[Philip-J-Fry]

Yes, I think there's 2 kinds of developer. Those who think the code is the hard part, and those that don't.

The developers that thing coding is hard are the ones that absolutely love AI coding. It's changed their world because things they used to find hard are now easy.

Those that think coding is easy don't have such an easy time because coding to them is all about the abstractions, the maintainability and extensibility. They want to lay sensible foundations to allow the software to scale. This is the hard part. When you discover the right abstractions everything becomes relatively easy. But getting there is the hard part. These people find AI coding a useful tool but not the crazy amazing magical tool the people who struggle with coding do.

The OP is definitely in the second camp since they could spot and realise the shortcomings of the AI. They spotted the problem, and that problem is that the AI can't do the hard bit.

[jfim]

I'd say there's another camp: the camp of people who know that code isn't the hard part, but that it's still time consuming to write code. AI coding is pretty useful for that, when you can nail the design but you just need a set of hands to implement it.

[Philip-J-Fry]

I'm classing that as the second camp. Because you don't find it hard to do, it's just time consuming. It means you still know what you're doing and you're just using AI as a tool to accelerate your delivery. That's the optimal way to use in my experience if you want to actually deliver well architected software.

[dale_glass]

I'd fall somewhere in the middle.

I like coding, I just don't particularly enjoy figuring out the framework du jour. The task at hand is interesting, but the part where I need to figure out what are the incantations to have a Qt list with images in it is not. I need a working UI to get the thing done, but the framework stands in my way, requiring me to step away from my task intended task and spend a few hours on understanding QTreeView.

That's where I really enjoy AI currently, because I can get the GUI stuff out of the way much faster and get back to the thing the GUI is for.

Now within the specific problem I'm trying to solve, sure, I enjoy thinking about the abstractions, maintainability and extensibility. That's the part that actually matters. But the Qt UI on top, that's just a visual layer with a structure that was already set in stone, there's no big decisions of interest to make there. Just to figure out how to make it do the thing.

[seer]

But isn’t AI doing the same thing to project management as to coding?

PMs can now cross reference and organize tickets with just a few keystrokes. Organisational knowledge, business knowledge, design systems and patterns, etc all of it is encoded in LLM consumable artefacts. For PMs it is the same switch - instead of having to do it by hand you direct lower level employees to handle the details and inconsistencies and you just do vibe and vision.

When all of the pieces successfully connect and execute reliably, what is left for humans to do? Just direct and consume?

And AI companies with their huge swaths of data are soon gonna be in the situation of being able to do the directing themselves

[jcgrillo]

Such a person is just pushing a giant pile of cleanup work onto their colleagues. Unless they actually checked, the "cross references" are probably wrong in places or just entirely made up. Lower level employees by definition don't have the experience to correct the more subtle inconsistencies, so you've basically just constructed a high pass filter that lets only the worst failures through. Moreover, you're absolutely guaranteed to lose the respect of those lower level employees--forcing someone else to clean up your sloppy work is just cruel, and people resent being treated cruelly.

[byzantinegene]

this pretty much sums up what i feel about AI currently. It made my life significantly easier for most tasks I already breeze through, yet tasks I used to struggle with are still the equally difficult

[mountainriver]

There are also just problems where the code is the hard part…

[Philip-J-Fry]

What problems are they? I can't really think of any problems where writing the code was the hard part.

There's plenty of times where I don't know what code to write because I've never used a library before. But it's just a page of documentation away. It's not hard, it's just slow and tedious.

[mountainriver]

Writing machine learning kernels. Writing low level geometry libraries. Writing compilers...