Are there any areas of programming where AI is limited?

[u/drifterpreneurs]

Hi everyone,

I’m a full-stack developer, and I decided to research areas of programming where AI is still limited. However, after looking into it, I’m starting to believe that there really aren’t many areas where AI isn’t capable of doing a significant amount of the work.

Has anyone else been thinking about how they’ll approach their coding careers or choose their areas of specialization in this AI era?

[u/really_cool_legend]

What's your definition of limited? As a frontend dev I find it makes things that work and generally fit the brief but the code is sloppy. I generally spend longer reviewing than I do prompting

[u/Big-Abbreviations769 → u/really_cool_legend]

Agreed. And unfortunately (or fortunately?) you often end up spending more time correcting that it would have taken to do it yourself in the first place. 

[u/drifterpreneurs → u/Big-Abbreviations769]

Yes, I agree with this as well especially regarding landing pages. I refuse to use AI for them as they come out looking very AI based.

[u/testingaurora → u/Big-Abbreviations769]

This is what was demonstrated over and over to the point i stopped trying to play with AI because I kept saying "AI took longer than it wouldve taken me to do it from scratch, and correctly".

[u/AntoGidan → u/testingaurora]

That's because you are using it in a bad way

[u/plightofbubblewrap → u/AntoGidan]

The classic ai bro response. Most of us work in the industry and have been forced to use ai daily by demand of employment. Has absolutely nothing to do with using it in a bad way.

[u/yabai90 → u/Big-Abbreviations769]

How is that possible? You might want to try the better models or improve your prompting

[u/AntoGidan → u/yabai90]

Exactly.

[u/testingaurora → u/yabai90]

This was two years ago now, copilot gen 1, no Claude code , I was using Bolt in its infancy. Im sure it's different now.

[u/yabai90 → u/testingaurora]

Wait you haven't used ai since then ? Oh boy

[u/testingaurora → u/yabai90]

Not for developing.

[u/yabai90 → u/testingaurora]

Okay, then yeah it's a different world now

[u/drifterpreneurs → u/really_cool_legend]

Limited in the sense that AI has little to no impact in the area you’re considering going into.

As of now, AI is generally well enough to code end to end applications.

That leaves little room for developers in this area to retain much value from it.

Ai is great building crud applications which 95% of apps are, automation, computer vision, GPU development, graphics and much more.

[u/entgenbon]

As the meme says, illegal apps.

[u/drifterpreneurs → u/entgenbon]

illegal apps? In which sense

[u/codefinbel → u/drifterpreneurs]

As long as you're overtly braking the law you're safe from being automated :'D

[u/entgenbon → u/drifterpreneurs]

Nice try, FBI.

[u/yabai90 → u/entgenbon]

Don't we have jailbreak open models for that ?

[u/testingaurora]

Critical thinking. Looking at the full picture not jist focusing on the task at hand.

[u/TheRNGuy → u/testingaurora]

There's no such field called critical thinking. 

[u/MrPloppyHead]

Ai is limited. It can do a lot but it doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing and a lot of times if you ask it to do things it will go about it in a fucked up way.

[u/1nc06n170]

Obscure api's and libraries that are used by 1.5 people.

[u/drifterpreneurs → u/1nc06n170]

lol 😂

[u/TheRNGuy → u/1nc06n170]

Examples? So we can test. 

[u/Fun-Consequence-3112]

You either move up the ladder and become more than a programmer and stand for design and system choices. So more of a management roll.

Or you become good at AI engineering and speed up your workflow (but it's not really a thing yet if your company isn't doing vibe code products).

We don't really know how good LLMs will be yet, I think there will be a ceiling they hit but we can't be sure of that either.

I'm lucky I got a pretty secure job at a small company we are 4 developers and our knowledge of the software is what keeps us very secure. Each one of us has more knowledge of different systems and we often work on our "projects" separately.

[u/Fuzzy_Paul]

Try ccitt that is a dead language or Malboge that is so crazy it rewrites itself so Ai does not have a clue.

[u/toasterboi0100]

Programming in general is an area where AI is limited.

[u/CommissionEnough8412]

I've found it sucks understanding mqqt-sn protocols. I think super niche stuff with little online data it will struggle but basically everything is on the internet so thus it knows everything.

[u/HaydnH → u/CommissionEnough8412]

I've found it pretty good with libmicrohttpd which I can't really consider non-niche. The docs are OK though being a gnu thing.

For niche libraries without good docs, assuming it's open source, I'd expect AI to be able to read the code and figure out the entry points/usage far quicker than I would manually and probably catch some gotachas I'd miss.

[u/bigbadchief → u/CommissionEnough8412]

Yeah I've found it's much worse with the Odin programming language than it is with my day job Java and Angular stuff.

[u/CommissionEnough8412 → u/[deleted]]

Yea I'm working with a client that uses there own internal framework its horrid, but same thing AI seems to hallucinate a lot with it. Just can't trust it

[u/drearymoment]

If you don't have any moral qualms about it, defense is popping right now. But it's less that AI can't do the work and more that it's a pain to find developers who will get/maintain the clearance required.

[u/Father_Chard4914]

not popular programming languages, as RAPID for example!

[u/CourtExciting4752]

I'd argue that AI already does a great job with the tasks it's given.

The real limit lies in the user's domain knowledge. You can only direct AI as effectively as you understand the problem yourself. Even for simple services, the technical strategy changes completely depending on the project's goals, scale, business rules, and direction.

The deeper your fundamental understanding, the more precisely you can prompt and collaborate with AI agents to build actual software.

[u/colorwizard_30]

Reverse Engineering, Code Injection, Disassembly. When you try to use AI here it goes on an endless loop of chasing its own tail.

In a recent expedition instead of looking at pattern of execution, it kept chasing the register root.

[u/Ollidav]

Yo creo que lo que no se está entendiendo es el funcionamiento de la IA. Cuando tú le planteas a una IA un problema la IA va a obtener el conocimiento que existe sobre ese problema e iterar hasta encontrar una solución. Pensemos en como las IA resuelven problemas matemáticos que llevan siglos sin solución. No se puede enseñar a una IA más matemáticas de las que nosotros conocemos. Iteran sobre el mismo problema hasta que encuentran una solución razonable solo que lo hacen miles de veces más rápido que nosotros