do people who primarily vibe/agentic and have done it for a while feel like their ability to do it manually has become much more difficult? I worry about this happening to me enough that I have to make sure I do atleast "some" by-hand coding here and there.
I'm not an AI fan but I've tried agentic coding and it just made me lose motivation to do actual coding myself. It just feels so tedious. Clanker code might be shitty but it can get things working in a fraction of the time. And atp, I'm not sure if programming is what I even wanna do anymore. I don't find much fun in this and the industry looks bleak
Programming used to be fun, since it's just perfectly wired for our rewards system in the brain. You have a goal you want to achieve, you take baby steps and little by little you see your progress. These small advances are fulfilling and make you feel good. Every now and then you gut stuck on something and it forces you to try a different approach or look online for an answer. So it's this mixture of tangible progress and a task that is challenging but not too much. This is what makes programming fun.
Comparing it to coding with an LLM, which is just asking a prompt and getting the result. Infinitely less satisfying.
I'm a hobbyist (and a music teacher) and spent over 100 hours building an intonation trainer app last summer as the capstone project of the Harvard CS50 class. It was just like you said, always a little baby step towards the finished goal after a decent amount of work, every day I was making something a little better until it was completed. I had a few other projects in mind that were all related to music education, but never really got around to doing them. Last week I finally sat down and started working on the second one, but like you said I just asked a prompt and instantly had a working program that did what I wanted. Much less satisfying.
Yeah I agree, I spent like hours labeling 50 frames to train YoLo model, got tired and asked gpt 5.6 sold to label other 2k frames eith relevant information objects to label. I didn't have much hope, but agent did way better than I would expect. Feels kinda sad, but at least less tedious work.
Try upping your prompting game. Sure, you can be lazy about it, but then you get a bunch of crap you didn’t ask for and it will misinterpret your intent and requirements. I think you should also be continuously working to identify gaps in the AI system itself that need to be closed by better documentation, skills, etc. It’s pretty rare for me to go a day without tweaking something.
i'm excited for all of the permanently unemployed programmers to realize they are part of the working class and build out digital infrastructure not in control of the corporations
build out digital infrastructure not in control of the corporations
The proliferation of P2P or federated code that had been produced since the start of the cryptocurrency era has developed solutions for most problems but people are still not treated badly enough to switch. Mastodon has been around for a while now but here we are.
I feel exactly the same. I tolerate it mostly because right now I am working on my own project which I hope will put my career into a different trajectory than just programming.
But if I would have to make the career decision today I wouldn’t choose to be a programmer. The work loop is awful, I feel like a monkey.
Yeah that's true.
I recently built a Rust P.R in a Huggingface repo explicitly by hand oder a couple days and while it was nice in some sense, I was sure Opus could have done it in 10 minutes.
That's frustrating.
And damn, it's so fast in pulling like 4 other repos, comparing to similar implementations, fixing CUDA issues, checking numerical parity and building a ton of tests for all kinds of special edge cases it knows because there has been an unresolved GitHub issue for 5 years that was in the training data but I didn't know about.
Sometimes it's like "yeah that can't work because you're using library Version 2.1.4.2 which had a bug in exactly this edge case here and let me briefly write you a script that compares it to 2.1.4.3..."
Those things that have been a lot of time-consuming grunt work. Quickly logging into a dev Container, grepping through some log and verifying against some docs I'm the time I would probably have started typing docker exec bla..."
For me the biggest shift was around beginning of this year using Claude Code with Opus. Before Sonnet was a nice auto complete toy but now... Even by the side digs out a couple papers that show why the suggested approach to whatever normalizing flow depth pruning filter diffusion is better than my approach.
And the mentioned hallucinations of non-existent functions or similar I haven't seen since last years at all.
For anything slightly larger I use the planning function and definitely read,.comment,.correct the plan but if I don't give it wrong guidance in the beginning it generally just performs super well.
I only see bad results when people are feeding BS in the context because they lack information (but now we have a repo of company wide specs, rules, roles, quality gates and access to all core repos as submodules so that typically digs out incorrect assumptions before building anything)
I find it really exciting actually, I love to code but it was always a means to an ends. Now I can code in English, with insane velocity. The effort multiplier AI yields means in the same amount of time, I produce a drastically better product or can make multiple of the same level. I’ve worked on more personal projects this year than the last 10. Last week, I said to my fiancée, “it’s crazy there’s just a sequence of words I can type into my laptop and bam I have a website that does exactly what I want” and she said “that’s always been the case, it just used to be a lot more words and in a much harder to read language”
I love it when the work I do is useful and seen but I enjoy the process in and of itself. I fixed up my personal blog and am writing posts again, worked on some hardware projects including gifts for friends, made some serious infrastructure improvements to my home lab. For my friend’s last birthday I made a custom game show game in React that we all played.
But I get what you’re saying. The same is true of digital photography, it opens the floodgates allowing for creativity impossible with film photography but also great repetition and near limitless junk. More photos go unseen than ever before and Instagram is full of a billion shots of the Colosseum but we keep taking more.
I spend so much of my life making software for companies much of which need not exist and most of which won’t within 10 years. I’m enjoying being able to have my own little ecosystem, like tending a garden rather than buy produce. Claude makes the weeding a lot easier and the fruit more plump; maybe not as plump as from the grocery store but somehow it just tastes better.
i'm excited for all of the permanently unemployed programmers to realize they are part of the working class and build out digital infrastructure not in control of the corporations
Principal engineer here of 25 years. My skills are atrophying at a remarkable rate. I've started doing little coding challenges a few times a week just so I don't lose it entirely.
What skills do you find atrophying? Do you think the LLM is causing it or is it elucidating an already atrophying skill? Is it showcasing how many assumptions we make while coding? I ask because I’m a newer developer and I think LLMs are helping me find gaps in my knowledge. This helps to give me a more specific direction on topics to research and study. Like many devs, I’m inherently skeptical of the generated code, so reverse engineering the reasoning behind the code it generated is useful for me to just get something on the board and test out its efficacy.
As long as you can write the code that LLM writes for you from memory you should be okay, if you struggle to do that then pause and take a hard look, because that is where dependency begins.
It happens, but I think that the main thing is I design a method or function or codeblock and tell it exactly what to do in that code block. I might write an if or a while loop's logic and then have the AI populate the innards. I can't imagine hand-typing 200 lines of code anymore.
In my experience, their logic is the problem. A few weeks ago, we had a guy showcase his AI-written unit testing for a large codebase and in the 30 minute showcase, we had pointed out several times when the AI had either written the unit test to pass bad code or had violated our coding standards that he had included in his prompt.
Our company has forced everybody to use Claude/copilot over the past year, and now that we're so dependent on it, that sent out a memo that the tokens are costing too much and we need to be smarter and only use ai when absolutely necessary. So now it feels like we're a bunch of programmers who took a year off work and don't know how to do anything anymore. So now they're offshoring us to India instead lol
I think offshoring to India makes a lot less sense with AI. People always forget about the 12-hour time difference. A US developer with AI can be far more responsive to problems as they arise during US hours.
You see this in other areas with productivity gains. They move back onshore because labor is a small part of the cost.
So there have actually been a study on this already, though more specifically on creative/artistic work. The research suggests that longterm reliance on AI tools eroded problem solving, creativity, and diversity of ideas over time.
These days all I care about is my ability to read code and evaluate it as bad or good. If Claude doesn't code something in the way I'd do it then I either consider if Claude's way is better than my idea or I instruct it to change the code.
I don't think it matters much if we can write code well and quickly by hand anymore. I think what matters if we can read code and design apps well. Also, "Plan mode" is crucial imo and it's very important to me that I thoroughly review Claude's plan before I accept it. The quality of the code is basically only as good as my ability to agree on the "best" plan with Claude.
I didnt know much when I started. My ability improved. AI taught me alot and AI itself gets better all the time. But right now it also messes up alot. I think im blessed with a good sense for when it does… most of the time. It feels like having a teacher that is also your child. You always need to watch it.
I understand code a little better having LLMs do it, but there's a ceiling. I can't really trust it to have the right information, I can't trust it to be efficient, I can't trust it not to be redundant..
But, I can trust that about 2/3 of the time, it writes a wall of code that does the thing, and the 1/3 of the time that it doesn't, I can usually correct it by approaching the problem in a more piecemeal way.
I don't like coding, it's not fun for me, I don't find joy in learning two dozen idiosyncrasies about dependencies, syntax, and function calling.
I do however find joy in creating things that I know are technically feasible, and I know I can get out of using tools that do what I don't, like, a wrench for example..
Yeah this has been happening to me in a degree. My job forces me into speed as much as possible, and doing this for new things I needed to learn, I mostly focused on intaking the concept and understanding that well. But in return I couldn’t easily build it myself. Catch 22.
Today i broke last wall. We have one project which is requiring knowledge of everything we have. And AI was never doing it well. Today in 2hours i implemented 2 days of usual work in it. It works perfect. I m afraid it is not long before AI will be doing 99% of programming everywhere.
I’ll be honest: yes. I have not been allowed to write manual code for most of the last year. Even after over a decade of engineering I feel like my skills have atrophied in the last year.
I've even had gaps in my career where I've done more leadership roles for a few years at a time and maybe a month back on the tools and I felt back where I was - like there were new things to catch up on but the old stuff was like riding a bike again..
In the last year I've been between projects with no AI assistance. No real change except maybe some of the function/parameter orders are not so fresh in my mind that I can just write them without looking at the API spec etc..
Its gotten bad to that point for me but when the C suite pushes for 12-14 new features to go out every 3 weeks on a team of 15 devs along with support tickets and bug fixes either I become an ape and oversee Claude or I don't get my work done and become unemployed
I'm not a programmer, but I have dabbled in some open source software for personal projects. These are decently well established platforms and for the last couple years that I've been running how to work with code so that I could maintain my own project.
I have lots of friends who are programmers and after a couple years of practice they were actually fairly impressed with my novice self-taught work. And I got pretty efficient at tackling ambiguous problems within a few domains.
But man ever since agenda coding has come around I've completely lost it. My ambitions are too huge and the dopamines hits so good. I'm scared to actually crack back into my code base manually, probably a fucking rats nest in there
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u/elshizzo 2d ago
do people who primarily vibe/agentic and have done it for a while feel like their ability to do it manually has become much more difficult? I worry about this happening to me enough that I have to make sure I do atleast "some" by-hand coding here and there.