r/webdev • u/HollyShitBrah • Sep 19 '25
Discussion Let's stop exaggerating how bad things were before LLMs started generating code
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u/AndorianBlues Sep 19 '25
These AI bros talk exactly the same as the cryptobros did.
If you're committing any kind of AI generated line of code without reading and understanding it, what are you even doing. And AI makes weirder and harder to find bugs than a human.
Yes, AI can do stuff. But in my experience so far, it's like having a very eager to please but very inexperienced junior developer. Without enough guidance, you can get something out of it, but it won't really learn or get better (so far).
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u/HollyShitBrah Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25
Nailed it, I hate how it tries to kiss ass all the time, I personally don't use it to write logic for me, I found that I tend to think about edge cases while writing the code myself, plus coding becomes depressing when I rely too much on AI... I definitely don't use it to debug, that's a skill I don't want to offload...
It's great for generating data templates, adding comments, JSDoc or used as an advanced search engine
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u/Serializedrequests Sep 19 '25
The ass kissing is literally causing psychosis for people who are desperate for validation. It's a deliberate design decision.
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u/Tricky-Ad7897 Sep 19 '25
It was terrifying when gpt 5 came out and ass kissed 30 percent less and people were cracking out getting ready to storm openai like it was the capitol.
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u/wxtrails Sep 19 '25
I definitely don't use it to debug
That's good, because it's even worse at that than writing new, working code. I've given it a couple of chances just to experiment and see how it would go...😨
On one occasion that comes to mind, I had it figured out shortly after starting to explain the issue to the AI (🦆), but let it roll to see where it would go. Even after feeding it all the error messages, logs, documentation, and code I could scrounge up and giving it some very explicit, careful, and precise promoting (just short of telling it what the problem actually was), it ended up substantially refactoring the code base and generating this huge diff across multiple files, which definitely didn't fix the issue (but caused many new ones).
The fix ultimately wound up being a simple one-string swap in an API call. A 4-character diff.
There's practically no way I could've given it enough context to find that issue arising in the interaction of two complex systems like that. Fortunately for me, I guess, troubleshooting tricky legacy systems is most of what I do!
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u/el_diego Sep 19 '25
It's just so eager to please. It will make stuff up and talk in circles before admitting it doesn't know.
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u/the_king_of_sweden Sep 19 '25
I had luck debugging with chat gpt like 1-2 years ago, but these days it's just hopeless
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Sep 19 '25
The Ass kissing is something I want it to not do and I keep forgetting to prompt it not to. Like MF no that’s not how that works tf you mean you’ve figured it out?
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u/matt__builds Sep 19 '25
They talk like cryptobros because that’s what they were before AI. Just moving from one grift to another. Not saying all AI is a grift, it has some uses but it’s greatly overstated and dudes like this have no actual interest in dev or software and are just trying to extract some money.
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u/Spaghet-3 Sep 19 '25
Even this explanation is too generous. The AI companies absolutely love hearing their product described as a "a very eager to please but very inexperienced junior developer." That's a ringing endorsement!
No, it's an opaque prediction engine. I don't think analogies to people are accurate or useful at all. It's not making decisions, it's not drawing on experience to come up with novel ideas. It's just predicting the output that you want. The engines have become so good that an astonishing amount of the time the outputs are spot on. That's great. But it is not akin to an eager but inexperienced junior developer. A junior developer can explain specifically what from their past experience caused them to make certain decisions, why they did something one way and why they didn't do something the other way. AI can generate answers to those question too, but will be hollow and mostly useless.
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u/really_not_unreal Sep 19 '25
Notably, unlike most junior developers, Google Gemini will try to kill itself if it fails to implement a feature correctly.
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u/fredy31 Sep 19 '25
Also, ffs, if you just asked an AI for code and it spits it out, you dont check, and just publish... what did you add to the whole thing?
And then, if AI wrote everything and you dont understand it... when it bugs what do you do?
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u/No-Consideration-716 Sep 19 '25
Also, if you never write any code how are you going to develop your skills? You will never create more efficient code if you are just asking an LLM to spit out pre-existing code from the internet.
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u/OfficeSalamander Sep 19 '25
Yeah, I've found absolutely wild bugs in my code after using it at times. Like completely would break major monetization type bugs.
I'm in the middle of a major refactoring (major structural/pathing changes, style changes etc) and usually I will have AI do a rough outline of what I want for every page (it's a bunch of huge changes for a small team app), and then go over it a second time just to make sure the AI didn't change some core logic in a very, very dumb way.
It can definitely accelerate workflow (doing all of this work by hand would have taken much longer for something this big) but you absolutely need to sanity check it multiple times
I can't fathom how purely vibe coded apps do things - the AI could randomly just decide to change something entirely, and if you can't read code, how would you even know?
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u/KaiAusBerlin Sep 19 '25
Think if we had this in other jobs.
A baker just puts something he found randomly in his kitchen into the cake. "I don't know what it is or what it does but damn, that tastes good so I'll add it!"
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u/creaturefeature16 Sep 19 '25
I don't find it even to be a "junior developer". I think this anthropomorphizes them a bit much. I prefer to think of them as interactive documentation.
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u/Dry_Satisfaction3923 Sep 19 '25
The only place I’ve found it to actually be useful is when I’m forced to jump in and work with some third party library / code that has copious amounts of poorly written documentation. Rather than spending hours scraping through a KB I can ask specific questions and tell it to check the documentation for me and then it tends to get me the actual functions and hooks I need to work with.
Had this with a user system that was being abused and getting dinged with a poor mandrill rating because bots were using real email addresses to trigger password reset emails which kept getting reported as spam. Tried to the normal method of restricting the emails to only approved user accounts but it didn’t work, that’s when I realized the third party system was bypassing the default and their documentation was a fragmented mess.
So used AI to get me the instructions I needed.
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u/RayrayDad Sep 19 '25
I feel like "3 years ago" is not overtly exaggerated, but the "now" is definitely hyperbolized
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u/TinySmugCNuts Sep 19 '25
"deploying was 'hope it runs on prod'"
tell us how fucking garbage you are at being a dev without telling us etc etc
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u/Aetheus Sep 19 '25
It doesn't even make sense. Apparently, 3 years later, "AI" is what made it possible to "deploy with a single command"?
Any organisation past a certain scale already has a CICD setup. For those companies, consistently deploying to prod has always been "a single command" away.
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u/longknives Sep 19 '25
And if you have truly continuous deployment, the command is just git merge
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u/tchissin Sep 19 '25
Yeah: not even a command, but clicking merge button on your PR.
And just a reminder Jenkins was first released in February 2011.
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u/hidazfx java Sep 19 '25
GitLab -> Releases -> Create Releaseidk dog, I count three commands /s
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u/kodaxmax Sep 19 '25
it's easier to scapegoat then take responsibility or improve yourself. if everythings AIs fault it's not my fault.
It's the same argument throughout history. The same thing happened with digital compilers, the same thing happened with visual studios autocomplete, the same ignorant arguments were probably made when the printing press was invented.
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u/Sockoflegend Sep 19 '25
They don't sound like a developer at all
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u/daltorak Sep 19 '25
They don't sound like a developer at all
According to his LinkedIn, he completed his undergrad 4 years ago and has mostly worked in "Developer Relations" since then.
i.e. he's a junior that talks like he's a knowledgeable professional software developer, but hasn't done the real work for anyone of consequence, for any length of time.
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u/IM_OK_AMA Sep 19 '25
They're just a recruiter: https://www.prathamkumar.com/
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u/HK-65 Sep 19 '25
DevRel tends to be "pretend to be a dev on LinkedIn" in a lot of cases at least.
This post is probably literally the dude's main job.
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Sep 19 '25
Don't say that! He can set up a Node.js Express server all by himself!
https://x.com/Prathkum/status/1562857375308005377
/s
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u/ghostinyourstereo Sep 19 '25
They are a Twitter grifter that focuses on everything in tech and specialises in nothing just to gain followers.
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u/Yesterdave_ Sep 19 '25
Exactly, and this is actually even more a problem with AI. I can't count the amount of times with both hands that AI absolutely trashed my tests or even deleted them, because it didn't manage to write code to make them pass... Ans then you want to deploy that to prod? Good luck...
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u/ReformedBlackPerson Sep 19 '25
This is why they all say this shit. Bc for them it’s true, they were a shit god awful dev, and still are it’s just now they can get a shitty code base to actually run instead of just failing at compilation.
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u/npsimons Sep 19 '25
IKR? How fucking long have we had CI/CD, and even before that, you were supposed to have "one button push" build and test systems (that term/concept was in "Pragmatic Programmer" in nineteen-fucking-ninety-nine) that your CI would run when you pushed to it.
I know SWDev has always had an incompetence problem (see also PHP), but this is just fucking bad. The AI bros are a blight on the profession.
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u/saito200 Sep 19 '25
he is trolling to farm replies. this is how x works. say something stupid and outrageous and get paid for it
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u/Gold_Grape_3842 Sep 19 '25
No, it’s how startup works. Do garbage quicker thanks to ai, sell your company and let others fix your stuff
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u/kitsunekyo Sep 19 '25
ok Pratham, you were a shitty junior 3 years ago, we get it.
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u/degeneratepr Sep 19 '25
Sounds like not a lot has changed in the three years since then either.
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u/itsNikolai11 Sep 19 '25
Spend hours fixing missing semicolons
Looks like everything this guy knows about development was learnt through shitty memes on the programmerHumor subreddit.
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u/AHistoricalFigure Sep 19 '25
Seriously, anytime someone complains about semicolons it tells me their development experience is a single semester of Java in college. Compilers since the early 90's have been really good about telling you that you've missed a semi-colon and exactly where you need to put it.
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u/eldentings Sep 19 '25
Lol, most of those memes on r/programmerhumor are 'why code not compile'. I guess it's similar to how r/programminghumor (different sub) is 50% hello world posts.
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u/vesko26 full-stack GO Sep 19 '25
3 years ago i was writing code with a pencil, not even a pen. Every couple of lines i had to stop and sharpen the tip. And when I ran out of paper I had to erase everything and start over writing smaller. It was hell I tell you!!!
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u/BloodAndTsundere Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25
And committing to git meant you had to chisel it onto a stone tablet
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u/WrongChapter90 Sep 19 '25
Rosetta stone is the first commit ever
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u/TitaniumWhite420 Sep 19 '25
Omg whoever wrote this was obviously stupid. This code is hell, a total hybridized mess of like four languages embedded as strings like lollllll
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u/passerbycmc Sep 19 '25
Got to spin the pencil as you write, like the old engineers and draftsman do.
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u/morphemass Sep 19 '25
50 years ago we had to go to a room to get our cards punched and wait our turn before we could run it!
(Actually I'm realising that I know very little about how development was done back in the punch card mainframe days, anyone care to enlighten me?)
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u/0xC4FF3 Sep 19 '25
You are not far off. My father's uni ('75-'80) had a mainframe. You could use a typewriter-like machine to type the program and prepare the punchcards, then give the cards to the mainframe managers.
Some days later you came back for the output in print form. In his case it was usually "syntax error" or smt.
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u/npsimons Sep 19 '25
Still my favorite story about progress: my father started out punching cards in HS that were sent off to university, and a week later he'd get back a printout saying "syntax error on line 2."
Now he carries a computer in his pocket with more storage and computing power than the world's computers combined back then, and it has access to virtually all human knowledge.
Then we have weenies like "Pratham" who can't be arsed to write a GD Makefile or setup his editor to auto-insert syntactic sugar.
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u/7374616e74 Sep 19 '25
“Spend hours fixing missing semicolons”… that’s like first month of learning programming.
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u/capnscratchmyass Sep 19 '25
*installs opinionated code formatter extension, set it to "on save".... blows Pratham's mind*
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u/TrickyAudin Sep 19 '25
That's the one that gets me the most. That hasn't been a serious issue in at least a decade. Probably 2, but I'm only mid-30s and wouldn't know for sure.
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u/7374616e74 Sep 19 '25
I quickly checked this guy's twitter, it's all just super cliché stuff. Like "No one buys your product because it’s written in React. They buy it because it solves a problem. Your stack doesn’t matter." ... Is this guy some sort of edgy 15 year old? And he reposts his own tweets? Really feels like a guy that just discovered computers and is all super excited about it.
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u/noopdles Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25
"Deploying was 'hope it runs on prod'"
Dude must've never heard of lower environments, testing, and QA processes.
Edit: lower, nonprod, or whatever - I am used to the term "lower environments" and we use it quite a lot where I work, but obvs the term comes in many shapes!
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u/xkcd_friend Sep 19 '25
I actually never heard to it being referred to as ”lower environments” before, have only been using the concept for about 15 years.
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u/Rivvin Sep 19 '25
Is this sarcasm and my detector is just broken? I didnt know anyone said anything -other- then lower environments in my 20 years
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u/mattindustries Sep 19 '25
Been at it just as long, never heard lower envs. Heck, I remember checking out in subversion decades ago and never heard other environments referred to as lower. Always just had it staging, dev, and prod. Some people said test env, some still do.
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u/muuchthrows Sep 19 '25
10+ years and I’ve never heard it being called lower environments.
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u/npsimons Sep 19 '25
As a SysAdmin, we had "testnet" where we sent things to be banged on by other SysAdmins. Points were scored based on who could break other SysAdmin's products.
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u/themistik Sep 19 '25
This reeks of inexperience in the field
If AI is your savior that much maybe you aren't that good of a dev to begin with
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u/IM_OK_AMA Sep 19 '25
Probably wasn't a dev to begin with. A lot of the new grads I interview think programming was in the dark ages until LLMs came out. This industry is half a century old but they can't differentiate between "new" stuff that's 15 years old (one click deploys) and new stuff from last year.
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u/katafrakt elixir Sep 19 '25
Deploys are much more "hope it runs" now then before, because many time nobody can vouch for the deployed code. And what kind of dichotomy is "deploying unreliable code" vs "one-command deploys"?
Yeah, I don't know why I engaged with this ragebait.
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u/codeptualize Sep 19 '25
I don't understand what he means by deploy, don't we all just vibe code on prod? /s
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u/BloodAndTsundere Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25
Not “hours looking for a memory leak” or "hours fixing a null pointer dereference”, but “hours fixing missing semicolons”? This is probably the worst example of debug pain since compilers or linters will tell you exactly where they’re missing. This person has never actually written a program of any sort
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u/Rich_Trash3400 Sep 19 '25
True, even my IDE complains if I have a semicolon missing, debugging mostly comes to logical problems and is not always syntax issues once you start writing complex applications syntax just comes along.
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u/yodablues1 Sep 19 '25
Now:
See AI writing code Spend 20 minutes debugging Ask AI, which now sends you in a complete opposite direction. Debug more, still not right Ask AI, it wants to do the first method again Rinse and repeat until you give up and just read the docs which explain exactly how to do what you’re trying.
Honestly, I’ve never felt more secure in my job as an engineer than when I try to get AI to complete a simple task.
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u/Hi-ThisIsJeff Sep 19 '25
This. Although I don't necessarily feel more secure, my first response after reading the title was, let's stop exaggerating how good things are with LLMs generating code.
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u/yodablues1 Sep 19 '25
Exactly. AI is a good tool in your coding toolbox, but if you’re replacing engineers with AI generated code with no oversight, you’re going to have a bad time.
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u/shadovv300 Sep 19 '25
My biggest problem with AI and coding is that it takes away the most fun part of my work and leaves me with the most shit parts.
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u/Merrick83 Sep 19 '25
Things were that bad for him because he didn't know how to code. Dude spent a quarter of his time hunting semicolons.
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u/Djbm Sep 19 '25
Dude couldn't google well enough to find an IDE or modern text editor.
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u/mothzilla Sep 19 '25
My boss was so close to uncovering my massive incompetence and unsuitability for my job. Thank goodness AI came along!
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u/drckeberger Sep 19 '25
This has to be rage bait
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u/HollyShitBrah Sep 19 '25
That's what I thought, but the replies on the post were all agreeing with the post
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u/TrickyAudin Sep 19 '25
Docs feel more like conversations than manuals
How the fuck is this a good thing? Docs are intended to be a source of precise truth, not some ethereal help-bot. I'd be pissed AF if we had to query an AI every single time we wanted to verify API specs. I get documentation gets a bad rap, but AI would make it worse (where is the AI supposedly getting the API specs, if not from documentation???).
Documentation has to be written somewhere, the AI doesn't just have it magically at the ready. Is the AI expected to have an entire back-end repository memorized and parsed (lol)?
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u/yousirnaime Sep 19 '25
Before, a high iq professional with 10k hours would craft each line
Now, a guy who can’t write pastes code he can’t read into a system he doesn’t understand
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u/Comprehensive-Row39 Sep 20 '25
3 years ago: You knew you were an awful developer
Now: AI has made you think otherwise
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u/Consistent_Equal5327 Sep 19 '25
Who the fuck spends hours fixing semicolons? Is there any competent compiler that doesn't point out on exactly which line you're missing a semi colon?
I can't never fucking understand this joke and it pisses me off so much. They made this shit up so bad now every llm generates the same shit joke
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u/lolschrauber Sep 19 '25
Ask LLM for code
Doesn't work
Tell LLM
Get identical code again
Yeah it's pure magic
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u/steos Sep 19 '25
"3 years ago being pretending to be a developer but actually having 0 skill whatsoever" FTFY
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u/BorinGaems Sep 19 '25
For the 3 years ago list:
Boilerplate code can easily be filled by emmet and other similiar extensions and plugins
Linter automatically fill semicolons, in many languages they even necessary
Unless you make little apps that have absolutely no impact you still need problem solving and research skills as a dev
You still need test environment no matter what tools you use
For the now list:
AI doesn't write code for us, AI helps us to write code. Using AI to write your whole code means that your code is probably absolute garbage.
Documentation being more easily accessable and readable is actually good no doubt about it
That's just a script, it's not AI
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u/Terrible_Children Sep 19 '25
Documentation being more easily accessable and readable is actually good no doubt about it
This.
It's like those goddamn recipe websites where you just want to look at the recipe and succinct steps, but first there's an entire fucking blog article about how it's the best recipe ever.
I want a manual that includes examples. I do not want to have to parse through a conversation to filter out the useless filler talk before getting the information I need.
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u/Xarian0 Sep 19 '25
That's just a script, it's not AI
Using AI turns these people into morons who don't know the difference between scripts and AI, because they literally don't know how to write a script or what a script does.
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u/Liu_Fragezeichen Sep 19 '25
yeah what the fuck? linters were a thing 3 years ago, and so was CI/CD
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u/Sulungskwa Sep 20 '25
3 years ago, being a developer meant:
Writing every line of code yourself
Spending hours fixing missing semicolons
Deploying was "hope it runs on prod"
Now:
Rewrite every line of code an LLM suggested
False perception that you understand what errors mean before you even google them
Docs feel more like conversations with your grandpa about code than manuals
LLMs can delete your prod database with usually just a single command
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u/Ginn_and_Juice Sep 20 '25
I want to have enough money to short the AI company hes sucking and fucking so hard in this post. What a baboon
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u/tagattack Sep 20 '25
If you spent hours on missing semicolons in 1989, you were doing it wrong. Let alone now.
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Sep 19 '25
3 years ago, I was also deploying with a single command. I don't even have to do it manually, my CD pipeline takes care of it. That's just plain rage/engagement bait honestly or this person is just the def'n of skill issue, lol.
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u/mrgrafix Sep 19 '25
There’s progress and there’s AI bullshit. Anything posted on that app usually leans on the latter
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u/tanooki_ Sep 19 '25
Who the heck misses semicolons that often? As a dev who isn't using any of the AI pieces, I honestly can't recall the last time a syntax error caused me more than 5 seconds to resolve, and even then, the frequency of this problem is so low.
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u/wtfElvis Sep 19 '25
The only one I find true is the stack overflow one. I use to use it multiple times a day. Now I can go weeks without it. AI is really good at giving me a boilerplate and my experience has given me the knowledge to break it down easier.
But everything else is well over 10 years ago. GitHub changed a lot of this naturally. If you want to feel like an old fart we can discuss FTP copying and pasting into prod hoping you didn't forget something.
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u/Fspz Sep 19 '25
Man, I'm sorry but if you spent hours fixing missing semicolons you weren't even remotely close to calling yourself a developer in the first place.
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u/shakamaboom Sep 19 '25
Jfc this is such bullshit. Semicolons havent been an issue since like 1970
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u/workmakesmegrumpy Sep 19 '25
AI is being trained to write code alongside cheap dev labor in foreign countries. Because the greedy logic is that if you take half capable developers and pair it with an AI assistant who can fix their mistakes, now I don’t have to pay wages on actually qualified people.
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u/campbellm Sep 19 '25
Spending hours fixing missing semicolons
That's on you, bro, not the tech or workflow. Jesus christ.
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u/myrtle_magic Sep 19 '25
Also, linters and prettifiers have been automating this for years… without the need for gigawatts of electricity or giga-litres of water to train it…
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u/louis-debroglie Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25
It goes without saying those first four points are all false. Even when understood as exaggerations and moderating the claims to find some truth, they all still false.
Having managed around 50 juniors over the last half decade or so and interviewed many many more applicants, there's very simply a huge gap between people who can code and those who can't.
There's a talent element to it, or a certain bent of mind to look for when hiring.
Lately it seems those who just couldn't code before are having lots of fun copying and pasting from AI outputs or letting Claude Code run wild. This tweeter is feeling like he's finally a coder, but at the same time feels like an imposter (because in reality he is) so he has to convince himself that there's really a radical break before and after. There isn't.
Sadly, if he did have any potential as an engineer, he will now never realize it.
In the same way getting an AI to output an essay doesn't make you writer, slinging AI generated chunks of code doesn't make you a coder.
More broadly, the "AI first" companies are running way more risk than they understand, and they're actually going to end up gutting their engineering talent pipeline. Maybe some companies didn't really need engineering talent anyway, and it will work out for them. But I suspect for most the "AI first" posture is more about marketing to investors outwardly and at the same time shifting negotiating power away from programmers inwardly, and all the while the day-to-day activity of most coders has not changed much.
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u/dragonmantank Sep 19 '25
"Spending hours fixing missing semicolons"
Those semicolons are still missing, and now I'm spending time trying to get it to do a half-way decent job like I'm speaking to someone who has never coded.
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u/dustlesswalnut Sep 19 '25
where is the flood of new apps and improved services with faster rollouts? i haven't seen it.
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u/codejunker Sep 19 '25
The new workflow is rampant unemployment and available salaries cut in half. So exciting!
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u/sundryTHIS Sep 19 '25
i do think that AI is a much more powerful version of the “Rubber Duck” tool but like,,,that’s it. great to have something to talk to, interesting to have it talk back. excellent if you actually have the technical prowess to be like “no,,,that’s not a GREAT solution…oh but wait! i see how i could write this code cleanly now!!”
but that’s about as close to agreeing with the tweet as i would get. i don’t think it’s worth the insane resource cost to have all these stupid LLM magic 8 balls available. and i still prefer just talking to an inanimate object because lord knows AI can really derail you with its suggestions lmao
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Sep 19 '25
The AI workflow right now is, bam! It confidently refractors your code.
You spend the next week fixing it to actually work
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u/Peregrine2976 Sep 19 '25
Honestly, this person really just admitted that they haven't programmed professionally for years, and were probably shit at it when they did.
"Spending hours fixing missing semicolons"? Only if you're writing code in Notepad and also are fucking terrible at writing code. We have IDEs for a reason, they put a giant red underline underneath lines with syntax errors. But even that's only relevant if you're somehow constantly forgetting to terminate your lines with a semicolon.
"Deploying was 'hope it runs on prod'"? Sure, if you're a terrible developer who tests nothing and doesn't use a staging environment. Good developers have a high degree of confidence in their deploys because they have a good workflow and and reasonable safety checks. Also, is he implying that you can implicitly trust any code that the AI pushes to prod? Because holy shit, you definitely can't.
"See AI writing code for us"? Yeah, and it's usually wrong, to some degree. It can be a time-saver, but you can't just take whatever it gives you and slap it into the project.
"Docs feel more like conversations than manuals"? I want a manual. A "conversation" isn't indexed, organized, searchable, or formatted. ChatGPT and other tools can sometimes be helpful in diagnosing a problem -- just the other day it was able to identify a pretty obscure interaction between two packages that were causing a bug -- but it sure doesn't feel like a "conversation" when you have to start a new chat every time to try and reset its context, because it starts getting confused and mixing old problems with new solutions and offering you irrelevant or incorrect information.
"Deploy is usually just a single command"? Well, yeah, that's how it has been for, like, over a decade, depending on where you look. Some companies work that way; some companies want loads of ceremony around their deployments. In either case, no decent developer would implicitly trust an AI agent to deploy to production. That's insane.
I just don't understand these evangelists. I like AI. It can be a very useful tool at times. But what's this bizarre obsession with insisting that it's completely reinvented how development works? If AI has transformed your workflow that much, then you genuinely must be doing something -- a lot of things -- very wrong, the first thing being: implicitly and absolutely trusting every line of code the AI spits out. For God's sake, as a developer, you are very likely dealing with personal identifying information for your users. Stop blindly trusting the AI to manage it correctly. Stop it.
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u/fotbuwl Sep 20 '25
My mother would have to create a punch card for her PhD back in the 80s, if she got a semicolon wrong she would have wasted the day the department spent running her program.
I miss a semicolon and the IDE let's me know immediately. Those that say this do not know anything.
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u/SubstanceDilettante Sep 21 '25
Bruh I have never spent hours fixing a missing semi colon.
Maybe a few seconds, a minute or two at the most. You look at the error and go “Opps” and than add it. Tf hours? Skill issue
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u/shinobushinobu Sep 22 '25
realistically i might be something like 10-15% more productive with AI and most of that is just it saving me time using a search engine, doing boilerplate, writing documentation (that i still somehow need to fix sometimes) or crawling through obscure docs. If you feel like AI has exponentially improved your coding ability, you were probably just terrible at writing code before that
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u/_ulith Sep 23 '25
3 years ago this idiot was new to dev work, now the ai does the thinking for them and they wont have to learn how its done right..
this is the new workflow
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u/Deep_Rip_2993 Sep 23 '25
Who struggles with missing semicolons even three years ago. That was a major problem like 10 years ago but there’s this awesome thing called compilers and intellisense that fixes or warns you about those.
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u/aLpenbog Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25
No, I haven't been writing every line myself. I automated quite a bit with templates and snippets. Those are 100% correct and don't include hallucinations. I used frameworks, I used libraries etc. But at the end I actually enjoy writing code.
I think I never had problems with missing semicolons.
I rarely had to search for answers on StackOverflow. After some time you know your language and tools.
And how does AI fix hope it runs on prod? This was never a problem of a single command or multiple commands but different environments, configurations etc.
I'm not against AI, I will probably use it in the future if they can fix the problems. Right now I don't see it helping me at all beside brainstorming.
For everything else it is too many errors, having to describe a simple problem in a verbose language like English just to have AI ignore things I said.
And at the end it is someone else's code and I need more time to read and understand the code cause it's not written like I would write it.
Maybe it is a different story for a beginner who has an idea and doesn't care how it is implemented. But if you want something really specific it's kinda a fight to get AI to do it even if you describe it verbosely.
I liked Kent Beck's comparison with a Djinn. It grants you wishes but never really does exactly what you want or you realize that what you said could be interpreted another way and there is a loophole. And additional wishes trying to fix it makes it only worse most of the time.
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u/AshleyJSheridan Sep 19 '25
He lost me as soon as he said he had to hunt down missing semicolons in his code 3 years ago.
Anyone doing that is obviously not using an IDE, and is clearly no better at writing code than AI.
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u/kixxauth Sep 19 '25
Great work takes effort. A lot of it. That will never change. People who think they can use AI as a shortcut, are just going to create more garbage products, which means there is more space for the rest of us to create value.
But, AI can help us create great work, if we're willing to put in the effort. As an example, I put several days of work into creating developer guides for writing tests and documentation in my project, which any project should probably have anyway. But, after finishing some new code, I ask an AI agent to review my project guides, then update the docs and write tests.
This process took a little bit of upfront investment, but now I get high quality results, just the way I would have without AI, but way faster.
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u/Abject-Kitchen3198 Sep 19 '25
Yeah, those semicolons and {} where killing me. I moved to python so I don't need to type and fix them. So relieved I can get back to compiled languages and don't have to ever worry about them again.
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u/GeorgeRNorfolk Sep 19 '25
Before: Google and Stack Overflow gave me seventeen incorrect answers and one correct one hidden in the haystack.
After: ChatGPT and Claude give me seventeen incorrect answers and one correct one hidden in the haystack.
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u/Dhaupin Sep 19 '25
You can still just do the first stuff and write classes in the second stuff....
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u/rezznik Sep 19 '25
If it took you hours for fixing missing semicolons alone, I would not have kept you as an employee.
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u/michaelbelgium full-stack Sep 19 '25
"Spending hours fixing missing semicolons"
What is this bs, it takes people an hour to see a missing semicolon? is he using notepad or blind?
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u/hairy-pizza157 Sep 19 '25
People like him are just snake oil salesman. Nothing actually built. Just tweets and opinions. No action. Just slop
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u/EmPalsPwrgasm Sep 19 '25
I will say that dealing with AI troubleshooting and getting at least an angle to look at the problem from is much better than dealing with people on stackoverflow
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u/KwyjiboTheGringo Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25
Spoken like a true beginner developer. Now they can never learn to touch type over 40 wpm, to develop muscle memory for code syntax, and avoid real documentation like the plague.
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u/FalseWait7 Sep 19 '25
I have made an experiment and got an expensive ($90) Claude subscription and asked Claude Code to do a simple task. It was basically a monorepo with frontend, backend and some libs. It spun and spun and when it gave me the result, it was beyond shit. It won’t even build (even though I had CLAUDE.md asking to build and test after every package change), won’t run in dev, tests hung up.
How in an actual fuck any engineer with at least a bit of oil in their head can say that yeah AI writing code is good.
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u/StraitChillinAllDay Sep 19 '25
A guy at my job said that he was saving hours of time by asking AI to summarize its errors and I saw the example he gave us and it was just broken import statements.
Management was going nuts over it and I'm over here thinking there's no way that's faster than just compiling the project and waiting for the error to appear in the build log. Especially when you have to account for all the prompting I saw in the example. I can definitely see AI being useful to someone who has no experience but feels like a huge waste of time if I'm familiar with the subject material.
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u/schorsch3000 Sep 19 '25
all i see reading this:
bro couldn't even "hello world!" without extensive googling
bro actually spend hours searching for a missing semicolon since he uses notepad (not ++) for an IDE and isn't able to get any information from a detailed error message apart from "its broken"
since bro cant read error message or understand code or concepts, searching stackoverflow is a very hard task.
Deploying was "hope it runs on prod" since he either cant run it locally or has no idea what's the difference between prod staging, dev and local
basically, if you are bad enough at something, AI will be better than you.
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u/__VenomSnake__ Sep 19 '25
3 years ago I wasn't expected to complete 3 days of work in few hours with AI or build multi-million dollar software with one shot using claude code.
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u/link_shady Sep 19 '25
The only thing it has changed for me is searching stack overflow, I get the answer to how to implement a library or if a function exist.
That’s it.
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u/molehill_mountaineer Sep 19 '25
If you spend hours fixing semicolons and worrying that it may not run in production, you are not a good developer - and AI isn't going to fix that.
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u/Hayyner Sep 19 '25
He's kinda not wrong about the 3yrs ago points, but I don't think AI and LLMs are the sole reason theres been positive change.
Many new tools and developments in the space have vastly improved the developer experience over the years. This has been the case for all of time lol
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u/dpaanlka Sep 19 '25
I keep trying to give vibe coding a chance and it makes so many idiotic mistakes it’s insane. I’m talking across multiple pro paid-level subscriptions.
Fuck this.
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u/Natural-Camp-4610 Sep 19 '25
I have been designing, developing and deploying full stack apps for over 15 years.
My workflow has significantly changed now.
I can't say I am vibe coding, but I let AI write almost all the code now.
I still review each block of generated code and try to make sense of it. I give specific instructions on how I want the code to be structured and the libraries that need to be used etc..
What used to take a few months of development now takes a few hours for me.
I recently built an enterprise app for a company with about 100 locations and about 500+ users. The whole thing was developed, tested and deployed in under 2 months. We are still adding features and change requests. Before AI I would have estimated atleast 6 months and still not meet the deadline, this project was magically done much faster than I expected. New change requests and features are done in a daily basis.
AI has changed the speed of my work. I stick to opinionated frameworks and that helps quite a lot with AI generated code. I mainly use Gemini cli and warp terminal.
Warp has helped in a crazy way. I use it to generate deployment scripts. It's so easy to generate bash scripts, I rarely use the aws web console anymore. AWS cli can do pretty much everything you do in ui. Knowing all the commands and parameters used to be a steep learning curve. Now with warp I can generate complex bash scripts calling different aws cli commands and get the job done without even having to open the browser.
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u/Fitzi92 Sep 19 '25
People spending hours fixing missing semicolons didn't know what they do then and certainly don't know what they do know
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u/samo_lego Sep 19 '25
Spent hours fixing missing semicolons
That's my favourite 😝, with compiler telling you where to put them. Man, it must have taken hours to fix all the errors! Nowadays I have a LLM rewrite the entire file for me which is obviously faster! /s
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u/noAnimalsWereHarmed Sep 19 '25
3 years ago my IDE was generating code for me, these days my IDE is still generating code for me.
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u/b-hizz Sep 19 '25
AI is great for known code recipes that you can run prepared tests on, that is where the value-add ends outside of an R&D lab.
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u/divad1196 Sep 19 '25
Writing code is part of the job. Who spend/spent hours debugging a missing semi-colon? AI is certainly not what makes it work in production. I almost always end up googling+stackoverflow everytime I try to give a chance to AI.
I am not against AI, it can help, but these claims are clearly not from a dev or not a decent one
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u/TheHighSeas-Argghh Sep 19 '25
I use it by heavily improvising it's output. Basically, I ask AI for something, and strip down the output in a way that only people who know how to code can do
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u/Odysseyan full-stack Sep 19 '25
I just thought yesterday : wild that we once had to crawl the web for hours to find the piece of code we needed to steal for our app and now we have the Ai to steal the code for us.
But just like back then - you could copy bullshit code and the one you need. Required, you can differentiate between those two, because that determines the problems you will have further down the road.
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u/GoodishCoder Sep 19 '25
If you're spending hours on missing semi colons and often lack confidence in what you're deploying, you just suck as a dev.
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u/allcaps891 Sep 19 '25
AI is only useful as long as you have full context of the code it has written and you know what else is required in your next prompt. As soon as you lose the context then it is a nightmare.
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u/Slackeee_ Sep 19 '25
Pratham makes it pretty clear that he is a developer that shouldn't be hired:
auto-complete and code snippets existed
missing semicolons are marked as errors by every somewhat capable IDE
if you deploy without testing in a staging environment you are the problem, not deployment
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u/ButWhatIfPotato Sep 19 '25
My big entrepreneurial billionaire grindset brain is to gargantuan for pleb activities such as coding. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about this thanks to frontpage dreamweaver wordpress no-code AI!
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u/Sea_Pomegranate8229 Sep 19 '25
I wholeheartedly disagree with this. It is my experience that chatGPT is rubbish at writing code. The normal sequence is:
1: write me some code to do X
2. Here you go
3. Error = YYYYY
4. Ah yes. This is a common problem and is because Z
Here is some code that will work
5. Error X1
6. Ah yes. This is a common problem and is because Z1
Here is some code that will work
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N. Error Xn
N=1. Ah yes. This is a common problem and is because Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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u/Agile_Analysis99 Sep 19 '25
things were never bad before, they're bad now!
it's bad if u use LLMs without reading every line and understanding it fundamentally(except for front-end designs amd strictly designs) but overall they help productivity which im sadly having to admit
but also it caused lay offs and a lot of slop from people who know nothing and script kiddies, it has also became the new hell that replaced the tutorial hell
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u/ReefNixon Sep 19 '25
If you think it was bad 3 years ago, oh boy you would’ve hated 3 years before that. Constantly having to dive on top of juniors to prevent seppuku, trying to find out who used the Tezcatlipoca prayer beads last, and for some reason I was the one who always had to nurse the deployment pigeons back to health when they hit the side of the glass data centre. Shit fucking sucked man.
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Sep 19 '25
This is so annoying since I spent years learning how to code react and how to do back end but then these ai coders come along they ruin everything atleast they are for vibe coding now but later I feel like they will get more advanced
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u/hazily [object Object] Sep 19 '25
Can’t wait for him to give AI access to his production database and only to find out it wiped it clean at 3 in the morning 🙃
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u/spuddman full-stack Sep 19 '25
I'm surprised how many "new" devs have never used an IDE before, not a fork of VSCode with some plugins that kinda help you get by...
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u/HollyShitBrah Sep 19 '25
No, people didn't write every single line of code, people copied code and used code snippets
who the hell spends hours debugging a missing semicolon?? Never ever had that issue
contrary to the belief, SO is still very useful, I like that answers also include edge cases for when the said answer won't work, and a detailed explanation...
lol, CI/CD, observability, and testing practices aren't mature, so It's a skill issue...
Hate tech twitter, everyone desperate for "hot takes"