[azangru]

> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted

What I am selfishly curious about is: is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022? I understand that there are many companies in which managers demand more of workforce — but are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago?

In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted?

Asking for a friend.

[gonzalohm]

Yes it is. You don't need to announce whether you are using AI or not. Just keep doing your job, use AI when it pleases you and keep building manual code when you think that's better.

That's what I do, I have never been asked if I use AI to write my code.

If it's dumb code I use AI. If it's something that I want to craft I don't

[aeyes]

Where I work % of code written by AI and AI spend is tracked all the way down to the individual person.

It is obvious to me that this will be used in performance reviews in the future.

[newsoftheday]

They started doing that tracking where I worked until last summer, stress so high, GERD kicked in worse than it'd ever been and that's going back to the 1980's. I retired, and I do thank God I was able to. I now just dabble every week or so in my personal side projects.

[anticorporate]

Garbage like this is why the tech industry desperately needs widespread unionization.

[gonzalohm]

That's so stupid. Let the agent write code that will never be used then and you focus on the important code

[sfn42]

What's stupid in my opinion is this idea that the LLM can't be used to write good code. Like you use it for throwaway code.

I use LLMs heavily, bit it doesn't diminish the quality of my code at all. If anything it raises the quality. Because I keep it on a tight leash and make sure every like of code is what I want it to be. If you let the thing run wild for hours and barely glance at the result sure you'll be producing slop. But there's nothing stopping you from being more involved using it as a tool rather than a slave, and getting great results that way.

[toast0]

My personal situation is unusual, but I don't see my coworkers being forced into AI. They also don't seem to be ignoring it, but they're also not using it very much afaik.

Some do try feeding it log based mysteries, which sometimes spots problems but usually not the one that was being investigated.

So far, all their attempts to write code with AI don't seem to have been worth the time. Although there's one report of good unit tests being generated.

I don't get much feedback on my open source projects, because the audience is limited, but I did get an annoying report recently where the reporter was using AI instead of their brain. AI took them (and me) through a pretty wild goose chase over a very simple reported error (unused variables in a couple places). Just remove them and carry on.

[sph]

Yes: work for 90% of the world that isn't a purely tech company, but just need a working product delivered on time and at cost.

No one has asked me to use adopt LLMs in my consulting work, at least as of yet.

[sevenzero]

>is it possible to remain a software developer, and ignore AI? To write code the same way we did before 2022

Yes if it's your own company or if you're self employed and can compete.

[andriy_koval]

> In other words, is it possible to not battle with AI trying to get it what we want? Were you forced to do this by your employer, or was this entirely self-inflicted?

if you work in company with lots of AI generated code, then you can't handle it without AI usage anymore..

[willtemperley]

Working on my own product using Claude, I feel like front-end coding hasn’t changed much. It still requires a lot of manual tweaking and understanding users at a human level.

Personally I’m happy that the backend and algorithmic side writes itself.

[chrisweekly]

That's refreshing to read (frontend is my wheelhouse). I mostly agree. It seems like most people using AI treat FE as a solved problem, satisfied using tailwind and settling for "looks close enough".

[willtemperley]

I think there will always be space for good artisanal FE. This is a Ford Model T moment, the software production line has just been invented, but that didn’t stop smaller sports car manufacturers pushing the envelope.

[varjag]

There are spots and niches where you can do this but I expect them to dry up within a year.

[jasonkester]

Yeah, of course. I’ve only ever been disappointed by ai, so I don’t use it.

I run my own shop, so I can do what I want, but I’m happy with my pace (which I’ve noticed is quite fast compared to folks I’ve worked with), and I don’t find “speed of writing code “ to be a bottleneck.

When and if it gets good, I’ll hop in. But for the time being I don’t get the sense that I’m missing out on anything.

[hermitcrab]

Same here. I am maintaining and enhancing several 100k of C++ I have written over 20 years. I use MS Copilot to write little snippets now and then. But I always modify them to fit my own style. It is challenging enough to navigate and understand all that code without letting an AI loose on it.

[rdbl27]

Yes, in the same sense that it is still technically possible to ride a horse to work instead of using a car.

You can code in assembly instead of using a compiler, too.

[dheera]

> are there still places where people are satisfied to not rush ahead and do business same way they did three or four years ago

They're getting outcompeted.

[eudamoniac]

No, their competition thinks they're getting outcompeted, just have to wait 6 more months for the AI to really get going. Meanwhile no one is shipping anything good.

[runtime_terror]

Are they? Have any examples?

[hermitcrab]

I'm less worried about being 'outcompeted' by clankers than the possibility that AI slop products become so numerous that it is almost impossible to get noticed.

[skeledrew]

You can always start your own practice and ignore AI, if you're serious enough.

[hellohello2]

I'm curious, have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy? What makes you wish to write code like 2022?

[toast0]

Having watched people use these kinds of tools, it feels like trying to tell an intern to do a project.

Except with an intern, hopefully there's personal development and you only have to be very specific a few times. And the intern's manager gets good feels for helping someone grow, and maybe it's a hiring pipeline.

If I'm going to have to do that for everything, I would rather just do the work myself.

I have seen some sessions with let's call it over agressive autocomplete... That's mildly tempting, but I'm happy with my disintegrated development environment, and it doesn't have any way to do autocomplete at all, so that's not happening for me either.

[hellohello2]

Current SOTA is far past "agressive autocomplete" at this point, more like ask for a PR for a small feature and its done... I guess for me the fun is you can build a lot yourself, without relying on others. I hear you for the social aspect though & thanks for sharing your pov.

[coldtea]

If you just like talking and some program comes out (aka "business problem solving") you might like it.

If you like coding (aka "problem solving"), it feels like crap.

And if you like still having an IT job in a couple of years, it feels like dangerous crap.

(Of course you can be hoping you'll be the one selected, out of millions laid off, to get to keep working on a higher level).

[hellohello2]

Perhaps its the apprehension/anxiety that makes it feel bad then? I like coding (building things) and couldn't care less about businesses, and am having a great time. In the current state of AI, mass layoffs probably won't happen. But I guess its a bit scary that we don't know how much more it will improve...

[coldtea]

>Perhaps its the apprehension/anxiety that makes it feel bad then?

It's a big part. But the erosion of what coding means is another big part for some.

>I like coding (building things) and couldn't care less about businesses

There are people who like coding, but they mean "building things" by it, and other who like coding and mean "coding" itself. The latter we aren't as pleased.

(I also like building things, but I like building them via coding, not thru vibing and getting them spit out).

[jon-wood]

> the current state of AI, mass layoffs probably won't happen.

I’m sorry, what? Have you been paying any attention at all to the state of the industry lately?

[hellohello2]

I wasn't clear enough, I was replying to "you'll be the one selected, out of millions laid off," in context I meant "mass layoff" as in "95% of everyone is out of a job permanently".

[tonyedgecombe]

It will be somewhat ironic if the people losing out in this transition are the ones screaming about it’s benefits.

[alchemism]

I’d probably let go of the employees who decline using agentic tools first, tbh. All things being equal.

[claytongulick]

And that's the problem.

The companies that agree with you will be at an interesting place when they have piles of AI slop code and no talented developers.

[alchemism]

I can’t say Claude Code is not a great product with solid market fit even though the code inside it is aesthetically garbage.

[azangru]

> have you tried working seriously with claude code or gpt codex and which part of it did you not enjoy?

I haven't. But I found myself, to my surprise, not particularly interested in trying; which makes me wonder what motivates other developers if not peer pressure or demands for more productivity. I find coding interesting and fulfilling enough to do it on my own. I do ask LLMs questions from time to time, but for that, even a chatgpt or a gemini in a browser tab is enough.

The best experience I had so far is with code reviews, when the models pointed out my mistakes. But I haven't yet gotten to the point where I would want them to write code for me.

[hellohello2]

Just to share my perspective, I have not had this much fun programming as when I first learned to code. It's really something you have to try for yourself to actually understand. Its like a new form of programming, where code is "soft" instead of "hard"; on the whole feels similar, but also completely new.

The opinons on this site make me realize most people here are into programming for the money, rather than for the fun of building things. Which is completely fine, but it leads to most commenters being depressed rather than enthralled, which feels honestly confusing at times. Obviously socially things are looking pretty bleak but if you find coding fulfilling on its own, lets just say you can look forward to fulfillment lol

[__lain__]

Yeah go to a niche market C++ shop

[OnionBlender]

What niche market? I work for a hardware company writing C++ code and my company literally has a dashboard for managers that shows employee's token usage. My manager warned me that my low usage will reflect poorly on me during performance reviews later this year.

[randusername]

I'm banking on this. I don't really know anyone younger than me at the moment that writes C++. Best-case scenario I'll be in-demand. Worst-case when my grandchildren visit me at my cardboard box I can tell them spooky bedtime stories about SFINAE.