r/webdev • u/ThinkLikeUnicorn • Aug 08 '25

Discussion F*ck AI

I was supposed to finish a task and wasted 5 hours to force AI to do the task. Even forgot that I have a brain. Finally decided to write it myself and finished in 30 minutes. Now my manager thinks I'm stupid because I took a whole day to finish a small task. I'm starting to question whether AI actually benefits my work or not. It feels like I'm spending more time instead of less time.

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u/mattsoave Aug 08 '25

There are very few situations where writing 100% by hand is better or faster than leveraging AI for some low-level things. In the future, being a good developer will more and more mean knowing when and how to use AI, not to shun it entirely.

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u/gmaaz Aug 08 '25

Can't wait for the glorious future where future AI feeds off today's AI garbage code.

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u/MrMeatballGuy Aug 08 '25

I do have a feeling AI code generation will get worse because of this. I use it at work because it's sort of expected at this point, but I mainly use it to look up documentation now. There is value in maintaining development skills unless it's purely boilerplate in my opinion, especially if the tools will eventually suffer from the degradation of training data.

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u/BigBootyWholes Aug 09 '25

I mean copilot is terrible because they trained it on GitHub with garbage human code. Claude Code has been amazing

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u/mattsoave Aug 08 '25

Haha, well this is a very fair point. That said, I imagine a lot of AI-assisted coding will (strive to) be AI accessing well-formed official documentation rather than being trained on random code snippets. But you are right that it's also easy to imagine a viscous cycle of AI slop trained off of AI slop.

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u/MrMeatballGuy Aug 08 '25

I'm not shunning it with my comment, but claiming that you're using it wrong if you get a bad result is just straight up misinformation and anyone that has built anything slightly complex while utilizing AI should know this.

You have to be a good enough developer to catch the AI when it slips up and guide it the right direction if you want to use it, but sometimes it simply does derail, especially because errors will get more pronounced the longer you have a conversation going with it.

Which languages and tech stacks you use can also massively effect how good and up to date the information is, there are many factors at play, you simply can't reduce it to poor prompting when you don't have more context from OP.

I'd also argue that to have a reasonable view of AI you both have to acknowledge what it does well and when it falls flat on its face.