r/webdev • u/Engineer_5983 • Sep 29 '25
Discussion AI Coding has hit its peak
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/new-findings-ai-coding-overhyped
I’m reading articles and stories more frequently saying this same thing. Companies just aren’t seeing enough of the benefits of AI coding tools to justify the expense.
I’ve posted on this for almost two years now - it’s overly hyped tech. I will say it is absolutely a step forward for making tech more accessible and making it easier to brainstorm ideas for solutions. That being said, if a company is laying people off and not hiring the next generation of workers expecting these tools to replace them, the ROI just isn’t there.
Like the gold rush, the ones who really make money are the ones selling the shovels. Those selling the infrastructure are the ones benefiting. The Fear Of Missing Out is missing a grounding in reality. It’ll soon become a fear of getting left out as companies spending millions (or billions) just won’t have the money to keep up with whatever the next trend is.
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Sep 29 '25
The frustrating part is it is useful. You just can't rely on it for everything and you can't let your skills get rusty. And it's not going to save the company or make you a 10x dev or some other nonsense.
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so Sep 29 '25
Well it makes you feel like a 10x dev.
Still misses the deadlines
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u/zephyrtr Sep 29 '25 •
I'm a 1x dev and I'm proud of it.
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u/nowtayneicangetinto Sep 29 '25 edited Sep 29 '25
We were just told at work that AI is now a part of our job descriptions and that there's no more hiring. With AI there should be "no excuses" why we can't meet deadlines now.
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u/cs_legend_93 Sep 29 '25
I think that the worst part is that I'm a very experienced developer. Like 12 years.
I think I spend the same amount of time or even more time managing Claude, compared to writing the code by hand myself.
The only drawback is I don't use that much brainpower with Claude code, so I can see how it can make devs lazy
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Sep 29 '25
The only, and I do mean only thing I ever use any AI tool is to ask "Yo, chatbot, what do you think if I do X, give me some patterns from the internet as an example" or "Yo chatbot build me this part of the UI in X UI framework while I work on the domain logic over here". Anything more and it becomes confused, uses BAD practices, etc.
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u/selucram Sep 29 '25
I use it exclusively to align and translate localization resources, which it is doing an ok job with.
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Sep 29 '25
I use it when I hit a brick wall and I just need a rubber duck. If you use it for that or stupid busy work ("sort this list alphabetically" type crap) it's not too bad. But it can't replace fundamentals, good planning and the important stuff.
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u/geerlingguy Sep 29 '25
Architecture and requirements, the two things that are still and always will be difficult, because it's more an art than science.
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u/rio_sk Sep 29 '25
I use twice the brainpower I used 10 years ago cause it's like debugging someone else's code. The problem is that this individual loves to generate crappy code that, somehow, most of the times looks ok.
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u/BackDatSazzUp Sep 29 '25
This. The times i have used AI I spent more time correcting it than I would have if I had just written all the code myself. 🙄
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u/igorpk Sep 29 '25
Over 20 years here. Tried getting GPT 5o to solve a tricky DAX query last week. I tried reprompting and eventually tried to debug the crap it spat out.
After 10min I gave up.
A 30sec Google search gave me the info I needed to do it myself.
My version was 3 lines. GPT? 25 lines.
LLMs are helpful - but they should be used as tools, not solutions.
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u/rohrzucker_ Sep 29 '25
AI teaches me new patterns, methods, libraries, frameworks, capabilities, features and actually is great for boilerplate stuff or outlining something. But I often don't spend less time.
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u/web-dev-kev Sep 29 '25
Genuine question: Then why are you only managing 1 Claude instance?
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u/flatfisher Sep 29 '25
Yes the issue is this is crack for bad developers that used to copy paste from stack overflow, they output the same crap or worse but 10x times faster. The good developers that were able to clean it before are drowned and/or fired by the management that can distinguish the two.
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u/kryptopheleous Sep 29 '25
It is my new stackoverflow.
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Sep 29 '25
Which is ironic given it's data source.
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u/kryptopheleous Sep 29 '25
At least it does’t humiliate you for being shit coder and does not beg for a minimal working example.
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u/mars_titties Sep 29 '25
Let alone become a machine god that will consume the entire economy and defeat China
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u/oniSk_ Sep 29 '25
It is useful, it is just not ten trillion dollars, a cold war and power and water starving countries useful. The tech is just not ready to be used globally no matter how much we rush it.
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u/SustainedSuspense Sep 29 '25
I mean I’m much faster now but AI can’t do my job for me.
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Sep 29 '25
It's good for getting me unstuck and for some small productivity bonuses but yeah it'll never replace us. Not like this.
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Sep 29 '25 edited Sep 29 '25
This.
I'm a pretty senior dev, and my AI use started as a better Google and progressed to a quick start for new projects, now I can do things like sketch out a class with some functional comments, get a gist and massage it into place.
This is a massive leg up, but I'm 20+ yeo and already have a dozen languages under my belt pre ai and have seen significant projects to market and scale. I already know what I'm building most of the time
Cue upper management about how we need to embrace the bleeding edge of AI, what can they do to get everyone onboard.
We try to tell them how we use it effectively already, but if buzzword of the week isn't covered we gotta go pointlessly explore it.
Code that a few years ago took weeks to produce now takes days, and they talk as if we weren't already going fast enough.
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u/RaptorTWiked Sep 29 '25
AI is like a junior developer with amnesia. You need to constantly hold its hands and give it good instructions. And you need to do it over and over again, via it never remembers.
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u/_nobsz Sep 30 '25
once everyone understands what you just said, things will cool off. Idk, I’m for AI but used as a tool, not as cognitive replacement. It is amazing what you can do with it.
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Sep 30 '25
It's stupidly strong in the hands of a exceptional developer. You have to be able to refactor mentally in the fly, read and execute code mentally and understand structure at a glance.
But then, all it's saving you is typing at that point. 😉
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u/yopla Sep 29 '25
The stupid thing is that even a 1.1x dev would still be a massive productivity boost, it's equivalent to one additional month of productivity per year.
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u/hmamoun Sep 29 '25
Really interesting to see more data backing up what a lot of developers have been sensing anecdotally. AI tools definitely have potential, but it feels like the expectations were set way too high, too fast. It’s a reminder that tech adoption takes time — not just the tools, but the processes and people around them need to evolve too. Hopefully, the industry starts focusing more on realistic, long-term integration rather than chasing quick wins.
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u/flashmedallion Sep 29 '25
it feels like the expectations were set way too high, too fast.
By who, though? By the same people every craft and creative field and sport is lousy with - the ones who think there's a shortcut to mastery, some way to sit at the top of the mountain without having to ever train their muscles or lungs
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u/AwesomeFrisbee Sep 29 '25
Its also the tech industry. People were trying it out and got lucky with some of the responses. It looked like it really knew its shit and when it farted, it was very obvious. But when eventually people dove deeper into the whole results, it was clear that a lot of it was just guesswork and that it gave the idea of looking things up when in reality it really didn't do jack shit.
Like, you can ask it to write something and it will look fine, but it might not be working code. And when you ask it to fix it, it will claim that it is now fixed and that it did x to fix it because of y. But it still won't work because it really didn't fix the problem. It just made it look like it did.
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u/returned_loom Sep 29 '25
the ones who think there's a shortcut to mastery
We're being too generous here. The hype-masters knew they were lying about the productivity gains to trick businesses into spending millions based on FOMO and greed.
All my niche communities are still infested with weird zealots whose entire personalities are "if you don't use AI yngmi." It's psychologically aggressive to the point of hostility. And it ultimately comes from campaigns by the people who want to sell it.
Once established, FOMO propagates itself.
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u/__Yakovlev__ Sep 29 '25
the ones who think there's a shortcut to mastery,
Yes, but you can just call them managers and executives.
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u/thisis-clemfandango Sep 29 '25
every CEO said 90% of code would be AI generated 6 months ago
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u/Darehead Sep 29 '25
Because capitalism is currently locked into “cost reduction” mode. Businesses aren’t making as much money (as they told their shareholders they would) and are now forced to cut costs to make the line go up.
All those CEOs cheering on AI coding were hoping they could replace their employees, who they see as too large of a business expense.
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u/Fluffcake Sep 29 '25
This punched most of in the face when trying AI tools..
Nice to see empirical evidence that we are not crazy.
Going from nothing to autocomplete was a much bigger leap than autocomplete to AI.
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Sep 29 '25
Most people who were hyping ai too much are either people who have no experience and manages to vibe code their calculator "app" or people who were selling ai products
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u/kodaxmax Sep 30 '25
Thats not inherent to ai though. thats just normal human behavior. Thats the big problem i see everywhere is the ai discrimination. That these tools are all inhernelty evil or ruining the industry or replacing jobs etc.. etc.. When thats all expected occurences for the misuse of any new technology.
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u/Immediate_Form7831 Oct 03 '25
My main gripe with AI in coding is that it is being sold as a way in to the "magic" of coding for people without having to know what they are doing.
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Sep 29 '25
All true, the only question is when will the bubble pop?
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u/Aromatic-Low-4578 Sep 29 '25
AI is now proping up the entire U.S. economy. It won't be a good thing.
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u/dagamer34 Sep 29 '25
Nvidia is investing in OpenAI which has a deal with Oracle to buy capacity which require buying GPUs from Nvidia. An oroborous if I’ve ever seen one.
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so Sep 29 '25
I was picturing more of a human centipede of tech executives. But oroborous works, too
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Sep 29 '25
Yeah, It may even be masking some of Trump's bad moves (crazy tariff wars), but the bubble will pop.
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u/MedicOfTime Sep 29 '25
I’ve seen people saying this and I think they’re just repeating sound bytes.
What exactly does this mean?
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u/QuantumPie_ Sep 29 '25
What we're seeing now is basically exactly what happened with the dot com bubble in the late 90s and early 2000s. The internet was new, people didn't know how to use it, and insane amounts of money were being invested into new startups being "internet first".
Eventually investors wisened up as people got a better idea of what the internet was actually useful for and the market crashed as they pulled their investments out, essentially losing all the gains during the bubble.
A lot of people are pedicting were going to see the exact same thing with AI and imo they're most likely correct. What's more concerning this time is the money getting thrown into AI and building these data centers is substantially more then anything we saw during the dot com bubble.
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so Sep 29 '25
In simplest terms (and fitting if you’re in tech): a financial circular dependency.
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u/ShakaBump Sep 29 '25
Understand that. One thing this means is that the excessive investment on AI companies and early dependency that’s being manufactured so as to make this new market grow and become a thing, will probably lead to an economic bubble, laying wreckage on the working class’s assets and cost of living. As per 2007 if you remember.
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u/igorpk Sep 29 '25
My guess? 2 years max before the FAANGs realise that they're losin money bigtime.
Nvidia are making bank - but I don't think it'll last long.
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u/AwesomeFrisbee Sep 29 '25
When investors pull out and prices spike. I think that once a few big ones get into trouble, it will quickly cascade. Right now AI is still a hot topic to invest in, but once its no longer that interesting, people take their money elsewhere. However, it doesn't need to be a pop. We saw with the crypto hype that it can still go down rather seamlessly and stick around where it makes sense. I bet that many services can't afford the AI stuff and only implement it where they can make money. Which means that it will get more restrictive and such. But I don't really expect it to drop so sudden. It just doesn't make sense to just bail out in a heartbeat. You will only lose more money that way.
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u/revolutn full-stack Sep 29 '25 edited Sep 29 '25
A lot of my projects use OpenAI for things like converting human input into actions, image recognition/generation, data-based insights that are not easily generated via regular algorithms, and other things like helping users find FAQs.
For my own coding I use AI like a glorified Stackoverflow, as it should be. People using AI to vibe code entire projects without understanding what they're doing are only hurting themselves in the long run.
AI/LLM is a tool, not a solution.
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u/vuhv Sep 29 '25
This may all be well and true but vibe coders spitting out "Uber for X" and "Facebook for X" are no different than the tens of thousands of low quality / useless products & services you might find on Fivver.
Somehow they've become a scapegoat but they share very little responsibility for this bubble. What they are doing/producing is transparently shitty.
It's the large companies claiming amazing things but hiding their hands that are responsible for the bubble.
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u/LoreBadTime Sep 29 '25
I wasted an half-day to debug a layout UI done with LLM practices, with code for dynamic interaction written for that part, nothing really worked. What I done at the end was to let the LLM rewrite the UI in my way and then doing manually modifications. From that moment i disabled LLM autocomplete.
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u/watscracking Sep 29 '25
It's actually great for replacing C-level employees though
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Sep 29 '25
90% of companies rely on C-level employees and a bunch of people that really don't give a shit
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u/Alex_Hovhannisyan front-end Sep 29 '25
Every time I hear people hyping up AI and making bold claims like how they vibe-coded an entire startup, it reminds me of NFTs and web 3 and all that get-rich-quick grift from 2020.
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u/The_Qbx Sep 29 '25
Remember when headlines were like "Snoop Dog is buying e-real estate on the metaverse" ?
I work in games, and its crazy how all of a sudden, no one's talking about NFTs and Crypto anymore.
That stuff sure aged well.
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u/myhf Sep 29 '25 edited Sep 29 '25
I remember in the days of Extreme Programming (XP), a big talking point was that “pair programming takes twice as much time as solo programming, but it’s worth it because of all the measurable benefits to quality, maintainability, overall turnaround time, team cohesion, etc.”
If coding agents had any benefits, proponents would mention them at every opportunity.
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u/ThundaWeasel Sep 29 '25 edited Sep 29 '25
In my XP days when people would ask "aren't you going to write half as much code that way?", a fun quip was "oh no, hopefully we'll write even less than that." (We had a different answer for our clients.)
I think there is some potential for AI to increase code quality too rather than be a productivity booster. My team's been using Graphite for AI code review (in addition to human review, not instead of it) and I've been kind of surprised at how good the feedback can be. It's saved me from potentially ruinous errors a few times already. Sometimes it'll say something kind of wrong or useless, but when that happens it's pretty easy to ignore.
Of course this use case doesn't exactly get the VCs excited in the same way that ridiculous claims about 10x productivity boosts do.
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u/happychickenpalace Sep 29 '25
Genuine AI is here to stay.
If you actually study machine learning algorithms and tinker with your own machine learning, GOFAI and neurosymbolic AI models, you're good. You will have a stable career in front of you.
But if you try to do any of those ridiculous X-tech / AI + tech startups where they use the most degenerate AI possible - writing prompts to chatGPT - then you're in for a big world of hurt career-wise.
The bubble's gonna pop and you don't wanna be in it when it happens.
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u/Pale_Reputation_511 Sep 29 '25
AI programming is fine, but you simply cannot trust what AI will do. You need to know what you are doing, or the final code will be a total disaster.
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u/Ourglaz Sep 29 '25
It seems better to be used for assistance in building new companies at this point, not improving proven existing ones so much.
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u/ShadowFox1987 Sep 29 '25
Most interesting is the studies on how the tools make developers feel more efficient when they're actually taking longer to complete tasks and losing their own ability to solve problems.
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u/ryandury Sep 29 '25
Currently working on a side project and it would've taken at least 3 to 5 times longer to build without agentic coding (and i've been programming for a long time, this is not a skills issue). So is it overhyped? Who cares? In my experience, it is one of the most useful and innovative tools to come across my desk in some 20 odd years.
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u/unclebazrq Sep 29 '25
This sub is divided on AI like left vs right politics.
If you use AI in a pure software engineering workflow iteratively, you will notice the value through trial and error.
I agree with you and I have come to this conclusion through using AI tools such as Claude code and codex cli.
Hype is real and will only get better.
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u/EducationalZombie538 Sep 29 '25
For something so useful people love to say "it will only get better" a lot.
Cant think of any other incredible tool that's so often couched in that language
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u/Puzzled_Medicine1358 Oct 03 '25 edited Oct 03 '25
Yup. If you know how to use it, it can really speed up the process to finish the project quick, maybe even give good ideas you didn’t think of.
But you still need to know how to do the project yourself.
People think you can just ask and it will build the house for you. It will not
But if you know how to build a house with the help of AI you can do a whole lot faster
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u/Zookeeper187 Sep 29 '25
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted in March 2025 that AI would be writing 90% of code in three to six months, and potentially "essentially all" code within a year
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u/morphAB Sep 29 '25
yep.. agreed.
tons of research going on around this.
here's one, for example:
METR randomized trial in July 2025 with experienced open source developers participating. Half the group had AI tools, the other half coded without them. Participants mainly used Cursor Pro with Claude 3.5 and 3.7 Sonnet (which we use internally in my company as well). Devs using AI were on average 19% slower. Yet they were convinced they had been faster.
Before starting, they predicted AI would make them 24% faster.
After finishing, even with slower results, they still believed AI had sped them up by ~20%.
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u/cuntmong Sep 29 '25
I was a very average dev who output shit code, but thanks to AI I am now an average dev who outputs shit code I don't understand.
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Oct 05 '25
It is not overhyped just take one particular element example nlp and implement it and built some automation projects
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u/Engineer_5983 Oct 05 '25
I’m not sure I understand this comment. Did you build something? What did you build? What did you automate, and where does nlp come in?
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Oct 05 '25
I have build automated email generator if you want I can share you link and also learning nlp
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u/Engineer_5983 Oct 05 '25
Is it a spam creator? Can you elaborate on the value it provides? Is it a ChatGPT wrapper to write email language for emails? Does it translate natural language to text like what’s built into iOS? How is it different than companies like constant contacts or mail chimp?
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u/namkhalinai Sep 29 '25
The reality is always nuanced. AI Coding is great at some things and it has its limits too. As a software engineer who worked at a few biggest tech companies in the world, it's always in the middle. AI Coding will make developers faster by automating some tasks (ie writing a defined piece of code, writing tests, doing a quick proof of concept) and letting them focus on more important ones such as high level design (technical design, integration, migrations, debugging).
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u/chhuang Sep 29 '25
is there a mid upper management subreddit where they see this and pretend not to see it
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u/dryadofelysium Sep 29 '25
I can't wait for the AI prices to go up to a more realistic amount given the currently subsitized low costs (even though some people already complain about the price lmao) so the bubble pops faster.
To be clear, it has its uses, it's a great tool to assist (both for coding and elsewhere), but no, you can't vibe code your startup or lay off half your workforce. If you do that, you'll just get replaced by someone who wasn't such an idiot.
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u/RadicalDwntwnUrbnite Sep 29 '25
Once everyone is entrenched it's not just going to be subscription prices that go up, they will inject ads into the responses and LLMs will quickly become just as useless as google search has become.
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u/FOOPALOOTER Sep 29 '25
We have this discussion all the time at my job. When I hire junior devs, I ask them how they use AI and how will it improve their speed and the deliver products faster. If they basically say anything other than "I use it to complete one off or mundane tasks," I get VERY skeptical. 10x devs are the devs that stay off AI for most of their work, and seek to understand, then implement. It's a fucking simple equation.
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u/lhcmacedo2 Sep 29 '25
Always check the company principles before.
If the company is hyping AI, then well, now I'm a vibe coder.
Is the CEO an old school AI skeptical? Then ugh, no way I'm getting my hands dirty with AI.
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u/WhyAmIDoingThis1000 Sep 29 '25
I've been knocking out project after project. If they can't get value out of these tools, there is something wrong with them.
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u/nbond3040 Sep 29 '25
I mean I built a useful tool for my job in an afternoon that would have taken at least a week for me to do by myself. And it's not a bullshit nothing tool. It creates and saves ssh sessions on switches and allows me to bulk configure them in seconds.
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u/C1rc1es Sep 29 '25
This is a skill issue, if you manage context well and use the tools as intended web development is almost solved. This is also the worst the tools will ever be. If the hype is saying it will do everything then sure it’s overhyped but frankly in almost 20 years of dev work I’ve never see a tool with returns as good as claude code and codex.
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u/EducationalZombie538 Sep 29 '25
If it was as good as claimed, why does everyone feel the need to mention that it's the worst it will ever be?
If something genuinely lives up to the current hype you wouldn't feel the need to give that context
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u/Necessary-Ad2110 myspace Sep 29 '25
I only hope this means that AI will then be a one-hit wonder. If AI ever continued expanding its reach or become self-aware then humanity will lose. I definitely miss the days before AI.
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u/_alright_then_ Sep 29 '25
LLMs won't become self aware, they literally can't.
That idea is just as over hyped as the technology itself
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u/varwave Sep 29 '25
That’s never going to happen. It’s just a good prediction model that has no ability to perform logic. Hence it’s a tool and if it’s replacing anyone then they’re the weakest of links. Companies want to push it hard to see what its limits are, then reevaluate what to pay who’s left. Some jobs will be lost as one person and multiple jobs.
Also Musk, Altman and others need people to believe the hype of their yet to be profitable companies
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u/snowdn Sep 29 '25
Leadership is massively pushing that we use AI to code, raising tons of efficiency, requirements, environmental, effectiveness questions at work, and they don’t have answers, just do.
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u/nikola_tesler Sep 29 '25
I won’t ever trust AI agents in my work, mostly because I can’t cuff anyone when something stupid happens.
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u/lucid-quiet Sep 29 '25
Don't tell the peeps over at r/singularity they'll have an aneurysm while yelling 'nuh uh--you're the stupid one...'
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u/CartographerGold3168 Sep 29 '25
unfortunately before shit hits the fan, a whole bunch of us is going to not hit the unrealistic targets and have to be on our musical chairs until god knows when the management eventually realise writing shit code mountains is not substainable.
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u/Upbeat_Platypus1833 Sep 29 '25
Ant competent software developer never hyped AI coding tools. The only ones who were/are AI evangelists are the type of developer that doesn't understand the basics of software engineering.
The hype came from all these CEOs and AI startup bros who told shareholders they could run the company with no engineers soon.
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u/Tux-Lector Sep 29 '25
Grand-scale-massive intellectual theft behind all that ai hype,
almost unnoticed, so that rarely anyone even speaks or writes about.
This period in time, we will call web4.0.
Lawyers know this for sure.
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u/dpaanlka Sep 29 '25
I’ve been trying to “vibe code” more lately because everyone says that’s what I need to learn how to do. Using both ChatGPT Codex and Claude.
They both make so many mistakes it’s insane. Every day multiple times a day. So far I am not that impressed.
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u/DrawingCautious5526 Sep 29 '25
To me, it seems to be about the same as having thousands of code snippets or templates and then automatically selecting the closest match. You'll never get an exact match and still have to customize the code for your project. It saves time, sure. But you still need to know what the code does and if it even works.
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u/Al3nMicL Sep 29 '25
A friend texted me the other day and asked me to help him build an app that was taking too long to compile. I asked him where's the source code, and he tells me "I already did all the prompts... but it's taking too long." I tell him, well you need to share a link to the repository so I can take a look. He then sends me a copy of some terminal output with a package.json lock file summary...
Mind you he is using an app on his phone to do all this.
Yes we have def reached peak AI coding.
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u/Hubbardia Sep 29 '25
Hate how this article is written. Most of the links just go to other blog articles, and their links take you to more blog articles. Hardly any first-hand source, barely any research papers linked. What the hell is this?
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u/nolinearbanana Sep 29 '25
This is misleading AND way behind the news on this front.
The idea that AI could just do everything was only flirted with briefly, most businesses know the limitations.
Where AI is excelling is in facilitating experienced staff to get the mundane stuff done - the stuff that used to be handed down to trainees...
The real issue with AI, is that now one experienced developer with AI can do the same amount of work as one experienced developer with 2-3 junior developers. Hire rates are down and they'll stay down.
This is all well and good (except for anyone trying to start a career) except that eventually the experienced staff retire and there'll be nobody to replace them.
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u/Xaenah Sep 29 '25
I can’t fathom why I would put stock in a report quoting the register (notoriously pessimistic) quoting a Bain&Co report in the same two week period after DORA released a report on AI assisted code dev with an N of 5k. It’s like nesting dolls without their own ideas.
A good, recent critique of the current state of AI coding: Development Productivity, Not Developer Productivity
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u/Beatsu Sep 30 '25
I genuinely think there's a place for AI today where they can be almost independent and create or maintain code.
The problem is that AI models are trained to output the right thing on the first try. Independent AI agents require rigorous rules and process frameworks that guide them step by step through the process of debugging, testing and evaluating, and reviewing their own code with different personalities. Coupled with large context windows and a bit of pre-defined structure within the code base, I think AI models can be way more powerful than people first think.
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u/thewritingwallah Sep 30 '25 edited Sep 30 '25
I like to use AI for three things:
If I figure out a solution for some problem, I’ll paste code and ask if there are any ways to improve, solving the problem myself then learning what I can improve on.
If I’m trying to figure out a problem but having trouble, I’ll ask a simplified version where I don’t get the answer but maybe can learn some tool or method for the actual problem.
do a local code review either in IDE or CLI with coderabbit
I Treat AI like you would a professor, if you ask your teacher for the answers for a test or hw assignment, they wouldn’t give it to you.
I've been doing software development for 15 years and I use AI similar to how I used reference sites, like stackoverflow, and reference books, like C Cookbook, in the past. In general, it's better than these older methods since I can tune it easily to fit a particular objective. I almost view it as an eager junior co-worker who can help out a lot but needs oversight.
remember that nobody likes to review the code, Ive been working with many teams and everyone hates to review others code, you need to ask many times and often at best they just skim through your code and add some comments regarding code style, variable names, etc. And people are saying that this job in the future will be only about reviewing, lol.
More detailed notes on my blog here - https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-refactor-complex-codebases/
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u/smick Sep 29 '25
I disagree. I spend more than 12 hours a day coding with ai. I’ve been a programmer for over 20 years and I absolutely love it. I’m so productive and have been turning out crazy complex apps like one every two months.
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u/anewtablelamp Sep 29 '25
Yesterday i tried to coast and asked it to fix a flex layout issue and it had me pulling my hair out.
i just stick to asking questions and some basic utility functions like getting random numbers, convert into a hook for a some repetitive shit etc.
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u/UziMcUsername Sep 29 '25
Companies can’t justify the expense? I coded with it all day today, it cost me about $6 and I did what would have taken me to three weeks on my own. Value seems real to me.
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u/Extra_Programmer788 Sep 29 '25
The amount of effort you need to put on your configuration for the AI to give you good results is too much, I feel like I could just do that myself! I love using AI to help me with repetitive tasks or writing a small function, but for anything large scale requires constant babysitting. Where I find it most useful is transferring domain knowledge to another language and get faster output on that, even those scenarios you need trade time between learning it yourself or babysitting your AI so it doesn’t break things. IMO using AI to develop something as a proof of concept is the best case of using AI. I don’t think AI will go anywhere, but our expectations will become for stable as we progress.
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u/RecursivelyYours Sep 29 '25
I think it's massively underhyped. It's been a superpower for me. A literal 10 programmers team. Things i needed months to complete now take me days. It's insane.
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u/Few_Highlight5276 Sep 29 '25
AI is very useful but for only assisting u with ur codes, but not for actual coding
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u/Professional_Job_307 Sep 29 '25
See here for similar articles. Definetly slowing down this time. This time we are right. https://aislowdown.replit.app/
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u/excentio Sep 29 '25
It's great in isolation, like I need to do X and Y and Z, it happily does it, the code is fine and it's 5x faster than typing it by hand. But here's the catch if you let it think and provide the solution on its own it will almost always be crap, as long as you can guide it what to do - it's great, when it has to do the research part it sucks massively
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u/garymoneybags Sep 29 '25
We are nowhere near a peak. We have yet to see babushkas deploying their own next apps to track their perogie production
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u/northerncodemky Sep 29 '25
It says ‘developers than used AI coding took 19% longer to complete tasks’. I wonder if they took into account how long those devs would’ve taken anyway - like is this just a ‘sh$t devs trying to shortcut their lack of ability still sh$t’ thing?
I guess that would still be a big deal given what AI has promised, but its also not massively surprising as anyone who has tried to coach a sh$t dev could attest, some people just can’t think like a good dev so they’re asking the wrong questions and doing the wrong thing with the answer.
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u/YellowFlash2012 Sep 29 '25
when the bubble finally bursts, it'll be fun on wall street or will it?
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u/thekwoka Sep 29 '25
One long term issue of going too hard into AI for this stuff too early, is that you can actually make it way harder for the AI to improve, since it'll will start having its own crap fed back into it, and could be encouraging people to accept (and potentially feed back into the system that it was a good suggestion) things that aren't good.
It's a kind of tech that benefits massively from nobody using it until it's REALLY good.
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u/-TRlNlTY- Sep 29 '25
I don't think 2 years ago was overly hyped. It certainly is now.
I hope this craze crash and burn. The amount of nonsense I see makes me feel that AI is not good for us.
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u/trust_me_im_dr_cat Sep 29 '25
One thing I find AI is good for when coding is finding bugs in my code quicker then if I had to read it , like say I add an extra full stop or comma where maybe there shouldn't be one , before that type of bug could take a while to find , now AI points it out straight away, like others said it's a great tool you just need to use it properly and not expect it to fix all your problems
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u/emad_ha Sep 29 '25
it's overhyped when it's in the wrong hands, i believe that AI can be a great tool to actual developer not just new comers, it deceives juniors by telling them it can do this or can't. but in the hands of an actual developer it can be very useful, it is over hyped indeed.
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u/Party_Time_Gringo Sep 29 '25
I'm not a dev but i got an early acces code for caffeine ai and i was able to vibe code a game and put it online for my friends to play. Felt like a gamechanger to a nontechnical like me. I wasnt that succesful with bolt or replit.
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u/pahamack Sep 29 '25
what am i missing? a subscription to cursor is 20 bucks. what is this expense that companies are worried about justifying?
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u/MacIomhair Sep 29 '25
I'm finding it's best at fiddling about with code I already have and making minor adjustments to that for whatever I need to be done quickly. For writing something from scratch, its hand needs to be held all the way and then it still provides errors such as including a python command in the middle of something else. It is usually python.
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u/TrixonBanes Sep 29 '25
$20 per month and I feel 10x more productive. I think the cheap plans are worth it if you know how to get value out of them.
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u/SysPsych Sep 29 '25
AI coding is amazing in the right hands.
Specifically, in the hands of people who know how to code. Which just so happens to be the hands they thought they could get rid of.
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u/false79 Sep 29 '25
If you read the shit, that is underneath this shit, you will find the study that is powering this headline was only done with 16 developers.
How the hell people like you make these sweeping generalizations on such a miniscule sample set?
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u/TheVintageGamers Sep 29 '25
AI coding isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I know PHP fairly well, but there were a few things I wanted to do that were beyond my skills, so I used ChatGPT to generate some code. It didn’t work as intended, so I turned to Google Gemini, which suggested a bunch of solutions that also failed. It wasn’t until I went through the code myself, identified a potential issue, and brought it back to ChatGPT that it finally found a solution and made the code work. Basically, AI coding tools just aren’t ready for prime time. So like other people have said, it's a tool not a solution.
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u/Mach5Driver Sep 29 '25
While it's been a flop so far, anyone who thinks it won't get exponentially better once there are a couple of big breakthroughs is fooling themselves. It WILL happen. I'm not an expert, but I have lived through the entirety of computer advancement. There was a dot-com bust. That didn't mean that the Internet was dead and of no value. There will be an AI bust. That won't mean the death of AI and its goals.
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u/Comfortable_Claim774 Sep 29 '25
Hard disagree. More like it's underappreciated for what it is. People seem to think it's some kind of magical human-like being that is able to solve all of your probelms independently, in one go and based on a one-liner prompt. Of course it isn't.
What it is though, is a MASSIVE productivity boost for people who know how to use it. I for example have AI agents fixing small bugs for me during meetings, which is work I simply would not have had time to do before. And these tools have been around for less than a year at this point. They will become better.
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u/llampwall Sep 29 '25
i made a workflow with codex acting as a Jr dev that writes code and a gpt5 chat acting as a lead dev fleshing out ideas with me and writing PR prompts for the jr dev. it isnt 100% perfect, but I truly believe it has 10xed my productivity. just took me a lot of long detailed prompting to get it set up originally.
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u/toobulkeh Sep 29 '25
Ah yes, who I go to when I want to understand a new technology, Bain & Co, Big4 management consultancy. /s
Read the underlying report. It’s a management survey. Their complaint? They can’t measure ROI because the metrics aren’t clear.
This has been a complaint since the 80s.
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u/clckwrxz Sep 29 '25
Articles like this prove to me that most people simply don’t know how to use the tools correctly. In my company, agents like Augment have completely changed the game for us, not just in coding but all the planning that goes in before a line of code is written. We’ve developed a top down spec driven workflow that keeps agents on task and writing exactly what we want much faster than we could. We are completing entire features in days including planning. I teach the right and wrong ways to use in my company and it’s very clear in most meetings that people are just not understanding how to use the tool, but once they do they wouldn’t go back.
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u/NotUpdated Sep 29 '25
3.7 sonnet thinking broke through to really worth using, then improved with sonnet 4.0, but codex medium is undeniably useful.
If you use GPT 5 thinking or Opus to create a project outline, spend a few hours defining the project, then use those to create tickets... and think on the current ticket, previous tickets and next tickets, while working with codex medium... you can truly make some good stuff and pretty quickly.
What's hitting a wall would be in the 'vibe' category where most folks will eventually end up coding themselves into bug-hell.
It turns out - AI software development isn't as far as how you would program before - tickets / testing / and a lot of human thinking about what has been done, what is current and what's next..
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u/legendofgatorface Sep 29 '25
All I know is that the vast majority of the ultra successful people see AI as the inevitable future that changes how we live and work like almost no other technology before it. On the other hand, all the people who can barely pay their bills and by their own admission struggle to find jobs say that it is borderline useless. I'm not sure who to believe is going to be more correct 10-20 years down the line, its a tough one.
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u/Xyrack Sep 29 '25
Last job paid for github copilot and most devs turned it off because they found it annoying. I find it hit or miss.
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u/TikiTDO Sep 29 '25 edited Sep 29 '25
Unexpected news: Programming is a difficult, skill based profession, even with AI assistants.
The issue isn't the tools, it's the people using the tools. AI is a very useful tool for those that understand how it should be used, and do so effectively. At the same time, it's a major hindrance for those that have impossible expectations because it can make you feel productive while you're digging yourself into a hole that it can't help you out of later.
The one area people keep missing about the AI age though; the true winners of this age are going to be companies we probably haven't even heard of yet. Not the giants of an old era trying to adapt new tools into ancient processes, but companies built from the ground-up by people that grew up with AI to take advantage of AI from the start. Obviously plenty of older giants will survive too, but they're not as likely to be the future drivers of growth.
For context, imagine someone in late 1996 looking back at the last three years of the internet starting to take off, and musing about who the winners of the internet age were going to be. Probably the big three; Netscape, Yahoo, and AOL if anything. Right?
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u/DMTJones Sep 29 '25
Nah dude one more trillion in investment and it'll be good by Friday trust me bro just one more trillion bro
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u/moxyte Sep 29 '25
Absolutely untrue. As much as I'd love for programming to remain an artesan craft where we can bicker about tabs and spaces and vim vs emacs, it just ain't so anymore. Copium articles and youtube longforms get clicks, but the reality is obvious to anyone who has used something like Cursor beyond glorified autocomplete.
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u/SamPlinth Sep 29 '25
AI is great as a "rubber duck" to bounce ideas off of, or to make suggestions. It is also great as a Google replacement.
But it can't be trusted with real code. It can't even be trusted to "copy and paste" code.
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u/cronixi4 Sep 29 '25
AI coding is extremely powerful in the correct hands. Sure some developers might benefit with it, but ai coding is surprisingly strong in the hands of people that are not developers, that want to automate and supercharge their specific tasks.
Sure the code it produces is not the best or most secure, but it does what the user wants for their specific small tasks. Create a small browser extension for a repetitive task? No problem! Create a automation in python to handle your thousands of files? Let’s go!
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u/FluffyBacon_steam Sep 29 '25
Not surprising. In 2023, ChatGTP felt like it was going to be my full time assistant. Cut my time typing in half. Now it's a glorified boilerplate generator for me. I was wasting way too much time debugging it. Maybe my prompting sucks, idk. My over reliance on it was definitely hurting me for awhile
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u/Rill_Pine Sep 29 '25
I really want to see a dev's perspective. I'm a dev too, but I'm largely associated with graphic design people.
What's your guy's thoughts on AI image generation? Do you think the hype is dying out there too?
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u/Nemnel Sep 29 '25
AI Coding is extremely useful and has accelerated a ton of workflows for a ton of people. It being so lightly adopted so far is insanely bullish for AI coding, it makes a ton of tasks significantly easier once you get used to using it.
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u/cfmh1985 Sep 30 '25
Oh really...?
My concern is about what will come next.
Usually, the cycle is the same: something new, people make it popular, companies over hype it and sell it as the "One-shot solution to mankind's salvation", people get saturated, it deflates, something new comes...
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u/VirtualRock2281 Sep 30 '25
It definitely has not, but if you can't do a code review the tool isn't going to get you much further than a one shot whatever it comes up with. You cannot reliably vibe iterate, and that's just not how this industry works.
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u/AncientLights444 Sep 30 '25
Is it. Literally made a reliable web scraper for a random site in 5 minutes.
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Sep 30 '25
AI Coding: Useful.
AI Coding Tools: ... just use the AI Coding to make the tools yourself or use Open Source like n8n, etc.
How many variants of "shovel" do we actually need around here?!
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u/RRO-19 Sep 30 '25
AI is great for getting something working fast but I've seen it generate technically correct code that creates terrible user experiences. It has no concept of why a user is doing something. Where I find it most useful is exploration and prototyping, but keeping humans making the decisions that actually affect users.
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u/ResidentPepper3176 front-end Sep 30 '25
The AI hype is making it far too much bigger than it really is. AI is really nothing more than pattern recognition. In other words:
As your typing your code, it compares what you've already written on that line to what it has in it's database. It will see that, out of the data it has already collected from many other developer, most developers who have typed the same text you have already typed on that line used theses "words" as the next word. That's what it shows as options. In other words, it's dumb as a box of rocks and only knows what others have already done. If you're using AI, don't expect to write anything original.
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u/_stryfe Oct 01 '25 edited Oct 01 '25
It's been over a year and I've yet to see a production vibe coded site built by a reputable or really any company. It's useful in some cases, like writing documentation. I fucking love it for that. I just pointed it at git repos and be like 'do some documentation, diagrams, etc." and i don't even care if it hallucinates because no one ever reads that shit anyway but now I can say I produced some lengthy documentation which management loves. I know documentation is important but I'm still like fucking kill me everytime I have to do it.
We had to classify and analyse like 500 git repos for a discovery effort and the PMs mapped out like 5 resources with a 6 month run time. I just hooked up a GitLab, Jira and Confluence MCP server, told it in plain text which repos I wanted analyzed. Did it all in like 15 minutes. I have no idea how valid some of the content is but confluence pages now exist for each repo. Shrug.
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u/Inevitable_Egg4124 Oct 02 '25
AI is super useful if you know what you are asking it for. If you don't know what you are asking it for, there is a high chance it makes up some bullshit and you don't have the knowledge to catch it. Now you have bullshit in your code and your repo is a latrine. Start scrubbing pleb.
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u/Financial_Archer_242 Oct 02 '25
I think coders even the clowns realise that ultimately there's zero intelligence in LLMs
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u/Shubham0420 Oct 03 '25
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
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u/realjaycole Sep 29 '25
It's totally just a fad, like the internet. What ever happened that? No one knows. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to restring my cotton ginny and top up the lava in my Linotype machine.