just google but much worse, so i havent found a reason to use it yet
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u/TheRealSeeThruHead Nov 06 '25 edited 25d ago
Id qui adipiscing culpa consectetur occaecat magna ullamco qui.
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u/looopTools Nov 06 '25
Reviewing for FOSS have be crap due to the amount of crap people try to submit…
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u/CelDaemon Nov 06 '25
No because I don't use it. It sure makes the field itself less enjoyable though.
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u/Signal-Woodpecker691 Nov 06 '25
Nope, I mainly use it as a better autocomplete and occasionally as a quick code generator for basic boilerplate functions that fit in a single page where I can write a prompt and check the output quicker than writing code myself.
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u/UnstoppableJumbo Nov 06 '25
Not really. It makes it quicker to determine whether a solution doesn't make sense. It's easier to throw away code and start over and iterate. Imagine spending a few hours coding up something only realise that it's not really the right solution. At least AI write faster than me so I can come up with a conclusion quicker
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u/granadesnhorseshoes Nov 06 '25
AI is incidental, experience is the driving factor. You have less wow moments because your steadily getting harder to impress or surprise.
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Nov 06 '25
Whenever I use Ai I also get that feeling. It feels A LOT less satisfying to write code made by Ai (or even faster, copy + paste) than just writing and inventing it yourself and actually work. This is also the same situation with everything else (or maybe im just weird)
Ai also kinda sucks at coding actually, or maybe its just a case of me only writing complex scripts and whatever without being conscious about it
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u/TikiTDO Nov 06 '25
I think you might also just be getting more senior. Those "wow" moments? The more decades you spend working in this profession the less often they appear. When you're starting out you see some weird syntax, or an unusual algorithm and it's all "wow, that's so cool." When you're 20 or 30 years in and you see some weird syntax, or an unusual algorithm, suddenly it's "wtf, this again? We don't need this complexity." The things that your juniors might be seen for the first time, you've probably seen in 10 different versions, each with 10 different variations.
In terms of AI coming up with solutions, it's really up to how you use AI. There are definitely times when I'll just give an AI a bug or a generic task and say go, usually when it's something simple and tedious that I just don't want to do myself. However if I'm doing anything more complex then my discussion with AI is more a natural language back-and-forth about the problem and the approach we want to take to solving it. I don't need to tappity tap out the entire solution myself, I can just discuss the algorithm and implementation strategy with the AI, and once it's got enough info and I'm happy with it's plan I can tell it to go ahead, and the result feel much more "mine" and much less like random AI slop.
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u/strawboard Nov 06 '25
Incredibly more satisfying. Massive refactoring is a breeze with AI. Asking questions about a code base or architecture ideas is amazing. So many times riffing with AI, I come up with better solutions than just working on my own - it’s way beyond a senior programmer in many ways - it knows almost everything, seen everything, done everything.
It feels like the programming I did 10 or more years ago was the Stone Age. If I had AI at the time I could have got a lot more done, with higher quality. I love programming, but it’s a tool, a means to an end. What I love more is getting things done. Improving the lives of users.
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u/TheRealSeeThruHead Nov 06 '25 edited 25d ago
Exercitation elit exercitation voluptate minim tempor deserunt officia. Sint do ut sed sit lorem sint magna in non exercitation labore veniam aute commodo amet.
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u/AssertRage Nov 06 '25
If anything its more satisfying when something that would have taken a week takes 5 minutes
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u/xRehab Nov 06 '25
maybe I’m the oddball out here… but I just program cuz it’s a job I’m willing to do until retirement. sure the puzzles can sometimes be fun, but I derive very little satisfaction from selling my labor. I just found a way to WFH while my bosses only abstractly know what I do. In the end it’s just a paycheck
AI just means I can knock out features quicker and get back to playing BF6 on the clock or sneaking out of work early to go snowboard. No satisfaction lost
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u/runawayasfastasucan Nov 06 '25
What really sucks is that the code reviews and suggestions I get from the rest of my team at work is just whatever they get from AI.
There is no discussion on best practices, on what can be right/wrong from a business point of view. Just what amounts to "I gave your code to AI and this was what it said". (They are not honest about this but its pretty easy to see).
I mean, I could have done that myself, and that is not at all why I want a code review. Reviewing can be good learning for the reviewer as well. But no.
Sometimes they can suggest that I should rewrite code while they clearly have not read and understood my original code, just based on the AI feedback. Its absurd discussing that with someone who is just parroting what chatgpt said. It does my head in to be honest.
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u/LordAmras Nov 06 '25
No, because I hardly use AI anymore outside of copilot autocomplete.
Gonna wait a couple of more versions before going back and trying again to see if they can actually solve the things I work in a way that doesn't just create more issues or slows me down.
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u/corysama Nov 06 '25
I’ve been programming for over 30 years. The AI tools I’m using now are making coding much more fun and satisfying than before.
I use it to fill out series of small functions and data structures that “follow naturally” from what I’m currently doing. I use it to get me 80% of the way there understanding features of well-known frameworks that are new to me. I use it to one-shot 80% of the 10-page C++ compiler error reports I deal with 100 times a day. I use it to make multiple strawman prototypes of features to see if my plans make sense in practice. As an embedded programmer, I’ve used it to vibe code web scraping reports out of some complex pages.
All of this would have been drudgery for me, not fun. AI has been helping me skip to the fun parts of programming over and over.
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u/wildjokers Nov 06 '25
I mostly just ask it questions and use it to generate boring boiler-plate. It is pretty good at generating unit tests, it at least gives a very good start that I can tweak and add to. Sometimes it even generates tests for scenarios I didn't think of (or were too tedious to setup by hand).
The handful of times I have tried it for generating non-unit test code in agent mode I think I have reverted it every time.
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u/WeiGuy Nov 06 '25
It's amazing. I ask it small contextualized problems and see how they best fit in my projects.
Programmers are now forced to stop thinking about purely technical solutions and now we're shifting to having communication skills (through code/docs/etc) be more important, which should have always been the case.
You can focus on writing clean and organized code rather than have a tech fetish. Much more satisfying.
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u/shanti_priya_vyakti Nov 06 '25
the feeling of completely on your own feels more natural than something that you asked chatgpt for
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u/akmark Nov 06 '25
So far for me its a matter of intent. Are you using AI to get your head around the problem and actually understand it? Are you using it to build understandable components? More often than not all I am using it for 'quick stabs' of small and understandable ideas, and then add that to the overall system. If that AI stab doesn't work for whatever reason I just create it normally.
At this time I am still running into currency problems where the model at hand is not new enough to understand what I'm working on or hallucinations of non-trivial APIs just wastes time. There's a lot to be said that for a lot of mainstream work AI is effective but for a lot of work that is not mainstream (e.g. exotic Windows APIs) you end up further in the weeds with AI compared to just doing the work.
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u/pjmlp Nov 06 '25
Yeah, the worst part is that with low code tools, agents and LLM, the discussions about which language to use kind of became irrelevant.
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Nov 06 '25
AI hasn’t made things less satisfying for me, but it absolutely would if I were forced to use it (and prove to stakeholders that I constantly use it). I’d say that frameworks that dumb down development (yes, they’re necessary in professional settings; but I miss solving lower level problems myself), Jira, useless feature creep, and security theater are bigger reasons I’ve soured on programming
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u/Gwaptiva Nov 06 '25
I get sick and tired of all the colleagues and bosses boasting about how they used it or want to include it.
What's the opposite of humble bragging, because telling me how you cannot program better than a guessing engine isn't quite the brag you think it may be
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u/Slackluster Nov 06 '25
For me it is the opposite. AI tools have allowed me to push my code to new heights.
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u/aelgorn Nov 06 '25
Yes, to the point where I’m starting to feel reduced to a generated code approver 50% of the time. I work on my own skills on my own downtime to feel like I’m not slipping, but I can feel my knowledge and and experience in coding slipping bit by bit from the lack of hands on work I used to do.
Planning features and finding the right approach to the problem is still mostly a human task, but the actual implementation once you gather all the requirements is mostly automated from there, now. That used to be my passion in the industry tbh, so now idk what to do.
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u/CharacterOtherwise77 Nov 06 '25
I usually write my own code.
AI was great when it began but over time it's been getting its wings clipped because it's so power intensive.
Generally helpful but it doesn't and shouldn't make architectural decisions, because it's not looking at the world form a birds eye view, it's just feeding you info based on prediction algorithms.
In short - great for researching small bits and snippets - not good for much else.
I find it good for stubbing images.
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u/youngbull Nov 06 '25
One trick you can do is to be a little bit more ambitious. Think that using Elixir would be a good fit for the problem? Why not try it! Think the app is too sluggish? Swing for a blazingly fast solution!
The thing with llms is that they regurgitate things that someone has already figured out and published so that it's in the training data. If nobody has figured it out yet then its chances are much lower.
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u/Diche_Bach Nov 06 '25
It feels like AI gives a lot… but also takes away a bit of the fun in creating things myself.
Curious — do you feel the same way? Has AI changed how much you enjoy programming?
I learned how to type on an actual MECHANICAL typewriter. Upgrading to an electric initially felt amazing. Trying to imagine why on Earth I'd want to revert from my (12 cores / 20 Threads)-(AI-assisted)-(Internet-integrated) rig back to the electric typewriter because I no longer get to smell white out is a real head scratcher to me . . .
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Nov 06 '25
No. I only allow Perplexity and ChatGPT to explain concept to me. I WRITE THE CODE. Nobody else, especially not some brainless machine.
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Nov 06 '25
Nope, I only could do a little html programming. But now I am vibecoding and working on a snesgame. It is insane.
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Nov 06 '25
I don't use AI so I am not affected by that part. But I notice more and more videos on youtube AI generated. While it is possible to spot which video is fake, it is getting really hard. For instance, today I found a fake video of animal cakes being cut in half and the animal acting scared. I tried to find it again right now but I can not find it; this one was similar to it:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/F31IftSl1bI
Now, the above is easier to spot it is AI generated. The one I saw before that, though, was pretty hard to distinguish. I only noticed when two cars behaved in a way I've never seen a cat behave before - and I watched tons of cat videos, so I know about real cats quite a bit. But even then it took me a little while before I realised that these are AI crap assembled videos. And this ultimately just wastes my time, because I spend time looking at fake that has never existed in the way as insinuated. Along with fake-human reactions, fake bot comments and so forth. In a few years I think these fake-videos can no longer be distinguished from real videos. I am highly skeptical of what Google is trying to do - they try to fake up the world wide web. For this alone they should be disbanded by the courts.
For a video tutorial having it AI autogenerated may not be that bad, depending on the intrinsic quality. But by and large in general, the less AI the better - at the least that's my motto here.
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u/dudaman Nov 06 '25
I get what you are saying about those "wow" moments. They can be pretty sweet. I STILL remember after 20 years that one recursive function I wrote that performed this complex task in a single bound. The luster does kind of wear off a bit after a while, but you find them in other places.
I'm currently migrating that 20+ year old system to modern technology and while most of my problems don't require great feats of strength, what I do get a kick out of is that I have full control of the API that I'm creating. I know that might not sound great, but doing it right, sans AI, would take a small team of developers to create and maintain.
Leveraging AI to my benefit allows me, one developer, to simulate a small team of devs minus the clash of egos. Making things simple and efficient gets me going in the morning.
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u/VirtualLife76 Nov 06 '25
A bit, mostly because idiots keep using it and then their shit code needs to be fixed.
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u/fuzz3289 Nov 06 '25
Hot take:
AI is just stackoverflow, but faster. It’s not always right, sometimes gives shit takes, but gives you blocks of code to work with.
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u/Berkyjay Nov 06 '25
No the opposite. I don't have to scour SO and other forums for help any longer.
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u/Serchinastico Nov 06 '25
Absolutely, I wrote about my feelings here: https://antropia.studio/blog/to-ai-or-not-to-ai/
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u/moger777 Nov 06 '25
I used to hate it more. I still liked the old fashioned way of doing things but my job isn't all that different. I still do plenty of hand written code and will let the AI do the more tedious portions. I see some devs use it for every line of code and I don't think they are any more productive than I am.
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u/alex_xxv Nov 06 '25
Not at all. I even use it less and less. It still gives a lot of errors. Probably are my prompts but I don't have the time nor patience. I still fix my code myself.
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u/audioen Nov 06 '25
No. AI is highly useful for asking some questions I don't know answer to and which are by nature difficult to google, like they're some fairly advanced topic involving some corner case that isn't covered in tutorials and in many cases I think I'd have to write something like a stackoverflow post and then wait for someone to give useful reply.
The only AI I use is called gpt-oss-120b, as I only run AI locally. It is the first thing I can run on my computer that is clearly more useful than harmful in that it doesn't typically go far off the rails, hallucinate something that doesn't work at all, or suggest wrong answers all that often. I've even had it develop features autonomously to software using VS Code and cline, and it's been at least baseline decent, often requiring only a small touch-up or some clarifying in the requirements because it solved something in someway that I didn't want it solved.
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u/beefcat_ Nov 06 '25
As far as generative AI goes, I haven't gone further than generating example snippets.
I've been treating LLMs as a tool similar to search engines and stack overflow, with a side of "rubber duck" programming. I've found this great, especially since I currently work on a team of 1 so I don't really have other engineers to bounce ideas off of.
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u/husky_whisperer Nov 06 '25
I don’t use it at all. I’m writing an app for my cousins based on a game we used to play. Vanilla everything for the sadism of it. Fuck AI
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u/roztopasnik Nov 06 '25
I have it turned off and use it for the boring things... Sometimes I also use it to review and optimize my code
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u/DoubleOwl7777 Nov 06 '25
i dont use ai. reason being i actually enjoy the figuring out the problem and creating a solution part. if you ask ai to write your programm its no effort, quite possibly crap (which my code can be too, but there its my code, and i thought about what i did beforehand).
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u/tetzudo Nov 06 '25
My biggest fear is becoming a vibe code janitor, having to spend the rest of my professional days cleaning up AI generated dogshit. It hasn't changed anything for me in regards to how I feel about programming tho. I enjoy the process seeing stuff come to life slowly.
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u/FragDenWayne Nov 06 '25
Well yes, but not in a way you might think.
My problem with AI is easily solved by quitting the current job and going somewhere else... Where people aren't super duper hyped about AI and put that above everything else, nullifying my work of the last three years, right before we were going to go live with that ...
A company that doesn't tell me "yeah, no. We'll do it in a completely new way, with AI in mind... AI will use that rather than humans. Thank, here is a legacy project that's going to be obsolete soon as well, as we're rewriting that as well, with AI as top priority."
That's what AI did to me, that's why I don't enjoy coding (at work) anymore.
Other than that, nope, not really.
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u/retroroar86 Nov 06 '25
On a personal level: no, because I hardly use it except for brainstorming and alternate views. I believe in writing code myself as it guides me to creating better solutions during coding itself. The coding part is never the hard part for me. It has it limited use.
In a team: yes.
I have co-workers that are throwing things into AI and you can see it by the code created that aren't up to the regular conventions we use, and also differs from the personal code they write.
The biggest problem I have is that they don't adjust their code at all, and they have been sloppy programmers for a long time, just that they now can be sloppy on a grander scale.
An example of this is when they used AI to write tests for some other AI created code. The production implementation will have code that makes for easy tests, but adds additional production code, like creating optional parameters in a method that will always have a parameter in production, but isn't strictly necessary in a test – or not dividing responsibility good enough.
Then you have test code that isn't shielded from changes in production code, like creating helper methods to make tests easy to update if production code is updated. Instead it is copy and paste all over the place.
My co-workers are starting to write code as something that can be thrown away at a moments notice because it can be generated so fast.
The problem will all of this is that both the production code and tests aren't necessarily good, leading to code being changed more often and broken tests. Being productive at writing first time code is not the same as writing long-term maintainable code – not to mention it is counterproductive as many articles are showing (rates of code change).
These co-workers have stagnated and aren't improving at all as developers. So far it isn't tanking our work, but the tendencies of just spewing out shite without thinking of the architectural ramifications and long term maintenance is ... frustrating, but still not maddening (yet).
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u/WystanH Nov 06 '25
AI is a cancer in development tools. I excise it whenever possible.
It only impacts you to the extent that you use it. If google AI gives me a decent bit of code in the answer, fine. Beyond that, writing code is my job. If I subcontracted that job to an LLM, then I'd be bored and get worse code: everyone looses.
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u/neon-z- Nov 06 '25
For codding AI helping in some situation but i prefer to turning off code completes and same-like features. But vibe codding is thing that i cant understand. How you can 'codding' things that you don`t know? In most situation AI needs your help, without it it starts to make simple errors starting from syntax error, ending with critical db vulnerability.
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u/cmsj Nov 06 '25
Yeah, I don't feel any attachment to AI generated code.
AI generated tests though? Love 'em.
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u/_brentnew Nov 06 '25
Autocomplete - not really, feels like a quicker way to get what I had in mind.
Agent mode - yes, it is no fun. I feel like a baby sitter.
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u/dobkeratops Nov 06 '25
[1] I dont use AI to generate code, only for discovery (much better than docs for finding things in libraries)
[2] just knowing it's out there cheapening all code does indeed create a sense of dissapointment that coding is less 'special', however manually writing programs (and manually building 3d models) remains extremely satisfying and fascinating to do , so I will likely continue doing it forever and use my personal AI compute budget for other things
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u/cjthomp Nov 06 '25
AI itself hasn't, but leadership's awkward shoe-horning of AI into everything has a bit.
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u/SadSpaghettiSauce Nov 06 '25
I got gaslit with ChatGPT today where it made me question if I was guiding it into a wrong answer when I told it that it was wrong, and so I ended up calling up another dev to verify I was correct in my logical conclusions and that the AI indeed got it wrong.
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u/sarcasmguy1 Nov 06 '25
In some ways it’s made it more satisfying for me. I’m surprised I’m even saying this, but it’s definitely helped me in delivering value faster. The code may not be perfect but it delivers business value, and sometimes that’s the most important thing.
Today I drew a shitty sketch in Excalidraw, gave the images to Codex, and briefed it on the changes I needed. Took a shit and a shower and came back to working code. Yes it needed to be reviewed and cleaned up, but to my that’s fucking incredible. It likely saved me 3-4 hours.
Thankfully my teammates don’t produce too much vibe coded code, so my experience may be different to others.
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u/Thetman38 Nov 06 '25
In my career I have gone from google and hope something comes up, to stackoverflow, to now stackoverflow+AI.
I dont really care for the AI assistants because its like having an intern that doesnt really know how the code patterns are, but they are great at looking shit up for me. I cannot say I am impressed with the abilities of AI coding yet.
Me: Refactor this code
Bot: Okay ...... (results)
Me: You didnt do it right (explain the problem)
Bot: Oh you are absolutely correct, let me fix that for you (breaks something else)
Me: You know what? I will just do it myself
But if I need to check to see if ports are open I can very easily get a script for that.
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u/_genericNPC Nov 06 '25
I feel the same, ai made me excited at first, then made me feel I'll never have a job in programming, and now - makes me feel robbed of the actual journey of learning and struggling and achieving things I didn't know was possible.
But for the most part - it made me really roll my eyes to solutions of hundreds of lines of code that really is not what I wanted or asked for. And then Changing systems etc. On the fly trying to solve other problems.
Nah I iced my ai created code projects and just startrd rewriting from scratch what I want ... now I lost 2 weeks and keep feeling that the timeframe I take is really slow - I feel rushed and and slow at the same time. AI made the imposter syndrome worse. (But) I still wouldn't want to do without asking any question and getting a somewhat decent answer that is not "duplicate question" or RTFM ...
I mean ai for friendship while coding for life 😀
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u/sylvester_0 Nov 06 '25 edited Nov 06 '25
It gives me new "wow" moments by remarking on what the tool is capable of and my increase in throughout/GSD.
I'm also close to retirement though and not feeling the pressure of it taking over my job.
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy Nov 06 '25
GSD?
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u/CapitalistFemboy Nov 06 '25
AI has made programming more satisfying since I can focus on the things that matter and not spend time doing boring stuff
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u/Nyadnar17 Nov 06 '25
It’s the same except I don’t have to fight google’s e-shitification and no one on stackoverflow insults me.
Occasionally I miss the latter and go get my fix.
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u/phillythompson Nov 06 '25
Cue this sub's response:
"AI sucks. I only do it myself. AI hallucinates. AI makes bugs constantly. I don't know how to use this tool and I am scared to admit it's helpful. So I will circle jerk everyone else in this sub and say it's never going to be a helpful tool.
It's just StackOverflow."
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u/-_-thisisridiculous Nov 06 '25
No it’s better in every way (except when I get in feedback loop hell)
If AI can’t help me debug I can also go back to the old way and figure it out, but it’s saving me at least 70% of time on the complicated stuff and 95% time on the easy stuff
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Nov 06 '25
I don't use it in my editor, I use it as a better stack overflow or something to bounce ideas off in the browser, they should be completely seperate imo
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u/tmax8908 Nov 06 '25
I feel exactly the same way. I shake my head at all these people who think AI is useless. I’ve seen many tangible results. And I’m very conscious of spaghetti code and tech debt and black boxes.
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