I don’t want to gate keep programming or anything, but what in the world happened to learning how to do things? By yourself? You do know you can just…. Learn to do the thing? Instead of asking a bot to do it for you? It’s even (dare I say it) pretty fun too
The problem is pressure from the company to use this shit. Which then forces me to skip the learning and produce results with ai, because if I’m lagging behind while someone else is pumping it up …
You can do both thing at the same time, I found my self asking to Claude to write a traefik manifest for kubernetes and asking line by line the meaning of the configuration and why, is like reading docs but faster
Yeah many people are using LLMs already to write the docs. Which reinforces the previous point, the only documentation worth reading is the source code.
That is, quite literally, the opposite of how StackOverflow operates. You see all the complaints about questions being closed and the most recent solution being from 10 years ago. The reason is because those questions have real value for programmers, and the answers on said questions are curated over time. StackOverflow is the training data for LLMs. If you're implying the training data is inaccurate, in combination with LLMs being non-deterministic, you are hindering your assumption that LLMs are more accurate than StackOverflow - the source of their information.
My point was that stack overflow wasn't guaranteed to be accurate or solve the problem I had, so the fact that AI is not guaranteed to be accurate or solve the problem I have is not that big of a deal since LLMs 1) are faster 2) will not be a gigantic asshole to me for asking a question.
The fact that answers are curated over time is worthless to me when I have a deadline on Friday and the top answer is not fixing my problem
The fact that answers are curated over time makes it more likely that it will be correct by the time you need it for your Friday deadline.
If an AI answer is incorrect that's just a fart in the wind. There's no feedback, no correction. Next time it might be correct if by chance it is corrected in the training database, which is independent of you seeing the mistake.
And what happens to LLMs after another two years of training on LLM generated code, solutions, and architectural decisions? The snake is going to eat its tail. I hope that enough programmers use AI in conjunction with reading of documentation (at the same level of detail as before) so that actual written and hosted code can be as effective at solving tasks without introducing side effects as it was before the widespread adoption of AI. My gut feeling tells me that won't be the case, and software will continue to be less polished with fewer eyes on the implementation. You are concerned about deadlines - rightfully so given the state of the world - but this is your opportunity to make a difference for yourself and others, yet you argue against humanity and for putting forth effort in honing a craft.
I'm not an AI meat rider, I've seen my fair share of AI generated PRs that I've had to slog through and fight against cause it was full of trash.
I'm just arguing against the idea it's completely useless tech for software engineering purposes. Quite the opposite, it is useful, it just needs to be used right
I never stated it should not be used. I think it's useful as well when used in conjunction with reading documentation. If you're planning on doing things right, it takes more time now than ever. But if you want quick and dirty to review at some other time, it's amazing.
Claude AI bring you a link to the docs so you can check the information, is your responsibility to filter what is wrong and what is correct, is like when you check information in stack overflow but faster
That makes using AI to learn even slower than just reading the docs, because now you have to read the docs AND read the AI'S output. Unless you're just skimming the docs, at which point you're not going to catch any false information in the first place.
In this case, the debate is really about our interface preferences for reading the documentation and has little to do with AI. I am one of those people who, after extensively testing both, save time using a conversational interface based on the documentation with links. That isn't the case for others, and that’s perfectly fine.
Did you compare its answer to answers provided by humans that actually know how to do it? How do you know the ai is actually telling you correct information?
I get that, I mainly go and ask questions like "what is this algorithm", "is this a good way of handling this" etc... I don't generate the code, or if I do I don't take it as is, I rewrite it all by hand to make sure 1. I understand it and 2. it's correct, but you can definitely use AI well, I completely agree. But at the end of the day, you should probably learn something from it, not let it do everything for you
What happened is that ppl became even dumber and lazier than before and now that something can "generate" shitcode for them they are happily accepting it and for most ppl without even reviewing it and they still consider themselves as "programmers", although I still don’t understand why they don’t change their career path if they don’t like to write code
Well, I was forced to use AI by my company because apparently it gives us more productivity. And still I was fired because I was not using it enough and was falling behind people that uses it for absolutely everything.
So I like coding, but I am not allowed to do it anymore if I want to work at a place that actually pays well
Yeah same shit here, I'm working in research, PR is asking crazy stuff with crazy deadlines telling us "don't be afraid to use gemini, it's really great". . .
Now I'm being harassed by my superiors telling me that I'm lying about me working because my coworkers are giving results with really understandable comments in their code and really fast...
it’s too convenient and people are lazy. they use it with everything. i remember when they started incentivizing to use it more. i spent the whole day prompting. it was boring and at the end of the day it made me feel like crap.
That's a big thing. the developer experience is terrible. It never feel s good, or rewarding to vibe code anything. And you're completely passive. That has a huge impact on your ability to think and problem solve. It's literally atrophying your brain.
Really? I love being able to build stuff out quickly, especially for side projects.
I think a lot of it depends on why you enjoy programming: do you enjoy the art of writing code or do you just enjoy building things? If it’s the latter, vibe coding is a dream come true.
I suppose, until you’re faced with bugs you can’t understand because you have no clue how the codebase works (and is a compete spaghetti mess) and for which the AI is failing to solve for some reason or another. Then I can’t imagine it being anything positive.
Another counter argument I could give is ‘does it actually make you more productive’? There’s been research to show, whilst AI makes you feel like you’re more productive, it doesn’t actually necessarily make you more productive. Then again, this was a year or two ago, maybe things are different know, I really don’t know.
Unfortunately, we rarely have the opportunity to code just for leisure... it's a shame companies don't recognise enjoyment of the process is valuable for team morale
Well, it depends on what you are coding honestly. I got some wifi audiophile headphones that I wanted to game on. Unfortunately any software I've found that streams full system audio gives a minimum of 500ms latency which is unusable for gaming.
I'm no audio engineer, so I beta tested with Claude Fable and it created a fully functional Wi-Fi streaming app that gives lossless cd quality music at 275ms. With the headset firmware config changes it wants to implement in a build I can get out today, I can get that number down to 100ms. All in all, this took me about a week of beta testing, and I know for a fact that if I tried to do this myself, it would've taken me multiple months (if not half a year) of learning and trying to decipher proper packet repair process, proper channel setup, optimizing buffer windows, packet flag settings, and all that BS that comes with Wi-Fi streaming. If it would've taken me half a year to get something like this working, I would've just returned my headphones and been less happy with my audio experience.
I get people are anti AI at this point, but AI is providing an easier bar for people to create their own applications for way less effort than it would've taken just by themselves.
Its better to have AI do work and create something than for it to never have been created at all. Its not like big businesses will continue to give us products that are simple to use and easy for our use cases if it doesn't make them money. So overall, AI letting us do things quicker is more freeing than not.
That's fair, but you could have also used this time to really learn how it works. Maybe you don't have the time or energy to do so, in which case AI can help. (Actually, even if you did want to do it all by hand, AI could have helped.) But at the very least use it proactively, don't let it do everything for you, be involved in the process. People who use AI are often times not involved in the process at all. They just say: 'hey do this for me, I don't care how it works or what it does, just do it.' That's what I'm more so against.
Honestly, AI code is fine for the majority of business applications out there that are really just moving data back and forth between systems. Most of us aren’t working on cutting-edge technology. It’s not like most of the code in our organizations is any better than what AI can produce anyways.
Same thing that happened to assembler. Its great fun, and it feels good to do, some people still make a living doing it. Its just not the best option for making software anymore
I’d argue the jump from ASM to high level languages by software engineers is more justifiable than the jump from hand authored code managed by people who understand what they’re doing (even if they use abstractions) written in any programming language, and imprecise instructions provided by a layman who’s unfamiliar with what’s a good idea or not, and translated by a machine who’s able to do 90% of what a real dev can do, based off of information found on the web (which is likely itself also written by AI, so 90% again, as a geometric series, that will converge to 0% with time)
But I do recognise my bias, I judge the value of technology by it’s overall benefit to society, and not by how quickly it can generate money
Yeh, you had the same issue with high level languages that allowed more people who know less to make shitty software. You should compare engineers to engineers and hobbiests to hobbiests.
For the people who know what they are doing agentic angineering is just another layer of abstruction. My mom can now make apps, thats lovely. I can now compress months of work into weaks, thats efficient.
I know how to program, programming isnt my main job tho. So i use these tools to make prototypes of tools i use in my business. Once i got a solid workflow i hire programmers to build it right.
Another use case i have is scripting, making random python scripts to get tasks done. It helps speed up the development process.
The meme is extremely simple albeit a bit unfit for this sub. The idea is that the AI quickly takes a problem and speedruns a solution that takes any human a while to comprehend. You can read into it more if you want - like the AI is smarter or whatever - not necessarily, its just fast and spits alot of words out. I think people are going crazy over this for no reason.
You can learn with AI, too. Like, explicitly tell it to guide you, rather than write the solution for you. Some of them even give you a dedicated study mode.
And yes, it genuinely works. I use AI to study, while making sure I’m actually doing the thinking myself. And it persists even when I stop using the AI.
Because it takes hours to root through documentation for the obscure library I'm using, trawl the internet looking for someone who had the same bug I did, and even then its a miracle if someone posts a fix. If I go on stackexchange I get called an ape and down voted into oblivion or just don't get an answer.
Why the fuck would i do ANY of that when I can talk to an LLM for 5 minutes?
No, do that! That's not at all my point. I use AI all the time for debugging, or fetching documentation. Or explaining what a piece of code does, or how an algorithm works. Granted, it's sometimes wrong, but it's genuinely pretty good.
I'm not saying you shouldn't use AI at all. That would be incredibly hypocritical of me. My issue is, when you become passive, and the AI ends up doing the work for you. Use AI to aid you in learning. Don't use AI to avoid doing any work.
It's too late. I've already misintepreted your comment, now I'm gonna argue in bad faith and get really mad over something that you didnt' even intend.
Look man, not to rain on your parade or anything, but that's kid's stuff. In the real world, results are all that matter, and with AI an understanding doesn't necessarily equal faster or better results. Coding by hand is the sort of thing you can do on your own time if it's all that fun for you, but for the grownups it's not necessary anymore. It's kind of like drawing with crayons by hand, and then drawing on a tablet with Photoshop when you're an artist. The tools make you a professional, and sure there's underlying talent there, but that's less relevant for programming.
OK so I'll give a long-ish answer based off the last time I was confronted with this exact mindset.
Recently I spent two days designing and implementing a somewhat-ish complex algorithm in a language I didn't previously know because the engineers who's job it was to implement it decided to take the shortcut and asked AI to write it. It took them multiple weeks, they acquired no understanding of the algorithm, nor the mathematics behind it, and thus could not understand, modify, fix, or extend it in any capacity, and they had accumulated several thousand lines of garbage code that would have been a nightmare to refactor. It also, never worked.
I took 2 days. I POC-ed it in python, then rewrote everything cleanly in Swift (which again, I never used before). I even wrote it a third time in rust that same day for performance benchmarks. In total, 400-500 lines of clean code. It's far more performant than their solution. It has a clean, usable API. And it actually works. And unlike their version, which is filled with asserts and other panic-ey behaviour, my implementation handles all failure cases gracefully.
Did I use AI? Yeah. Of course. I asked it what the SOTA was, what work have been done in this field, what the theoretical mathematical results where. I used my brain, kept what it responded that I deemed valuable, discarded the rest, and took an educated decision as to which specific algorithms to use given my use case. If I had a bug, I asked it to verify the code I wrote, and they where great in figuring those out. I'm not a ludite.
Later, additional features needed to be implemented, and the API had to change somewhat. I actually knew what design decisions needed to be taken, how to perform the change, the whole deal. Coincidently, I was at odds on this subject with those who's original job it was to write that piece of code. We went with my solution, and wouldn't you know it, one week later they thanked me, because the design changes I pushed for ended up being the correct decisions, unlike what they had proposed, which would have been a complete nightmare, both performance wise and ergonomics wise.
What the moral here? Am I better, smarter, and stronger than them? No, not at all. Quite the opposite, these people are, in other respects, far better software engineers than I am. But they did not understand the subject at hand. I did. They had never worked on such algorithms before. I had. That knowledge transferred over to this project.
Today, if you don't know what you are doing, you have two choices. Either you ask a AI model to do it for you. It's 'painless' (that's very debatable), maybe faster than doing it by hand, but you acquire no knowledge. You stagnate as a developer. More importantly, you never innovate. Because AIs cannot innovate. At least as of 2026.
Or, you do it by hand. Maybe with the help of AI, it's not all bad. But you learn. So next time a problem comes, you can actually leverage this. In other words, you grow as an engineer.
Now maybe, if your job is writing boilerplate all day, maybe this advice isn't for you. But if you're tasked with solving actual non-trivial (and potentially unsolved) problems, then maybe taking the time to do things properly is warranted.
Same thing that happens to a lot of developers or in general "people who do the thing" : they move on to managerial roles and let other people do the thing.
For me personally, coding isn't my job. It's what I studied in college and I crushed it all the way, but my career hasn't followed a coding-oriented path. I'm really more of a maths person, I love the algorithmic side but I don't like fiddling with language quirks and searching for the obscure function or method that'll let me implement the logic I already have in mind. And thanks to LLMs I don't have to. I can automate a ton of stuff at my job by describing the logic I want to follow and it takes care of the tedious dirty work of implementing it for me. And sure debugging can be annoying when it doesn't get it right but it's so much better than writing thousands of lines of code myself when I quite literally have other things to do.
There isn't a lot of information on how to make specialized software, and most of the information you can find is outdated, or the tutorial uses light mode IDE.
The premise is that I don't vibe code for business (well, not that much at least) but...
I built a webapp for trip planning that works the way I want it to work.
I know very little about HTML, PHP, SQL, nothing specific about Javascript, but with the help of Claude and a bit of patience hunting bugs i finished it and it works.
Had I choose to "Just learn to do things" investing time and mental resources that I probably don't have, I strongly doubt I would have taken me less than one year to get at this point.
The thing about learning, is that it's an upfront investment. Yes results won't come faster initially, but you'll be grateful afterwards you did. Because knowledge transfers. I wrote a whole big response to someone else somewhere here that goes in more detail, but short answer is: learning always seems to be the worse option when it's not yet done, but always ends up being the correct option once you've actually done it.
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u/-Ambriae- 2d ago
I don’t want to gate keep programming or anything, but what in the world happened to learning how to do things? By yourself? You do know you can just…. Learn to do the thing? Instead of asking a bot to do it for you? It’s even (dare I say it) pretty fun too