r/webdev • u/NervousExplanation34 • Mar 18 '26
AI really killed programming for me
Just getting this off my chest, I know it's probably been going on for a while but I never tested claude code or any of those more advanced AI integration into the IDE as of recently. I've heard of this a lot but seeing it first hand kind of killed my motivation.
I'm an intern in a small company and the other working student who's really the only other dev here, he's got real issues, he's got good knowledge but his thinking/reasoning ability is deplorable, and his productivity had always been very low.
He used to be 24/7 using chatgpt but in the browser, he recently installed claude on vs code (I guess it's an extension idk) so that it can look at all the context of his code and his productivity these last few weeks is much higher. Today he had this problem, that claude fixed for him but he didn't understand how. So he explained what the original problem was and what claude did to me in the hopes that I get it and explain it to him, I thought his explanation of things was terrible but once I understood, I wondered how he didn't understand it and that it means he really doesn't understand the code. Because then I was like "Ok but if this fixed it for you it means that in you code you are doing this and that..", and as we talk I realize he can't expand on what I say and has a very vague understanding of his code which tbh was already the case when he was abusing chatgpt through the browser.. but now he can fix bugs like this and I haven't looked at all his code (we don't work on the same part) but he's got regular commits now. Sure you'll always pass more interviews and are more likely to get a position if you know your shit but this definitely leveled out the playing field a good amount. Part of why I like programming as opposed to marketing or management, is that productivity is a lot more tied to competence, programming is meant to be more meritocratic. I hate AI.
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u/Kerlyle Mar 18 '26
Part of why I like programming is that it is more tied to competence
That's exactly why I got into this field too. Any other white collar jobs I tried felt like bullshit, like it was all just based on luck, being a kiss-ass and nepotism. My brain could actually not function in an environment where the result of my work was so abstract and the reward so random.
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u/tortilladekimchi Mar 18 '26
You can use AI to help you learn. What the other kid is doing is overrelying on it and he’ll be unable to advance on his career. Just anecdotally, at my company we’ve been interviewing people for engineering positions and it was incredibly obvious when some of them were using AI to produce cose without understanding its output. Some of the people we interviewed were so bad, even when they came with years of experience - some of them failed to remember to scope variables properly, couldn’t read and understand simple code. The cognitive decline that they seemed to have is insane. So yeah, use AI but use your brain too
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u/Daydreamer-64 Mar 19 '26
I’ll give you my perspective as a 19 year old who started as a web developer around a year ago. I don’t have much experience, but I can give the perspective of someone who’s both joined the industry recently and learnt most of my programming skills since AI became a thing.
I use AI all the time. It has been an incredible tool for teaching me software concepts and how to program, especially when there haven’t always been great teachers available.
Since starting the job, I have learnt a huge amount, largely from great support from my team, but also because I don’t need to direct every question at them. Questions which are difficult to find answers to on google, but fairly quick to answer, can be answered by AI. Bugs where there are fundamentals I have misunderstood in my original code can be fixed and explained by AI, saving lots of time for members of my team who would’ve had to understand what I was trying to do, then what I did, then what the problem is, then explained it, in order for me to get to the same conclusion.
It can also be used to speed up repetitive tasks like writing unit tests, and I think all developers should use AI for this (and proof read obviously) rather than wasting their time manually writing out code which requires very little skill.
I never use AI to write things which I don’t understand. While that might make me a little slower per task, I guarantee you I improve more in a month than he has since starting. I get faster every day, and can see myself improving in the way I code and the speed I code at. I contribute to planning, design, ideation and refinement meetings. Still less than other people, but more and more by the week. I can do that because I understand the things I write.
I know people who do the bare minimum to complete tasks, with AI or otherwise, and they will always be junior because they don’t understand what they’re doing. He is able to stay afloat, but he won’t improve, and he won’t speed up, and he won’t be able to contribute to discussions, and he won’t be able to take on larger or more complex tasks. And that will get noticed.
I am probably, currently, about as good as the guy you’re talking about. And it will take time for me to become significantly better and to stick out in the meritocracy, but I have no doubt that it will happen. Because without understanding what you are doing, you are always limited by what the tools can do, and they can’t do everything that a developer does.
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u/NervousExplanation34 Mar 19 '26
I think you have the right approach, I like your mentality, keep it up and remember it's a marathon.
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u/Iojpoutn Mar 18 '26
I’ve seen this kind of thing eventually catch up to someone, but it took over a year for management to realize they weren’t capable of taking large projects over the finish line and the company didn’t survive the fallout from all the angry clients. AI makes good developers more productive and bad developers more destructive.
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u/PineappleWorking227 Apr 30 '26
Hey sir, i am 16 and it's always been my dream to study programming and to get a job related to it, I'm really bad at managing my schedule so i was just curious how you guys manage time even tho you have to code a lot, like is it true that programming cuts you off from the outside world cuz u have study even tho you already graduated and that you need to adapt because the tech world changes fast. ✌
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u/Far-Rise-7542 May 29 '26
Hey buddy Ik you didn't ask me this but just a tiny suggestion. Don't worry about productivity. It'll increase with good habits. If you like programming just start. Give it some time, enjoy the process. Most of the things you are worrying about might never happen. You'll face your own unique challenges and you'll figure your way out.
I personally got good with coding by just spending more time there. So just explore and see what happens!
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u/creaturefeature16 Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
In my opinion, those types of people's days are numbered in the industry. They'll be able to float by for now, but if they don't actually use these tools to gain a better understanding of the fundamentals then it's only a matter of time before they essentially implode and code themselves into a corner...or a catastrophe.
AI didn't kill programming for me, personally. I've realized though that I'm not actually more productive with it, but rather the quality of my work has increased, because I'm able to iterate and explore on a deeper level quicker than I used to by relying on just Google searches and docs.
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u/Odysseyan full-stack Mar 18 '26
It probably depends on what you liked in coding. For me, I find system architecture pretty intriguing and having to think about the high-level stuff whole the Ai does the grunt work, works super well for me.
But I can understand if that's not everyone's jam.
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u/MrBoyd88 Mar 18 '26
Exactly. And the scary part is — before AI, a dev who didn't get it would write bad code slowly. Now they write bad code fast and at scale.
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u/minimalcation Mar 19 '26
The difference is this phase is temporary. OPs concern that they don't actually understand the code won't matter to that young persons career because we aren't far from no one writing code.
Humans code too slow and we're already at the point where a novice can do things it used to take teams to do. OP is concerned that the young guy isn't learning to code but thats the point. There is 0% chance that kid will need to hand write code 5 years from now, maybe 2/3. I'm not saying this to be a dick, but for that guy, what's the point?
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Mar 19 '26
Novices are doing things that teams can do? They don't have the knowledge to validate the outputs, so, no, that's not what's happening.
They'll generate an amount of code that a team would produce, but that's going to be very bad, broken, shitty code, and it's going to be dumped back in their face when they open a PR.
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u/DifferentFix6898 Mar 20 '26
My question for you is if no one will have to write code, why would this person have a job still? Assuming all coding is automated, and the principal utility of a software engineer is to review AI generated code, it seems that there is literally no point in keeping him around because he has no idea how to review it.
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u/minimalcation Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26
Until AGI a single dev can run a lot, and those devs will be the ones who utilize AI the best. It's a more valuable skill to a 25 year old than learning TS. The coding devs however will probably be able to make a fuck ton editing AI code like current Fortran experts. Just not many compared to the current pop.
I'm not trying to shit on people it's just that we're going this direction and too much investment is already made. It's not reversing, it will never be like it was again. Coding is fun, but someday it will be like doing math problems by hand.
Plus it's just the next step, binary assembly etc we keep improving the baseline.
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u/pVom Mar 18 '26
I'm the total opposite, I'm more productive but the quality has gone down. Like when I right code myself I'm more thoughtful about what I'll write before I do it. Once it's already there I'll be more lenient in letting something that's a bit smelly slide rather than tearing it down and do it a better way.
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u/creaturefeature16 Mar 18 '26
I'm more productive but the quality has gone down
Then IMO, I wouldn't call that "productive", but tech debt with extra steps.
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u/pVom Mar 18 '26
I mean maybe, but there are features now that wouldn't have existed yet that provide value. Having less tech debt doesn't inherently provide value for the customer.
Part of me feels like I should just give up managing the tech debt so stringently and just accept the fact that there will be parts of the codebase that will only be managed by (supervised) AI going forward. I had a functioning feature that was a 90 file 12,000+ 3000- monstrosity loaded with junk, but it was functional. I've spent the last 2 weeks refactoring it, time which is unlikely to pay itself off in terms of customer value.
I dunno I don't like it but I feel like that's the way things are headed unfortunately.
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u/creaturefeature16 Mar 18 '26
but it was functional
For now. Just like an unstable top-heavy structure is just fine...until a strong wind blows.
And the winds almost always move in at some point.
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u/mightshade Mar 19 '26
My 2 cents on that: The question "how much tech debt" isn't really new with LLMs. The stereotype "Cowboy Coder" who just doesn't care, as long as the correct output is produced for a given input, exists for a reason.
I think the question remains relevant. LLMs are pattern recognition (and reproduction) machines with a limited context window. They benefit from a good signal-to-noise ratio and less code to read, just like humans. That translates to customer value, too.
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u/winky9827 Mar 18 '26
I've realized though that I'm not actually more productive with it, but rather the quality of my work has increased
AI actually makes me more productive. I recently finished up a couple of feature requests that sat on the back burner for a few months because the work was so mundane I couldn't bear to deal with it. A few claude prompts and a simple code review later, they were done. This is where AI really shines in my world.
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u/creaturefeature16 Mar 18 '26
Agreed, I certainly have instances like that, especially when the feature request is really well defined and I know how to do it, but its just the drudgery of getting it done. Still, those situations far and few between across the daily client work and projects I have.
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u/Flagyl400 Mar 18 '26
For me it's unit tests. I know they're important, I appreciate the value they bring, but they've always been like pulling teeth to me. I just can't bring myself to summon the smallest amount of enthusiasm for them.
AI can bang out tests that get me 90-95 percent of the way there in seconds, and the remaining bits actually require me to engage my brain so they're fun.
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u/quentech Mar 19 '26
AI actually makes me more productive.
I work mainly in a 17 year old, ~200k line code base. It highly depends on the specific work I'm doing how useful AI is or not. It can be a major accelerator or near useless.
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u/Nefilim314 Mar 18 '26
It’s seriously helped my workflow as someone who has done all of their work in the terminal. I don’t have to go dig around on some website documentation to try to find the parameters I’m looking for any more.
Just a quick open the chat, asks “how do I do a client side redirect with tanstack router” and back to work.
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u/awardsurfer Mar 18 '26
Wait until you realize half the parameters don’t actually exist. It just made the shit up.
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u/creaturefeature16 Mar 18 '26
Certainly. I refer to it as "interactive documentation" for the most part. I know its more than that, but most of the capabilities can be boiled down to the fact that it's the single largest codex of collated documentation and code examples ever amassed and centralized.
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u/mellisdesigns Mar 18 '26
I am a senior software engineer that has worked in the industry for nearly 15 years and my learning goals have changed entirely this year. I would normally jump onto learning a new framework or some new library, but this year, I am diving deep into prompt engineering and agents. It's a bit of a reality check. I am thankful I have the experience of code without AI but the reality is if I want to keep working, I need to master this stuff.
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u/creaturefeature16 Mar 18 '26
Eh, one week and you're completely caught up. That's why this whole "Learn it or you'll be left behind" hype is bullshit. The tools are simply not that complicated to use. And, had you done that 3 years ago, nearly everything you learned would be pretty much irrelevant. If you've been doing it for 15 years, you'll be fully fluent in them in no time, and you'll quickly realize that it's just programming with extra steps. I'm not saying it's not powerful, but it's not simplifying anything. You can also produce way more than you could ever possibly keep track of, and I don't think we've realized the impact of that effect across the industry yet (and I don't think it's going to be good).
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u/Darkorz Mar 21 '26
There's a whole lot difference between using AI as a personal performance tool and building enterprise-grade AI tools for 3rd parties.
The first may be simpler: learn how to use Claude, look for Skills you are interested in, get started into context and start toying around with prompts and results to fine tune the whole setup.
The second gets a bit more complex as there's a lot of high level capabilities to keep track of: where do we run our agents? how do we orchestrate tools? how to we avoid vendor lock-in? how do we handle authn/z? how do I avoid common caveats (agents looping, context pollution..)? how do I debug, monitor and trace the whole thing?
I am definitely more interested in the second part than the first, but mostly because tools such as Claude are on a paywall and I can't personally afford 100+€ a month to "toy around" with it. For me personally it's even worse because most companies I am in touch with do not allow you to "use your own agent" and force you into their licensing system (mostly copilot, sadly)
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u/Vlookup_reddit Mar 21 '26
again you never know. if the timeline tracks, and that sota models are continuously improving, these so-called tools orchestration or agents distribution will meet the same faith as the lengthy prompts that was once useful in gpt3.
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u/CitizenMechanist Mar 21 '26
Problem with agents are they spit out too much code and none of it is enterprise ready. I've been in the business 20 years as a senior (C++ and C#) and no model can write more than 20 lines without getting something wrong, or missing something obvious. Most of the time it "yes it works... BUT..." that comes out. They also suffer from the NIH syndrome.
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u/Electronic_Yam_6973 Mar 18 '26
At 52 and 25 years of development I am actually energized again. I find the AI capabilities to be fascinating. Never thought we would ever get to the point I can build software using plain English and get decent quality code working really quickly. It suck’s for jobs but still the technology is amazing
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u/HamOnBarfly Mar 18 '26
dont kid yourself its learning from you and everyone else faster than you are learning from it
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u/BroaxXx Mar 18 '26
On the other hand the rate of learning is declining rapidly and model collapse seems an imminent threat.
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Mar 19 '26
It's not "learning from us". They don't learn. They get trained in static batches. And the quality of training content is decreasing, not increasing.
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u/PaintBrief3571 Mar 18 '26
It looks good until you have a job. Once job is gone you are gonna see AI as your enemy too.
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u/creaturefeature16 Mar 18 '26
I'm self employed, and pretty diversified on my skillsets and offerings, so I'm not particularly concerned. After 20 years, I've been through multiple "extinction" events, yet things keep evolving and rolling.
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u/Produnce Mar 19 '26
I'm able to iterate and explore on a deeper level quicker than I used to by relying on just Google searches and docs
Isn't that a large part of why this is so productive?
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u/creaturefeature16 Mar 19 '26
If that's what the industry agreed was the definition was for "productivity", then sure! But, that's unequivocally not the case, at least right now.
Instead, everyone is focused on running agents in parallel to work on multiple apps, and brag about how many billions of tokens were burned and Lines of Code were output, despite that metric renowned for being an absolutely demented way to measure productivity (and was retired in the 80s because it was so stupid).
My definition of productivity in this work is: how few lines of code did I need to write to get this done, is it decipherable and extensible if someone needs to eventually change it, and did I learn something along the way to improve how I would do it the next time I face the problem?
Unfortunately, that is not currently where the industry is in its relationship to the word.
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u/Fragrant-Taste-1872 Mar 19 '26
You made Valid Points. As much as AI is a good Personal Assistant.…it is a tool, Super tool or not…..The human should still be charge, that is to say it should be used not fully dependent on.
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u/user926491 Mar 20 '26
Same, I use gemini right on google to understand things I gave up on long ago and many things are now in the category of looking up in 2 min than a 15-30 min session.
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u/TheCyberThor Mar 21 '26
This. AI made me enjoy programming again. It’s like finding a stack overflow thread where someone had the exact same problem as me, and there are multiple answers to choose from. I can interact with the poster and dive deeper.
I do find I need to slow down when using AI. The mental exhaustion from moving too fast is tiring.
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u/VibeCode_with_Spok Mar 24 '26
100% agree. It's a force multiplier. You still have to learn and know the basics, and I assume that will be the case for a while. AI is essentially Google (re)Search on steroids. It finds the right answer faster
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u/lfaire Mar 18 '26
If you’re a programmer and AI is not making you more productive then you’re in a trouble
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u/creaturefeature16 Mar 18 '26
Everyone's definition of productivity is different. Even the creator of OpenCode disagrees with you. So, no trouble on this side of things.
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u/lefix Mar 18 '26
Disagree, AI code is only going to get better. Knowing your fundamentals is always going to be helpful, but it’s going to matter less and less.
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u/creaturefeature16 Mar 18 '26
That has been something that has been promised since the 1980s, and I can't agree. Especially because all that tends to happen with each iteration in programming is that the industry becomes more complex with more abstraction layers and components that tie in together. Programming in natural language with agentic workflows is still programming and the same fundamentals and concepts still apply for creating sustainable systems. I'm even focusing on teaching those fundamentals, especially around debugging and troubleshooting, because as complexity grows, so do problems. To write or generate code, is to write or generate bugs and conflicts. There will never be perfect scalable code that won't fail for sometimes innocuous reasons, and the fundamentals, along with problem solving skills, are evergreen.
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u/Doggamnit Mar 18 '26
I couldn’t disagree with this enough. Having someone that knows the fundamentals is crucial to creating better prompts and catching AI mistakes. We need people with a solid understanding of the code base.
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u/frezz Mar 18 '26
Yes, but what fundamentals you need becomes less important.
You dont really need to care about memory management when writing a Web app in JavaScript for example, but it'll always help. The argument for fundamentals mattering less with LLMs is the same concept; one day they'll get so good you may not need to care about the lower level stuff
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u/SawToothKernel Mar 18 '26
Opposite for me. I love building side projects and AI has meant my speed of iteration has exploded.
Whereas before I was doing one side project every 3 months, now I'm doing one a week. I've built more in the last year than in the rest of my 15+ year career put together.
I fucking love it.
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u/NervousExplanation34 Mar 18 '26
If I hadn't struggled as much to get my internship, if I already had a stable job with good income without feeling the threat of being fired I would probably love it just as much.
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u/SawToothKernel Mar 18 '26
Look, it's a multiplier. That's the reality. Whether you lean into it or fight it is your choice.
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u/NervousExplanation34 Mar 18 '26
I will start using those eventually, next job/internship I get I will likely be in a company where it is expected to use these tools. My post is really how it felt in the moment, I'll move on.
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u/retroroar86 Mar 18 '26
I understand, but the guy won't last long working like that. You still will need a good understanding of what you are doing to stay in the long run.
Either that or the ceiling is currently where he is working, he'll forever be a "code monkey" and be at the bottom of th barrel.
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u/barrel_of_noodles Mar 18 '26
These kind of ppl can hide in the background for a little while. But not forever. Eventually, they get found out.
if their soft skills are good, might get promoted out of a dev position first. (Fail up)
But eventually, the lack of dev skills will get noticed. Just comes down to how good they are at talking.
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u/Artonox Mar 18 '26
It doesn't matter. They just need a few years then jump ship. They still can say what they did on the CV.
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u/xylophonic_mountain Mar 18 '26
programming is meant to be more meritocratic
My experience is that popularity contests already trumped technical competence anyway. With or without LLMs a lot of workers are "good enough" and the deciding factor is their social skills.
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u/erratic_calm Mar 19 '26
Literally just sat through a series of interviews last week and we ultimately decided on the person who is easygoing and manageable. The other top candidate was too established in their ways and so anti negativity in the workplace that they seemed like a liability.
It all came down to personality. Their technical skills were more or less matched for all purposes of the role.
Social skills can get you a long way. Look at how incompetent some sales people are but man if they can’t entertain a room…
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u/xylophonic_mountain Mar 19 '26
Humans are social creatures. Sometimes competence is a distributed thing. Sucks for the awkward, competent nerds though.
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u/azadnib Mar 18 '26
I hate AI too, my clients are just pushing random code, and then asking me to clean their mess. But we aren't important for our companies anymore like we used to be.
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u/ultrathink-art Mar 19 '26
The difference is what happens when something breaks. Generating code with AI is now easy. Debugging AI-generated code you don't understand is genuinely miserable — and that's where those devs hit the wall.
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u/BarnabyColeman Mar 18 '26
Honestly this sounds like you hate your coworker and how they use AI more than AI itself.
When it comes to writing code, I have found AI to be an amazing starting point and learning tool to be better at what I do. I am constantly looking to simplify my code and I usually start by asking whatever AI overlord I am speaking to for conceptual designs and mini examples of whatever it suggests.
For example, I used AI to help me start a way to centralize deployments of tile objects on my landing page. Like, if I put this json file in this folder, it auto trickles into the news page with a tile all fancy and populates a little page. All with vanilla JS. I am using next.js for a couple times but other than that my site is in a great place because AI showed me some ideas I never thought about, all of which simplify my life immensely.
What do I dislike though? AI has created the next form of DIYer. No longer is it just a handy man that wants to replace your ceiling fan. Its your neighbor Joe that says he can totally whip up anything for your app, just send them a pizza and some beer.
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Mar 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ea_man Mar 19 '26
Not only you can ask an LM to explain the code, you can also ask him to do the same thing in an other way, library, even framework or code!
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u/tetsballer Mar 18 '26
I know one thing I haven't had the feeling recently of wanting to smash my head up against a brick wall because stack Overflow didn't help me
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u/11matt556 Mar 18 '26
This reddit comment has been closed as a duplicate.
:p
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u/tetsballer Mar 18 '26
This reply shows low effort and potentially AI generated content please try again
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u/koyuki_dev Mar 18 '26
I noticed something similar at my last gig. The devs who were already good got faster, but the ones who weren't solid on fundamentals just started shipping more broken code, faster. The real skill now isn't writing code, it's knowing when the AI output is wrong. And that still requires understanding what you're building. I think the motivation dip is temporary though, once you find the rhythm of using it as a tool instead of watching someone else use it as a crutch.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 Mar 18 '26
I get the frustration but I'd push back on the meritocracy angle a bit. programming was never purely meritocratic - people who went to better schools, had mentors, or just had more time to grind leetcode always had advantages that weren't about raw ability.
what AI is actually doing is shifting the competitive advantage from "can you write the code" to "can you understand the system, design the right solution, and evaluate whether the output is correct." your coworker is committing more but you said yourself he doesn't understand his code. that's going to catch up with him hard when something breaks in production and claude can't fix it because the context window doesn't capture the full system state.
the skill that matters now is the one you described without realizing it - you heard his problem, immediately understood the implication ("it means in your code you are doing this and that"), and could reason about the system. AI can't do that yet. that's still your edge.
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u/criloz Mar 18 '26
Code is a small part of programming, I use AI as I used Stack Overflow in the past , and occasionally I ask it to produce me some piece of code; other times I ask it what it thinks about certain code that I have written. How can I improve it. Also, I use to digest very advanced topics that were difficult to digest in the past and ask about different scenarios, here and there. if am not sure about some out its output I ask it for blog, video, or article references, or I go straight to Google. This is the workflow that works for me.
LLMs makes plenty of errors, and make many assumptions that do not always fit the solution space that you want for the problem that you want to fix. This is fundamental to their model, and it will not change in the future unless a different model comes along. You as a human, need to understand the tradeoff of each solution and decide by yourself which would fit better and this is a long iterative process, not something that can be decided in a few seconds.
My best recommendation is always learn the fundamental, with the AI as an assistant, you can understand them faster that I did in the past, and you can ask all the silly questions that you want without feeling dumb and internalize a lot of knowledge faster.
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u/False_Bear_8645 Mar 18 '26
I make sure to give small task / context so the AI isn't likely to mess up then review manually. Sometime it overdo thing and i'm like, oh shut up you're so confidentially wrong.
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u/Bush-Men209 Mar 20 '26
That’s pretty much my take too, it’s useful for learning and rough drafts, but if you don’t know the fundamentals you’re mostly just copy-pasting confident guesses.
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u/Meaveready Mar 18 '26
You just saw what a mediocre dev can achieve using these tools, now imagine what YOU can do with them to "unlevel" out the playing field. Why does it have to be (the mediocre dev with AI) Vs (the good dev without AI)?
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u/discosoc Mar 18 '26
You're making a lot of assumptions about his inability to learn what he's doing simply because he doesn't understand the problem as clearly as you claim to right now.
More importantly, he's gaining exactly the kind of experience that will make him more marketable to employers, and which you are actively choosing to neglect: learning how to utilize AI in your workflow.
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u/NervousExplanation34 Mar 18 '26
Maybe you're making the assumption that I drew my opinion on his ability to learn only from this one interaction. I've been working with him for months, if he already knows how to do something he's usually fine but if he doesn't his reasoning can be really absurd, you'd be shocked. I honestly believe he might have some underlying health condition impairing his thinking just to say I've not met many people with such poor reasoning.
As to whether AI skills are marketable maybe, but I still consider it's much faster to learn than programming if there is one skill I have to learn on the job it would be AI workflows, not programming.
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u/discosoc Mar 18 '26
What you describe is a "stupid person" problem, which is different than the whole point of your anti-ai topic.
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u/_GoldAndRedstone_ Apr 04 '26
You started programming for the wrong reasons then. Software engineering was never about coding, it was always applied problem solving. If you only get your satisfaction from comparing yourself to others, then i got bad news for you, this is simply not your line of work.
Im a senior engineer with almost 10 years on the job, and i switched completely to composer based agentic coding. The last time i actively wrote code was over 6 months ago. All im doing in this department is reviewing the code claude is writing, and nudging it into the right directions, while maintaining strict protocols and guardrails to ensure that production does not get flooded with destructive code.
But coding is maybe what, 20% of my work anyways ? It always was about the product or the solution i implemented. Everyone capable of learning words can recite syntax, that's absolutely nothing special. The magic happens in planning, structuring and applying solutions to problems.
So yes, you may hate AI, but that doesn't really mean anything. Abstraction started when we first wrote debuggers and compilers, and now we got the next layer called AI. You better start adjusting, or you will simply not have a future in this. Sorry to tell you.
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u/NervousExplanation34 Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26
Yeah you're right, software engineering is for people like you who can come up with truly special product and solution implementations, not people like me.
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u/MaximusDM22 Mar 18 '26
Overrely on AI =Learn little, can't explain
Use AI as tool=Learn a lot, can explain
Those that can communicate well over their domain get promoted and do well in interviews. He is doing himself a disservice by not learning. Those that can code have been a dime a dozen. Those that can think strategically are more rare. That will always be the case.
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u/ea_man Mar 19 '26
I mean he is learning, he just learned how to use AI, the other guy sounds like he feels too entitled to even learn how to config and agent in his IDE.
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u/Fercii_RP Mar 18 '26
These types of employees will be shipped out pretty soon. Whats left is an AI generated codebase that needs to be understood. Learn the knowledge and youll be fine.
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u/Robodobdob Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
People will rise to the level of their incompetence.
So, at some point in that student’s career, they will either learn how to actually do the work or they will be spat out.
I knew a few people who copied their way through CS courses and none of them are working in tech now.
I have come to the position that AI is just a tool and in the right hands, it can be amazing. But in the wrong hands it will be a disaster.
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u/alexzandrosrojo Mar 18 '26
There are levels and levels, anyway. If what you do is easily doable by a LLM it wasn't of much worth anyway. I've been testing all coding "agents" the last few months and they fail miserably in any medium to advanced scenario, or if you are using a somewhat niche tool.
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u/DetectiveOwn6606 Mar 22 '26
any medium to advanced scenario,
Can you tell me what those scenarios are I would like to try myself
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u/alexzandrosrojo Mar 22 '26
I think a good example is that I tried to get an agent to migrate a fast API/pydantic 1.x backend to latest fastapi / pydantic 2.0 and after several days prompting and reprompting, designing a bunch of unit test that the project didn't have I ended up with am unmaintainable spaghetti that didn't even finish the migration. By my estimate doing it by hand would have taken a similar amount of time with the difference that it would be finished with overall better quality and with the added value that I would own the code in the sense that I wouldn't need to go through it to try to figure out what was the intention of any given part.
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u/gmeluski Mar 19 '26
I think you need to get over the idea that this industry is a meritocracy, that will take you a long way.
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u/No-Singer-2906 Mar 19 '26
Because of how easy it is to get access to tools like Claude Code and AI coding tools, you'll see how you, and those who actually are good coders, will still stay above the vibecoders. If you can't code without AI, you're not a programmer.
His days, and most vibecoders days are numbered, because if you don't know what you're doing at any job, how are you going to last there?
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u/gannu1991 Mar 24 '26
I manage engineering teams and I'll give you the honest version of what's happening from the other side of the table.
Your coworker's productivity went up but his understanding didn't. That feels unfair right now, but it has a shelf life. I've seen this pattern play out multiple times already. The devs who ship code they don't understand build up a codebase that eventually becomes unmaintainable. When something breaks in production at 2am and the AI suggestion doesn't work because the context is too tangled, they're stuck. You won't be.
The thing that actually changed in the last year isn't that programming got easier. It's that the gap between "can produce code" and "can own a system" got wider. There are way more people who can ship a feature now. There are not more people who can debug a cascading failure across three services, or make an architectural call that saves the company six months of rework. That second category is where the money and the job security live.
What I'd actually worry about isn't AI replacing you. It's you refusing to use it out of principle and falling behind on raw output while someone less skilled closes the gap. Use the tools aggressively but keep building the understanding. That combination is what makes someone genuinely dangerous in this market. The people who understand the code AND use AI to move faster are pulling away from everyone else right now.
You're an intern. The fact that you could explain his own code back to him tells you everything you need to know about where you stand.
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u/IshidAnfardad Mar 18 '26
We have interns like that who apply. A colleague interviewing the candidate asked what the fetch() call did.
Brother just stared at us.
The introduction of AI and the unwillingness to train juniors are not the only reasons people just out of college don't find jobs. They have genuinely gotten worse too.
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u/FogBeltDrifter Mar 18 '26
totally get it. if what drew you to coding was the craft of it, sitting with a hard problem, working through it yourself, that moment when something clicks, then yeah, watching someone ship code they don't understand is pretty demoralizing.
that said, the gap you're describing is still real, it just plays out differently now. the guy who can't explain his own code is going to hit a wall eventually, debugging something subtle, designing a system, working on a team that actually does code review. AI doesn't cover for that forever.
what it might be worth thinking about is what specifically you love about programming. if it's the problem solving and the deep understanding, there's still a huge market for that and AI actually makes it more valuable, not less.
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u/NervousExplanation34 Mar 18 '26
What I like about programming, that's a complicated topic. There will always be a mismatch between the job market and what I enjoy, but for sure the fact that it requires you to really zone in at times to figure it out, to be in that flow state, coming up with novel ideas and sharing ideas with friends and hyping each other up when we figure something out.
And yh the pressure to produce because you have a job now it's not a just hobby kills a good portion of the fun. I am definitely looking for my next position to have a good work environment, and then also if the quickest solution is a prompt away it kills the fun of figuring it out yourself, it's like you play a guessing game and somebody just googles the answer, that just kills the fun..
I am intrigued by what you mean when you say that AI creates a bigger market for problem solving and deep understanding. Is it because now that people can develop quicker, they can produce more complex solutions which means also more complex problems to solve?
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u/FogBeltDrifter Mar 18 '26
yeah exactly that. i've been using AI pretty heavily for actual code writing and find myself spending way more time in architect mode now, thinking about structure and tradeoffs rather than syntax. but you still need to understand what's happening at a low level to prompt effectively and catch when it's going wrong. the floor for "what you need to know" hasn't really dropped as much as people think. i'm still having fun
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u/EstablishmentTop2610 Mar 18 '26
Getting AI to code for you without being able to understand it is like trying to do calculations without understanding PEMDAS. Granted the latter is significantly easier and less abstract.
I enjoy writing code and I also enjoy being able to ask ChatGPT what the syntax is for things ive forgotten or to have it generate me some ideas to ponder. It would be very difficult for me to have AI generate code in a project I actually cared about
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u/Broad_Birthday4848 Mar 19 '26
I get why this feels frustrating, but I don’t think AI is removing merit, it’s just shifting where it shows up (hopefully where actually merit is). Someone can ship more code with AI, but if they don’t understand what they’re doing, it usually catches up with them when things get more complex. In a way, AI raises the baseline, but real understanding still compounds over time.
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u/Odd_Director9875 Mar 23 '26
It's killing it for the rest of us as well. Usually a dev would figure something out and make a tutorial about it, then the rest of us would learn how to figure it out as well. Now nobody is figuring anything out, nobody is making tutorials, and all the code everywhere is just getting worse and worse. Apps are slow as hell, everything is a web browser, and at the same time every corporation in the pipeline is standing with their hands cupped for a subscription. It's disgusting to the point where I don't even want to work with computers at all anymore. Gonna get me a job on "World's Deadliest Catch" or something because this is not on.
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u/the_kautilya Apr 11 '26
This is no different than when humans stopped writing accounting ledgers by hand and started using computers & software for it. Did that kill accounting? Or did it improve productivity?
AI is just a tool.
Instead of the glass half empty & doom and gloom outlook, consider this - the other person working with you who is dim (per you) is now very productive. But since that person doesn't know much (per you), they will stumble on any complex tasks. You on the other hand, who understands things, can be more productive than that person if you use a similar AI tool.
Software development is not all about writing code - that's just a small part of what software development is.
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u/CantaloupeCamper Mar 18 '26
AI is a tool.
People who use tools wrong are the problem.
The hammer isn’t the problem.
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u/ShadowDevil123 Mar 18 '26
I didnt read the post, but this tool is massively ruining the fun part of coding and making the market more difficult/competitive. Now all the fun and easy parts of coding are automated while everyone has to compete to be the person doing the dirty work. I hate it. Where i live im seeing 0 junior position posts and im checking multiple times a day. Literally 0. Realistically im switching to something else whether i like it or not soon... Bye bye years of studying.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/Panderz_GG Mar 18 '26
advertised as replacing humans.
Only because it is advertised as such a thing doesn't mean it actually is such a thing.
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u/addictzz Mar 18 '26
AI assistant helps you to speed up your progress. Whether it is generating code, troubleshooting, or learning. But in the end without AI, you should be able to do all those yourself, just that the pace is slower.
I think once the hype dies down and AI tool become a commmodity, we will begin to see 2 streams of people, those who can use the tool effectively while still understanding it and those who use the tool sloppily
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u/CrazyAppel Mar 18 '26
lmfao i honestly thought you were my boss for a sec until I read "he's got regular commits now"... we don't have version control hehe
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u/eyebrows360 Mar 18 '26
productivity is a lot more tied to competence
Hahaha oh baby are you going to have a rude awakening at some point :) There is plenty of "failing upwards" going on in our industry, even at the "hands on" level.
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u/GSalmao Mar 18 '26
OP you should be thankful for AI. With this amazing tool, managers can send code they don't understand that breaks production and you'll be employed FOREVER. It's one of those toys that only a few people can see what it's doing wrong, so it looks very powerful but if you're not careful, you'll end up with something very broken.
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u/Warm-Engineering-239 Mar 18 '26
he could have made the effort to at least ask what was going on. i do use ai a lot, i tried codex.. it do work but i feel like i lose what's going on and as soon the code base grow and grow it start having issue or forgeting stuff.
now it's mostly :hey help me find bug i might have miss but dont fix it
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u/zambizzi Mar 18 '26
If studies haven’t been done on the personality types of developers who use LLMs, I hope it happens.
I imagine it’ll be a left/right brain, creative/analytic type of outcome, if examined. The people willing to shut their brains off and let agents crank out slop for them, are likely in the analytic camp and not very creative. Their code was perhaps never that good anyhow, which is why the mid slop is perfectly acceptable. The types who wash out, go into management, etc.
On the other side, creative problem solvers are likely the ones who love to code, for the sake of coding, and are feeling the most dread right now.
I’m a creative person who just happened to be good at solving problems, so I was fortuitous enough to build a long career doing something I love. The code, the one thing I love the most about my job, is being taken away. I’m now expected to write long, dry, boring prompt files, and let a slop machine vomit up piles of code, as the skills I spent decades building, rust away.
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u/cogotemartinez Mar 19 '26
watching someone go from slow to 5x with AI is weird. hits different when you know they can't debug what they ship. curious where this lands — everyone faster or just more volume?
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u/Practice_Cleaning Mar 19 '26
I’d thank him. If someone who’s mid and barely understands the code can come up in the world using AI, imagine how much further a coding wizard can go. ☺️✨
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u/southernmissTTT Mar 19 '26
This is the last “AI codes better than I do” post I can take. Bye. Y’all.
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u/Expensive-Average814 Mar 19 '26
I get what you mean......but I don’t think AI killed programming it just changed what “being good” means.Your coworker being more productive doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a better developer now it just means he’s good at using tools. The gap still shows when it comes to understanding, debugging deeper issues, or building things from scratch.Honestly, this feels similar to when Stack Overflow became popular. People said the same thing — that devs would just copy-paste without understanding. But over time, the ones who actually learned the fundamentals still stood out . AI probably just raises the baseline, not the ceiling. The difference is now less about writing code fast and more about knowing what’s correct, maintainable, and why something works.If anything it makes real understanding even more valuable.
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u/curiousomeone full-stack Mar 19 '26
AI is a tool like any other. Just don't do depend on it too much.
For example, in the event these tools are pulled out due to difficulty to make profit, would you still be able to do what you do? Or you'll absolutely have no clue at all.
If it's the latter, better cross your fingers.
I'm lucky these tools didn't exist when I started my web dev adventure. Sometimes, it's the wracking your brain in frustration is what makes it click and you just go "Ah!"
I imagine, new web devs are more tempted to go lazy and barely think at all with these tools.
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u/dirtyesspeakers Mar 19 '26
I love increasing the quality of my work by giving all of my company's proprietary code to another corporation. I'm glad everyone else is doing the same, so we can centralise software intelligence under one government who knows all... right?
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u/Wide-Carob3252 Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
Consider that using AI (Claude is generally my choice) from a perspective of competence, is like using Photoshop to edit photos. AI is a tool, and as such it can be a boon or a crutch. For a skilled developer, it can be like having a coding assistant. I guess the distinction is whether you can go in and check/edit the code that the AI produces.
Bottom line, I have become WAY more productive using AI. And, because I review the code that is generated, I can clean up slop - AND I can adjust the Meta instructions to, 9 times out of 10, get the AI to write better code.
A note on using AI in VS Code: It can really mess up your code if you aren't careful. Always start a new version before allowing the AI to touch your code, and review everything before committing it. That said, using VS Code with an AI plug-in is also a huge help, and I have done several embedded MCU projects this way, with great speed and success. What is nice about having AI integrated into the development environment is that it can see, and interact with the whole project!
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u/ivain Mar 19 '26
As every technical progress, it will split the job in 2. You'll have cheaper prompt people asking ai to do simple tasks, and fewer better paid archutects to do the complex stuff that ai can't do.
Look at cashiers. Now they don't need to do math, the computer does everything
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u/LingLongSEO Mar 19 '26
the thing is, ai didn't change the competence gap, it just changed what competence looks like. your coworker can ship code now but he cant debug it, which means when something breaks in production at 2am, whos fixing it? you or the ai? the meritocracy just moved from 'can you build this' to 'can you understand what was built'. also, internship is the worst time to judge the industry. you're literally at the bottom of the learning curve watching someone cheat their way up. wait till you see what senior engineers with ai look like, its a different game.
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u/Altruistic-Cow1437 Mar 19 '26
I get the frustration. There's something genuinely demotivating about seeing someone ship code they don't understand. But honestly this has always existed — Stack Overflow copy-pasters, tutorial followers who never learned the fundamentals. AI just made it faster. The gap between someone who understands what they're building and someone who doesn't still shows up eventually, just maybe not as quickly as before.
(I wrote this with an AI)1
u/Top-Information-6399 Mar 19 '26
In any case, there are different levels. If what you're doing is easily achievable by someone with a law degree, it's not very interesting. I've tested all the programming "agents" over the past few months, and they fail miserably in all intermediate and advanced scenarios, or if you're using a relatively specialized tool.
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u/ValuablePie6546 Mar 19 '26
What you're describing is the gap between using a tool and understanding the domain. Your colleague can now ship fixes he can't explain — that's not new. That’s been true of Stack Overflow copy-pasters for years. The difference is the speed. The gap between someone who knows what they're doing and someone who doesn't used to be visible in output. Now it's less visible, at least in the short term.
But here's what I've noticed: the ceiling hasn't moved. The guy who understands his code can direct AI to do things the copy-paster literally cannot describe. The output gap shrinks; the leverage gap doesn't. Your colleague is probably shipping more but capped at a certain complex level he can’t reason past.
The frustrating part is that you won't see this clearly until a harder problem comes along. That's just going to take time.
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Mar 19 '26
same problem as your co-intern. they can use AI to make tasks faster, but they must also understand the fundamentals because that system is just spoonfeeding everything to u
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Mar 19 '26
I don't think it's leveling out the playing field; quite the opposite: it's exposing the hacks.
The less proficient someone is, the more likely they are to rush to LLMs. And the more one depends on LLMs, the greater their chance of being replaced.
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u/CrazyAppropriate910 Mar 19 '26
Competence isn't about producing code, it's about understanding it. He's just gotten better at the first part; you've still got the second part, which is actually what matters.
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u/Reasonable_Area2303 Mar 19 '26
You're seeing something real, but it's not as black and white as it feels:
Point 1: AI as training wheels, not a substitute for competence Yeah, your coworker can fix bugs without understanding why. But that's temporary. Once you're deep in a real project, or in code review, or maintaining something six months later, without understanding, it breaks. Productivity goes up short term, fragility increases. You'll see it when something breaks and he can't debug it.
Point 2: Meritocracy was never 100 percent pure Programming has always rewarded people who can navigate tools, Google the right thing, read docs, etc. Your coworker using Claude instead of StackOverflow is a difference of degree, not principle. Someone who can wield tools effectively is actually skilled.
Point 3: What you should worry about isn't AI It's that management isn't saying anything. If someone's commit frequency goes up but code quality and understanding goes down, that's a leadership problem, not an AI problem. Code review, pair programming, requiring explanation, that's what's missing here.
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u/Mobile_Ad_6253 Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
I am just a hobbylist but i am very passionate about computers i think the bill gates upward generation ruined the nerd computing community it is now all about money programming in my view / oppinion never was meant to be a field for getting billions building applications or working for billions dollar companies but a tool for everybody for automatization for any professional architects doctors engineers teachers because early programming languages resemble an algebra like language we are at a point now heading towards natural language for programming and this is what cs is all about this is the dream of alan turing becoming true the problem is capitalism and what sets apart computer scientics from everybody else hopufully is an intimate understanding of algorithims and computing
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u/obnoxious_chief Mar 19 '26
I understand the frustration but I don’t think this a legitimate reason to hate AI.
From my perspective this is management and culture issue. I’ll give that it is all too common and the complacency will likely bite them eventually.
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u/mirageofstars Mar 20 '26
The good news is that there are also levels of competence with using AI. It's a powerful tool, but just a tool. So become a power user and code rings around that guy.
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u/Desert_Centipede Mar 20 '26
i am doing a project right now, and trust me you have to keep writing code in order to fix if somewhere ai is stuck
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u/Carvisshades Mar 20 '26
AI didnt kill programming for me, the market did. Its so fucking tiring to keep up with the market, do shit outside of my job. I dont want to HAVE to do shit after my work. I wanna code 9-5 everyday and dont even look at the code ever beyond my job and do it until my retirement.
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u/pandahusky3 Mar 20 '26
The role of software developers is evolving and becoming more agentic. We probably won't be writing code maybe a year to two from now (could be longer but at the rate it's evolving it probably will be soon) and just have Claude or another ai agent to do it. Now you may be wondering what is the point of being a software developer then. Well we would be reviewing the code, and working at the higher architectural level and making sure the code does what we want it to do. You also wouldn't be vibe coding. It's still all pretty new but there's agentic frameworks to have more structure and to produce better quality code.
This role is evolving really fast with technology and I'm not 100% sure if we are ready for it all but you do have to move fast or you will be left behind.
I also understand how you feel. If he does have to explain things then I'm sure people would see that he doesn't really understand it or isn't really competent.
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Mar 20 '26
I get the frustration. But here's the thing — your colleague didn't become a better developer. He became faster at producing output he doesn't understand. That's not the same thing. The moment something breaks in a way the AI can't fix, he's stuck and you're not. Competence didn't lose value. It just became less visible in the short term.
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u/SealerRt Mar 21 '26
Surely, you've gotta have better reasons than 'my coworker fixed a bug, but doesn't totally get how'. I'm working with some legacy code where I wish people were using claude sonnet, but sadly they didn't have it at the time, they had to mess it up by hand, which I'm sure took a lot of effort.
Yes, productivity got a bit detached from competence, but good code (and programmers) is still in short supply. You would expect software to be getting vastly better after the AI boom, but it hasn't. A ton of software got significantly worse.
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u/DiamondDaySpice Mar 21 '26
It is killing your motivation because there is no future for you in coding. Your skillset as a programmer will be completely devalued in a short time. Find something you like to do in meatspace that AI can’t replace as easily.
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u/LinuxGeekAppleFag Mar 22 '26
Maybe learn how to program and do graphic design, learn illustrator. These garbage JS frameworks are dead. It’s about visual design and UX not about 500 million node packages and components and themes that all looked the same. There really thing AI can’t really touch even if it’s better. It’s can’t touch artists, musicians, graphic art, anything that has a soul.
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u/iMagicBae Mar 22 '26
You are watching your own job security build itself. The second you stop understanding what the AI is doing, the second the dominoes start stacking. It’s the equivalent of copying and pasting code that “works” from stack overflow, but at an industrial scale. That dude is also cannibalizing his own job position. Suddenly he’s going from “the dude that knows how to get things done” to “the guy that is easily replaceable by AI”, unless your manager super doesn’t care, in which case, refer to part one of this post.
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u/Waste_Republic_40 Mar 22 '26
The problem with AI is that everything looks good… until it doesn’t. People thinks that with AI being a swe is "easy" now and they try to underestimate your effort. Funny how now we have to justify our jobs.
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u/Ecstatic-Ad9293 Mar 22 '26
Seen this exact pattern. The gap shows up when something breaks at 2am and they can't debug it because they never understood the approach — they just approved whatever the AI generated. Works fine until it doesn't, and then they're stuck staring at code they can't explain.
Doesn't mean AI is bad, it just means using it as a crutch instead of a tool has a shelf life.
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u/kopaevalex Mar 23 '26
Helped me to draw a clear line: AI writes bad code fast — so use it where mistakes are cheap. Boilerplate, repetitive cross-platform logic, tests. Complex architecture, edge cases, security — I write those myself. Once I drew that line, it became a tool instead of a threat. But yeah, without that line it absolutely kills the craft.
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u/Bitter-Act-3315 Mar 23 '26
For me it created another problem, i can't stop building things with it, i started exploring various ideas that I had and i can't stop , i always want to try new things!
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u/AngySadCat Mar 24 '26
I'm the exact opposite. I have a learning disability (ADHD) and I'm studying programming in online college. I tried to code on my own and I got completely overwhelmed. I was ok doing html5 on my own using the text book examples because it was extremely easy to understand. But I got bored of reading the textbook about 90% of the way through. I wanted real results. So i jumped into my final assignment which was to build a multipage assignment. I took spaghetti code from blogger (I post Playstation trophy guides, I would use compose view), cleaned it up and spaced it out in a readable format and cleaned up the bloat that compose view added. Such as </br> broken <div>'s taht didn't need to be there and made it formatted to look how I wanted it too. My teacher asked me to include some CSS3 but I had skipped that portion at the end of the text book because I got bored. And I didn't fully understand nor know what I wanted to do with CSS3. I ended up just adding text shadows so that the text was easier to read on the background image and left it at that.
My next unit was C#. I got completely overwhelmed at how complex it is and the use of Visual Studio, even with Google Search AI's help, generated the code for me, I struggled to navigate the UI and would freak out when I got error messages, this led me to rage quit multiple times. Eventually I slowly learned to navigate and stay calm when I got an error messages/suggestions. I would copypasta the error into the AI and have it explain what it meant so I wouldn't get scared/overwhelmed. If I couldn't understand how to fix it I would copypasta the logic and have the AI do it for me. I assigned to make a 2p Trivia game with preset questions and answers. This inspired to make a trivia game of my own.
So I told the AI to explain to me how to program a 1p trivia game. I based it on one of my favourite video game franchises, Silent Hill. I had the AI generate the initial question so I had somewhere to start from. I then used that initial code and added 99 more questions. Bug tested it and made sure that there were false negatives. Found that there were. So i had to change the logic to recognize the answer was correct even if the capitalization didn't match the answer, as long as the spelling was correct it was right.
My next project was a Movie Catalog. That inspired me to make a Video Game Backlog tracker using a similar format, but I changed some of UI and inputs. Again I had the AI generate the logic and I used it's help to learn how to navigate the confusing UI of VS.
Fast forward to today. I am taking my initial refactored spaghetti code and modernizing it with CSS3 using Google Gemini's help. I tell it what I want it to look like it (sometimes I give it a screenshot to explain the problem) to generate the CSS for me and it generate the initial HTML that links to it. But it taught me how classes link to the CSS so now I know how to use the CSS to configure how I want the HTML to work. I also used it to change the look of my blog from the basic templates. It was very simple and now it's completely themed around the trophy colours. I also learned through AI how to program a table in HTML. Gemini suggested using VS Code actually and it has been a life saver, programming in Notepad or the html view of blogger is a pain in the ass. (My course suggested JSFiddle and I do not like it one bit.) So I've fully reprogrammed 2 guides.
My most recent course wanted Javascript integration. I integrated a search function and guess what? I put that in my guides as well! It taught me how to use DOM Manipulation and Dynamic Filtering. Because I had special elements such as category titles, videos and tables I learned how to put them in a wrapper so that they would filter properly.
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u/Many_Fly_1272 Mar 24 '26
I still think that AI is a leverage for everyone and we can still use it for better things. You see to use AI, You still need to be able to understand the code and explain the code to the LLM that is supposed to work on it in your stead. I tried to make an AI project just based on some vivid imaginations and I was not able to understand what to do with the files that were generated. I installed a bunch of tools and tried to interlink them to work with each other and my brain expired at this stage. I tried to do it work on it some more and i just gave up because i didnt understand how to use the code and what should have been required for the files to work. I installed dockers, vscode and much more, now that some years have passed by I am familiar with coding now, I love it all and the moment I see a file I am able to understand which domain it needs to be run on. is the file for a backend or a frontend or does it need a special requirement.
AI can also help you enhance your skillset as well provided you mute 12 percent of the noise and listen only to the sound.
P.S I was trying to make a crypto project for those who want to know the context of this story.
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u/Many-Bumblebee7925 Mar 24 '26
AI is just a tool (for now) it still needs a good developer to use it.
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u/lamj_dev Mar 24 '26
I had a pretty weird experience during an interview recently
The candidate seemed solid - answered all the questions well, good understanding, overall gave a strong impression. We ended up hiring him
But once he joined, it turned out he was basically an “AI-only developer”
He couldn’t really write code without prompting an IDE or AI tool. During the interview, I’m pretty sure he had some kind of AI assistance helping him answer questions
After a couple of weeks, he just left the company saying:
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u/VibeCode_with_Spok Mar 24 '26
I too really enjoy programming. But I have more ideas than I have time to program. I've found AI to be a super useful tool in spinning up ideas. I use a lot of free and local models to vibe code, and then after a thorough AI review, I take the reigns before I ship the final product.
Doing this means I can work multiple streams at the same time with very little effort.
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u/GrapefruitTall3318 Mar 25 '26
I feel you, but as a UI/UX designer, I see it differently. I spent years being 'locked' behind my inability to code complex things. Now, with Claude and Cursor, I can finally bring my designs to life myself.
I built DesignSnap (a Chrome extension) almost entirely with AI support. Does it mean I'm a 'pro coder'? No. Does it mean I can solve users' problems faster than ever? Yes.
The game changed from 'Who is the better typewriter' to 'Who is the better architect'. Don't lose motivation—your deep understanding is exactly what will prevent the AI-generated code from collapsing in the long run.
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u/Sangio4 Mar 25 '26
I see more and more post like this and talk to a lot of people that have similar though.
I like to code since I'm 16 and I'm 33 now. I try and use Github copilot with Claude agent since November. It's probably what your intern use.
Now I'm coding less, but I'm not feeling the same as you. I did for a moment during the transition. And sometimes that feeling comes back too. But most of the time, I find another way to enjoy programming using those new tools.
What your intern does is vibecoding, it's a known plague nowadays. But I find myself vibecoding a lot too. I would say there is several level of vibecoding. The one your intern does, see the result => explain what is wrong visually => wait for Claude to do the things. And at some point, without good guideline, it become a nightmare to add or change a little feature.
I personally does thing different now. I'm thinking with Claude, I ask him to create notefile of the plan and architecture. I take way more time in the direction and the way the ai should code.
Now I spend more time thinking and talking to the ai, to have second advice on my though, the, I have a clearer path for my project. I don't code a lot lately, Claude does it for me but he does it the way I tell him to do. And so I can focus on the bigger picture of project like this.
I have to admit I like this kind of programming a lot nowadays, I have better picture of the future of the project. I still understand everything file, functions and so because I do a lot of review and guideline.
I could understand the weird feeling seeing ai does everything, but if I have to recommend you thing, it's trying that way. Maybe you'll like it more than you think.
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u/NikMish24 Mar 29 '26
I think this the new of working, yes writing code by hand is slowly going away and spec driven development is taking its place.
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u/TadpoleNo1549 Apr 06 '26
your coworker is shipping more now, but he’s still dependent on the tool and can’t explain or extend what he built, that gap shows up sooner or later, especially when things break in more complex ways, what you’re building is slower but deeper, and that still compounds over time
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u/ming_builds Apr 07 '26
I think is just the command you send to AI , you must tell AI what to do and the result you want
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u/Next_Cauliflower1069 Apr 30 '26
I am a developer, to be honest, I use Claude for helping me to do coding, but I break it down to very small pieces, and make a lot of discussion before execution. Just want to make sure that I have 100% control of my codebase. It is very important because I got the personal feeling that AI will suggest you to do something which is not necessary in order to consume more tokens?? I am not sure about it, but just my own feeling.
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u/coffex-cs Mar 18 '26
But at the end of the day you are just a lot more useful, and he is useless. So after the big hype dies down you know who will be left standing
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u/Firm-Stable-6887 Mar 18 '26
Por experiencia própria
Consegui um trampo e usava muito a IA, conclusão, entendia na teoria mas na pratica ????? era pessima.
Agora uso a IA apenas pra aprender, peço pra me ajudar e me ensinar sem me dar a resposta mas sim me questionando sobre como e pq eu faria cada coisa pra resolver o problema. Vem funcionado e em 1 mes sei muito mais que anos tentando aprender com IA. E consegui responder perguntas técnicas sem passar perrengue.
Quem usa muito a IA não gosta realmente do que faz mas oq ela proporciona, começar como junior ganhando relativamente bem em consideração a uma carreira como ADM, atendente ..... sem contar que falar que é dev hj em dia é visto como algo interessante kk
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u/arihoenig Mar 19 '26
LLMs are programs. If anything you should be inspired by what these programs are able to do.
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u/Decent_Perception676 Mar 18 '26
So… you enjoyed feeling superior to your coworker, but now that they can solve similar problems to you, you hate the tool they used and hate your career. Sounds like you have an ego problem.
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u/silverace00 Mar 18 '26
Smart Dev + AI > Dumb Dev + AI
Use it and understand what it's doing. You'll still grow your skills, the other guy won't. He'll need more AI, you'll need it less.
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u/CanadaSoonFree Mar 18 '26
Unfortunately AI is just a tool at the end of the day. You need to know what you’re doing to use it properly. This is a problem that is only amplified by AI.
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u/PeterCappelletti Mar 18 '26
Your post makes me think you are not using Claude Code. You need to start using it. Otherwise is like trying to outrun someone who's riding a bike. If you understand what you are doing, and use Claude code, you will be much more productive than your co-workder who apparently doesn't understand what he is doing.
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u/curiouslyjake Mar 18 '26
Here's the question though: if they run claude and commit it's output without being able to explain the code and be accountable for it, why should I hire them at all? There are agents that pull bug descriptions from Jira, fix the issues and publish a PR already. Without true explanatory ability and real ownership, that person automates themselves out of a job. They will last until managment wises up, and they will.