r/learnprogramming • u/Alternative-Stuff149 • 12h ago
Topic Do people not write code anymore these days?
I've been working at my cousin's company for a month and a half. The business provides chatbot services, builds chatbots, CRM systems, landing pages, and everything else a company with a website needs. I work on the technical side and provide support. Since it’s a relatively new company, we already have several clients: an auto parts distributor, a real estate agency, a cosmetic clinic, and a restaurant. But so far, I haven’t written a single line of code—we do everything with the Cursor agent. I just give it instructions, and it takes care of the rest. The “most difficult” thing I’ve done is securing an e-commerce site with Cloudflare. I want to learn programming well, since I’m a computer science student (seventh semester), and I was taking a Java course, but at the same time, I want to know if it’s actually necessary to be a skilled programmer these days, or if most companies operate this way nowadays.
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u/jameyiguess 11h ago
It's such a difficult, "backwards" problem. AI can replace manual code writing, but only if you are already a skilled developer. You still have to architect, make decisions, guide the AI, constantly tune their directives, come up with workflows, understand the problems from a technical standpoint, catch the AIs doing insane shit or making incorrect assumptions about the business domain, etc etc.
A junior can't oversee all of that effectively, so the LLM is going to produce garbage.
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u/Odd_Put_1772 10h ago
Facts. AI can definitely produce results, but I find myself checking how it handles edge cases a lot, or saying something works when it never tested it. It’s not as bad as it was, but it can’t be left totally unchecked yet. And yes it still does insane shit.
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u/hooli-ceo 12h ago
People write code these days.
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u/theusualguy512 11h ago
Yup, pretty sure lots of people still write code by hand and also earn money by doing it. The current models are only trained on datasets that mostly include publically available code.
Any code base that is closed sourced and contains proprietary paywalled languages have people still writing code by hand because LLMs are unable to gain access to the business context and in some cases have sparse datasets on the languages and systems.
Most egregious example: Enterprise systems like Oracle and heavily legacy systems like DB2 on IBM z/OS, SAP ABAP proprietary language. Everything is behind a paywall and the knowledge of how these systems are set up in companies that use them is not publically available and often quite sensitive, so no publically available LLM model is good at these things.
Any language that is experimental and used within a few walled garden companies like Google. The publically available models are terrible at that and anyone that is damned at Google to work with tha strange language stack can only ever use Google-internal AI and/or write by hand.
Hardware languages like Verilog, C language subsets that are framed for specific proprietary chipsets that only niche industries use, PLC languages and stuff like this most LLMs are just not that useful because they lack system context which is hyperspecific and the information on these systems are often behind paywalls.
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u/StefanM3e46 11h ago
Exactly this.... I work in banking sector, specifically on ledgers... majority hosted on IBM mainframe or z/OS... LLMs can help you to some degree, Java here and there, COBOL not so much...so in reality its something that you would google from official docs etc...
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u/Ran4 9h ago
Yes, but in many places, not even remotely as much as they used to.
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u/hooli-ceo 9h ago
One could argue that’s simply the case for all compiled/transpiled languages as well…
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u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 11h ago
Our budgets were reduced so we write a lot by hand. Seems to really depend on where you work. The internet is an echo chamber so just because you see it everywhere online doesn’t mean it’s true IRL.
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u/Southern_Salary_2253 10h ago
We can all use an calculator.
Who would you hire to manage your companies finances? An accountant or a teenager who is "proficient in LLMs"?
Do I use AI to generate boiler plate, research, and help improve code? Can I explain my code line by line to my supervisor or a new hire? Also yes, and that is the important part.
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u/start_select 10h ago
It depends on the company and product and developers.
The 15+ year veterans at my work mostly only use LLMs because it’s no different than telling a junior what to do but 10x faster.
If it’s server development it’s 100% of the time because data access and APIs are generally pretty simple.
For web frontend it’s 80% of the time because sometimes UI is ambiguous and better built by humans.
For native mobile it’s 50/50 and depends on the developer. I figured out how to get Claude opus to write decent swift but it still makes mistakes in runnable code that are difficult to spot.
And when doing embedded C/C++ seniors only use it as a pair-programmer where they ask it questions because it tends to write incorrect code. When you have actual hard problems to manage like memory management or writing firmware for Bluetooth, it will write runnable code that accomplishes the task, but leaks memory and eventually crashes the board which is very bad.
Juniors use it to explain what to do next but write the code themselves. Mid-levels do a mixture of both.
Chat bots, crm integrations, landing pages, etc are all “easy” problems. It’s always the same.
Your e-commerce integration looks the same as 90% of other similar e-commerce integrations because there is nothing special about a shopping cart, inventory, invoices, payroll, etc. Literally every company has those things.
So the integrations aren’t anything special.
Landing pages are mostly static html, that’s easy.
Writing stable code for a new ESP32 variant and a custom Bluetooth stack or a custom sensor module is not easy. It might be something an LLM has never seen in its training data.
Writing stable code with memory management is not easy. You can’t follow the life cycle of all variables in a straight procedural line. The sequence of events before and after allocation and release might be different 20x a day.
Writing stable code with lots of async threading in a language like Swift is not easy. It might look correct and run, but do it wrong and you have the same memory leak problems or cause crashes because of cross-thread memory access.
Some problems are a lot harder than others. Some programmers never see those in their entire career. Some programmers do every other week.
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u/reflettage 11h ago
Being a “skilled programmer” is way more than knowing how to write code in a given language, even before AI. Good programs have architecture, and designing + maintaining good program architecture is very much a skill, and imo it’s a much harder one to learn. AI can write code, it sucks at architecture. We may be moving away from writing individual lines of code ourselves, but “programming” as a skill is not dead, it’s just changing.
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u/Hoshifuru 11h ago
As someone working with legacy systems, I would not say that code does not get written, sure, less is written and more is generated but there is still handwritten code.
From my experience, greenfielding new projects can go quite well using LLMs since the training data "knows" all the right patterns and idiomatic ways of doing almost any given task.
However, we work with systems that have been around for decades, with some of the Java projects being as old as Java itself, and for such projects with relatively little documentation and very project specific ways of doing things that have evolved over the years, it struggles.
Using higher end LLMs like Opus all the time helps since it is a bit better at "connecting the dots", but that quite expensive real fast so it is somewhat more efficient to point Sonnet to adjacent examples or a mini-PoC to demonstrate the business logic.
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u/Sarkonix 11h ago
You need to be able to understand it more than the ability to churn out thousands of lines of code these days.
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u/FireFearing 10h ago
people will rationalize any reason to say you dont need to learn programming anymore because its hard and takes tons of effort and time
people dont like effort and delayed gratification
its mostly wishful thinking. could it be true eventually? sure maybe, but claiming thats the case now is beyond a stretch and its just people making logical jumps to excuse themselves from putting in more effort than they want to put in
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u/viking_linuxbrother 8h ago
You can spend your entire life using a microwave/airfryer and eating what it can make. Other people still learned to cook and can use the whole kitchen. You can use AI to program and not know how to program. There is also a whole world of things you can know and do that don't require an AI chatbox and an AI IDE. Its a rich world where you get to learn and make things, you can still use tools but you aren't limited by them.
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u/TravelingSpermBanker 11h ago
I write code still since i know it and it’s quicker to type out and ask ai to do.
However there is tons of code I use now that i don’t have to write myself anymore
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u/Jwhodis 12h ago
A lot of code is still written by hand because AI cannot be trusted to make good code.
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u/StoneCypher 12h ago
a lot of code is still written by hand because even though it’s good enough for microsoft and google, local randos are still pretending to themselves that their superior skill, taste, and finesse are what’s going to carry the day
if only google had people at that skill level
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u/ResolutionThat248 11h ago
Why do Microsoft and Google still employ engineers then?
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u/le_fuzz 11h ago
To prompt Claude and feed Claude documents
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u/StoneCypher 9h ago
see, this is why you think real engineers don't use claude
because you don't understand how we use claude, and if we used it the way you did, it wouldn't make sense to employ us
which means you have two possibilities
- the world's largest engineering companies are wasting hundreds of billions of dollars a year on salary because they don't know as much as you do about programming, or
- you are mistaken about how senior engineers use claude
hm
which one of those sounds more likely
remember, we know that microsoft already made the choice "more claude or people," and chose people
maybe the sarcasm you learned in novice groups on social media doesn't actually map to a deep understanding of the profession?
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u/hylasmaliki 9h ago
And how do senior engineers use Claude?
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u/StoneCypher 9h ago
a great number of different ways.
but not just "derp i'm uploading files." that's a sad pastiche by a junior dev who's desperate to look down on people they've never met.
it's just "your world is dead, old man" energy from someone who just launched their 95th wrapper of claude to roast a website
my personal opinion is that the value of advice is intensely tied to the accomplishments of the speaker
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u/hylasmaliki 8h ago
Can you give some concrete examples how a senior might use Claude?
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u/StoneCypher 8h ago
... that's such a waste of time question to ask
what am i supposed to do, cherry pick a few examples of what individuals i know do and act like that's some kind of valuable goal?
i have the strong impression you're winding up for "if you can't summarize what an entire segment of programmers do in a few pithy sentences, then the character assasination against them was fact"
like ask yourself your own question. can you give some concrete examples of how a senior might use github?
sure you can. and it'd be a waste of everyone's time, and nothing of value would be communicated, because examples aren't relevant here. so why bother? oh, they're naming actions? oh. policy files? branch protection rules? an application? oh. like what is the point of a list like that at all?
what, do you want me to tell you things you already know, about /goal and /loop, about ultracode and ultrathink, about writing evidence driven agents, about how to manage testing, about how to write design systems, about how to write code standards? are you hoping that i can vomit some matt pocock at you? did you want to see my custom mcps? my custom plugins? are you hoping i will lead you to the manna in the promised land and just anoint you with some magic skills and claudefiles? managing your context, using the right engine for the job, getting dispatch right, the benefits of different models? how to write things to not trigger the nanny state filters? what are you even asking for?
the answer to the question you're asking isn't relevant by definition. the question has no meaningful answer. "ways senior people do things" is just a potpourri grab bag of observations.
the actual comment here was "no, of course google isn't paying people $400k to upload pdfs into claude and copy paste the result, why would you believe something like that"
and i got my answer.
because that's how the person speaking uses claude, and they cannot fathom that anything else exists at all.
it's like someone saying "chefs are just people who cut noodles with knives," and when someone laughingly says "no, you just don't know what they do," having a third party come along and tug at your pants leg and say over and over "yeah, but can you tell me how experienced chefs use knives? yeah, but can you tell me how experienced chefs use knives? yeah, but can you tell me how experienced chefs use knives?"
sure i could. i just don't want to. it's a waste of both of our time.
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u/ResolutionThat248 8h ago
It would have been faster to give one or two examples than that fucking novel you just posted.
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u/le_fuzz 9h ago
I use Claude every day, I literally do what I said above. I happen to know what prompts to give and what bits of documentation to feed Claude. Work at a FAANG, am grossly overpaid.
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u/StoneCypher 9h ago
well, you're very fortunate. that's not what it is for most of us.
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u/le_fuzz 9h ago
Obviously the more knowledge and skill you have as an engineer the more capable you’ll be using LLMs for coding. But on an anecdotal level barring a couple of “critical” codebases where engineers are not allowed to use LLMs everyone is heavily making use of Claude code.
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u/StoneCypher 8h ago
Obviously the more knowledge and skill you have as an engineer the more capable you’ll be using LLMs for coding
i think this is very much not true, actually.
i was dragging my heels about this class of tool for several years. i only got serious about them nine months ago. i once tried them in 2024 and had a very bad experience, because the tools were genuinely not ready yet and also i chose vendor poorly, leading me to believe the whole thing was a bunch of bunk.
when i circled back, the person who taught me to do this was two years on the job to my thirty.
But on an anecdotal level barring a couple of “critical” codebases where engineers are not allowed to use LLMs everyone is heavily making use of Claude code.
we agree
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u/le_fuzz 7h ago
I think the LLMs right now are amplifying engineers. If you’re not that great it allows you to do a lot of stuff but not that well. If you know what you’re doing it is multiplying your productivity.
I do very much believe that over time LLMs will eliminate a lot of software development roles.
Edit: regarding your experience these tools have gotten drastically better since 2024. Another time I have is to stick to the flagship models for whatever set of models you pick. E.g., sonnet is not up to the task whereas Opus with 1million token context window is good.
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u/StoneCypher 9h ago
"engineers use these tools"
"why do microsoft and google employ engineers then?
because you're the alternative
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u/TheSnailBear 12h ago
Yes. The industry has largely leveraged AI so that one no longer writes code manually. However, you cannot verify what the AI is actually doing if you don’t know your shit so you still do need to be a skilled programmer.
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u/lookForProject 11h ago
I think the issue is, that junior and medior software engineers, other then training, are more and more useless.
Most of the issues AI can not solve, can also not be solved by a junior.Futhermore, the places where juniors searched, are dying because of AI. So they are depending on AI more and more
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u/Vaprk263 9h ago
If only seniors are needed now, what happens in the future when the industry still needs seniors? How can we have seniors in the future if we do not hire juniors now?
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u/lookForProject 7h ago
Yeah that will become a problem. And when AI progresses perhaps one that AI can solve. But I think we are setting ourself up for a deadlock.
Another issue: there are plenty of problems, I can not tackle. But my colleague might.
When everyone is using AI, everyone won't be able to solve the same problem.1
u/hylasmaliki 11h ago
What issues can juniors not solve?
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u/brotherman555 11h ago
literally anything..
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u/hylasmaliki 11h ago
Name 3?
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u/jameyiguess 11h ago
I DEF wouldn't say "literally anything", juniors are great. But I wouldn't expect a junior to be able to debug and fix a DB n+1 issue, or write a complex data migration, or handle stuff with complicated business rules.
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u/hylasmaliki 9h ago
What would expect a junior to know or be able to do?
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u/jameyiguess 6h ago
Do the easiest tickets with guidance. Explore and learn. Pair with people. Give code reviews.
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u/lookForProject 11h ago
Depends on the junior. But most juniors, are a bit useless to begin with. And that is ok, most of us like to teach and train.
Mediors and talented juniors on the other hand, where able to solve a lot smaller issues, very fast. At most companies I worked at, they made up an decent portion of the workhorses.
That role is now being filled by AI.-3
u/hylasmaliki 11h ago
Can you name some problems they can't solve?
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u/lookForProject 11h ago
"Name problems", spoken like a true junior.
Problems might be abstract, but 99% of the issues you will come across, are very context specific.
The context being the language, the infrastructure, the frameworks, the domain.Sure, if you think about problems as "leetcode challenge", then loads of juniors and AI can blow me out of the water.
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u/hylasmaliki 10h ago
Why can't you give an example?
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u/StoneCypher 8h ago
every single post you've written has been a half sentence whiny question demanding other people do things for you. you did this to me too.
you're extremely annoying and you aren't delivering value.
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u/StoneCypher 8h ago
interacting with others in a productive way, figuring out what the correct solution to a problem is, knowing when something is satisfactory, security in general, behaving appropriately in professional groups, knowing how and when to compromise, not constantly asking questions in the fashion of a child, and tackling problems nobody else noticed yet, mostly.
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u/hylasmaliki 8h ago
Are you calling me a junior?
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u/EliSka93 7h ago
Are you not??
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u/hylasmaliki 7h ago
He was a bit passive aggressive with the way he said it
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u/StoneCypher 6h ago
"i thought that slinging insults to an honest answer to a question i didn't like wouldn't prove him right"
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u/elPappito 8h ago
Easy jobs - yes, don't think they write anything by hand anymore. Advanced logic, advanced software ? I think you can't completely replace human with ai chat bot.
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u/Trlckery 8h ago
Started my first dev job out of college in 2019. I’d describe myself as a hesitant adopter but in my day to day job it was 100% hand written until like 2023. Then started using copilot for code snippets and such but still writing the majority by hand. So far in 2026, with Claude, I have hardly written any code myself. I have more free time but it’s a lot less rewarding mentally. It has also created a lot of anxiety for where the industry is going and if/when this bubble is going to pop.
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u/ffrkAnonymous 11h ago
whats your token budget?
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u/Alternative-Stuff149 10h ago
I'm not really sure, I just know they pay $60 a month, and so far we haven't had any problems with exceeding or being close to the token limit.
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u/plantingles 11h ago
I am a 15 year vet, have not manually written code in over a year. I have shipped countless features and bug fixes to production to millions of users. Coding is dead. To the extent that old, slow moving companies are still writing code by hand, you can probably find those jobs in dwindling numbers over the next few years. But it won't last.
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u/neverbeendead 11h ago
I just got Claude CLI a few weeks ago and I feel a little lost. We literally just hired 2 new developers because my company is retarded and doesn't listen to the one developer they had. Now I spend two hours a day having Claude do all my work and the rest of the day I sit there bored waiting for someone to give me something to do. Any tips?
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u/start_select 10h ago
It depends on the code. For web dev sure it’s mostly dead. But sometimes it’s better for you to write the css or jsx or html.
For native/embedded code with memory management and other higher level concepts like threading and shared memory, LLMs write code that works until the memory leaks it creates crash the board or iPhone.
It depends on the use case.
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u/lookForProject 11h ago
Ah, the 1=n n is the truth coder.
For simple operations, AI will do just fine. For complex issues, large infrastructure, where most of the fun and income is found, AI isn't there yet.
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u/plantingles 2h ago
Nope, it is really there. It's all about harness engineering now. If you don't know what that is you are way behind.
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u/HouseOfDjango 11h ago
It's there.
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u/start_select 10h ago
Do you write embedded/native code like C/C++ for bare-metal? (No OS)
Or complex Swift or Rust?
Because even Fable writes code that will work for an hour before the memory leaks or threading issues it created crash the board.
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u/StoneCypher 8h ago
Do you write embedded/native code like C/C++ for bare-metal? (No OS)
i do
Because even Fable writes code that will work for an hour before the memory leaks or threading issues it created crash the board.
are you pretending you don't?
give fable valgrind
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u/start_select 8h ago
I'll tell my coworker to try that. I'm not on the embedded team. I only work on their stuff every couple of years. Its just the complaints I have heard.
The only platform I have problems with LLMs on are Swift for MacOS and iPhone. I successfully use Claude everywhere else. I successfully use it there too but it requires a much more complicated test harness and code-build-test-iterate loop than anything else.
My biggest complaint about that is that it writes incorrect but working code that most developers will never notice.
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u/HouseOfDjango 9h ago
Do you provide that information to it in the context when working in those areas?
If you just provide the task and expect to just do it correctly, that's what turns it into none working code. If you provide it a "playbook" of how to do The things you want the way you want, the quality and consistency of the code will increase.
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u/lookForProject 11h ago
Perhaps, but not yet for public. I use several AI providers, and it is very usefull. But if the tasks become too large, too niche or too complex, none of the solutions are up to the task.
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u/HouseOfDjango 9h ago
I disagree, if the task is to large then it can be broken down into subtask. If it's a niche or complex issue then you can provide it playbooks of how to handle those niche and complex issues the way you want to as well.
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u/lookForProject 7h ago
Writing code already is a small part of the job, the "provide playbook" is part of your job.
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u/Trlckery 8h ago
If a task is too large for AI then the task is also too large for a human.
FWIW I much preferred my job writing code before LLMs became one of our tools.
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u/lookForProject 7h ago
Yes, small tasks with a low mental stack are the way to go.
But the reality isn't like this. It is complex and dirty and too large.0
u/StoneCypher 8h ago
Perhaps, but not yet for public. I use several AI providers, and it is very usefull. But if the tasks become too large, too niche or too complex, none of the solutions are up to the task.
the poor workman blames the tool
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u/lookForProject 7h ago
No, the professional knows the tools limit. I love the hype, but there is a reason why the for-runners of AI, with the best AI in house, didn't fire all their software engineers yet.
They will, but not yet.
Do not be mad at this workman that he isn't replaced by a new fancy tool that easy.1
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u/StoneCypher 8h ago
For simple operations, AI will do just fine. For complex issues, large infrastructure, where most of the fun and income is found, AI isn't there yet.
google, microsoft, apple, and facebook, the largest software engineering orgs on earth, disagree.
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u/lookForProject 8h ago
They are cutting because they need the money to invest in their own AI tools.
They did fire around <10% of their workforce.So in other words, the companies on the forefront of AI, with AI that likely far outperforms what you and I can use, still didn't fire the bulk of their very expensive workforce.
Thanks for making the argument yourself.
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u/StoneCypher 4h ago
(sigh) that isn't even slightly related to what i said
normally i would say "and i think you know that" but i don't
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u/lookForProject 4h ago
You said the companies disagree. Ignore what they say, watch what they do.
They in fact did not fire 90% of their software engineers. Their technology is at least one generation better then what we can use, and they have unlimited tokens.If AI could replace their very expensive workforce, they would do this in a heartbeat.
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u/StoneCypher 4h ago
that isn't even slightly related to what i said
normally i would say "and i think you know that" but i don't
you seem to be ignoring what i'm saying, and treating this as a podium for you to screed against faang
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u/tangentstorm 9h ago
LLMs are getting better and better at generating good code. Personally, I tend to micromanage or even hand write code in some places, and just look at the results rather than the code in other places... I think it mostly just depends on whether the architecture of the system is important to me (something I consider an asset) or whether I'm just trying to get some arbitrary behavior out of the computer.
It's very cheap to just ask for prototypes now, for example, and not even worry about the implementation language or framework. You can often defer that decision arbitrarily, because it's cheap to port code now (if the implementation language even matters).
Whenever I do read the code, I find that it tends to be fairly good, no matter which model I'm using, though the harder the problem, the more likely it is to have mistakes. (Ex: basic web stuff is usually perfect... A sat solver I've been working on is full of subtle bugs.)
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u/GermOrean 9h ago
At our company we haven't written code by hand in awhile.
That's not saying I blindly tell Claude to go do something and send it. I plan, refine, and review the agents work, and we also still gatekeep our merges to main via peer review (and AI).
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u/decrementsf 9h ago
Fundamentals let you know if any of the output is reasonable. We are all technical reviewers now. Developing ability to write code the old fashioned way is what provides intuition to spot issues before they become brittle and explode into a scaled problem. It is a rule of professional work that everyone will be under pressure to produce more faster than reasonable. Whether you find a way to push back and check or not or do as many do and simply let it rip and hop to the next role before it explodes. We shall have fun in the near future.
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u/Y2K-enn 8h ago
I write my code for personal projects or side deals. but at work the majority of the heavy lifting I let agents do it. They laid off my team over the last year, and the company clearly doesn't care or appreciate the work I bring. so fuck it. let claude do it while I work on my personal shit to get out of there. That being said I do still review what is being done to make sure I at least understand what is happening.
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u/Redlight477 8h ago
It really depends on the project, its complexity and how much patience you have for prompting the LLM vs just writing it yourself
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u/dklogics 7h ago
If the app is performant, and reliable you’re good. I don’t know the answer to whether or not it’s worth it to “learn to code” anymore. If I were you I’d hedge my bets and try my best to understand what the agent is outputting (8+ hrs per day of looking at code, you’ll start to absorb it whether agent writes it or not), but don’t go too slow because there are others out there who could code circles around you, or your agency, and make the same product for less cost by optimizing speed.
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u/Pale_Height_1251 7h ago
Most, but not all of the programmers I know are now using AI for basically everything.
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u/Quixotic7 7h ago
While most are going to use LLMs for coding now a days it will give you a leg up if you can understand and write code yourself. It’s not a waste to learn.
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u/XandertheGrander 7h ago
I've been a full time developer for about a year and a half now. Even at my company it's split between handing everything off to the AI and writing everything by hand (generally the older developers are less trustworthy of AI and the younger developers like me use it often because its the tool we entered into the workforce with). The main thing I've noticed, is that writing code is not the barrier to entry anymore, but you still must understand the code and be able to zoom out and see the systems you are building and how they interact with each other. Personally, I have mixed feelings on AI tools, but I can't deny that they are incredibly helpful, however I still strive to learn everyday to become better because even with AI you will still need to provide directions/specifications/changes when it implements something differently than you intended.
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u/Limp-Cicada-9502 3h ago
If you really want to understand how software is written forget about using AI. You will not learn anything other then how to get the AI to write what you want. Right now AI is good for writing things that have been done over and over again like cookie cutter websites. Doesn't take any skill to do that because you are not making anything new.
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u/groversnoopyfozzie 2h ago
I have been using AI pretty heavily the past few months. It writes tone of code for me, but I spend a big amount of time making sure it is doing what I’m asking it to do.
I recently had to build a day for a very specific purpose. It was able to to look at the general architecture of the dags in our infrastructure and came ups with a pretty good template.
Since then I have spent a couple days tweaking SQL queries, creating reevaluating how it would scale. Putting sensors and dependencies with other jobs. Etc etc.
I am probably never going to code some new algorithm, but everytime you ask ai to do something it makes like 20 decisions fly on the wall you that you need to understand and question.
So it’s an amazing tool, but you also have to keep your eye on it.
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u/vextryyn 2h ago
I personally would recommend reviewing the code, the number of backdoors ai leaves open is still too high to trust it and when ai reviews ai there is a good chance it wont pick up actual issues
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u/arkt8 1h ago edited 1h ago
It is too early to you think about... The more you learn and write performant and or critical and or reusable code...the less you will trust AI.
I tried to ask AI to write "not serious" code some times (to understand some implementation alternatives). Every time it wrote bloated or with perf/sec gaps. Tried to refine but context start to be forgotten (?) and it only worsened. Then tried again and again refining the prompt from zero... well other points emerged and so on...
My point is: I knew what I wanted and knew how to do it... and Ai didnt produced acceptable code. If I didnt knew it could be passed as satisfatory.
There is a quote from Alice in Wonderland very related to most amazed people using AI nowadays:
If you don't know where you want to go, then it doesn't matter which path you take.
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u/adumbCoder 1h ago
too early to tell. yes it's possible to truly not have to write a line of code, but that takes lots of effort and good systems and redundancies.
the industry is still in a transition period and it's unclear how this transition ends. what we do know is we'll be utilizing a lot more AI and writing by hand a lot less. how much is still unclear
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u/Humble_Anxiety_9534 19m ago
when the bubble pops and tokens are £100 a pop. you or some guy in India will be very busy.
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u/Agreeable-Cell4007 10h ago
As a hobby, I learn Rust by hand and low-level system programming.
Professionally, I haven't written a single line since June 2025, and anyone who still does is a bit delulu imo.
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u/junglebunglerumble 10h ago
There's still people in this thread claiming "AI writes shit code" - i can only assume either they've had their head in the sand since 2023 when that was true, or they just don't want to admit reality
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u/Boot_Burner 9h ago
I’m in an introductory C++ course right now and the professor is vehemently anti-AI. I’m not saying I don’t want to learn the basics of coding and debugging but when I got my undergrad they told us we’d have to memorize all kinds of things in the event we “didn’t have a calculator”. I guess they didn’t realize we’d all have super computers in our pockets within a decade.
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u/klarkens 11h ago
Truth be told I haven't written code by hand for a year or so. I used to at least manually "correct" the output of the AI when I disagreed with it, now I don't even do that anymore as it happens quite rarely. I still think you should learn how to program so you understand the output of the AI and just for knowledge's sake. But im afraid the day of actually typing out code is gone
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u/Any-Range9932 11h ago
I just review and just reprompt if I want a different approach or need to update a design plan
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u/ResolutionThat248 10h ago
This sub is going to be extremely biased in favour of AI, because it's primarily for newcomers who cannot be arsed to learn properly and have convinced themselves that all the big boys are doing nothing but sit around prompting claude.
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u/LuckyPichu 10h ago
I still write code for my own projects and stuff that's too technical for the frontier models to handle faster than I can(despite the hype this still very, very much exists). Though generally I dictate changes to an agent through some sort of harness. I'd say that being able to steer an agent and correct it as it designs a piece of software incrementally with you is equivalent to writing the change yourself in terms of required skills. I'd still learn programming by writing code by hand though, as it is probably superior from a recall standpoint. I would also just get good at using agents for productivity, too.
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u/hylasmaliki 9h ago
What type of harness we talking about
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u/LuckyPichu 7h ago
I like Pi and Claude Code. I'll use the hunk diff viewer and its associated skill to have agents write their comments and explanations, and then approve/reject diffs by directing changes as I go.
Some people have more advanced setups, but I like to keep things generally pretty simple.
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u/hylasmaliki 7h ago
Thanks. What are more advanced set ups?
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u/LuckyPichu 4h ago
Some people run sandbox containers with hermes or OpenClaw to give their agents a higher level of autonomy while managing risk. Regardless of setup, OpenRouter is a solid tool to pick and choose models while maintaining the same harness.
In my experience advanced setups aren't really all that necessary to get most of the mileage you'd want out of the models.
If you're just starting out don't go off the deep end. Codex, Claude Code and Pi are all solid bases. From there, look into how skills and MCP servers/clients work.
I recommend keeping it simple and figuring out how you like writing specs and incrementally programming with models. A complex setup will just add overhead with very little learning value and make itself an obstacle to the goal of learning how to program with LLMs, learning to use LLMs, and learning to program in general.
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u/fuzz3289 8h ago
It’s necessary even if it doesn’t look the same. Think of it like this - no one really writes assembly anymore, and fewer people write C every day.
Software engineering has always been about layering abstractions to produce software more quickly.
You can think of LLMs as just non-deterministic toolchains, you can use them to produce code, perform static analysis, where instead of a high level language like Python you work in Contracts, Engineering Specs, sequence diagrams, etc.
You need to be able to read and understand the output though because they are non-deterministic, they fail often and you need to know when they do.
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u/Icy-Importance2143 2h ago
AI is developing rapidly, and I believe that in the near future, a single command will be enough to complete our tasks. I'm also a complete novice in programming, but I'm gradually turning my ideas into web pages using Codex. I believe that in the future, technology will become less valuable, while good ideas will become increasingly scarce.
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u/LuckyGamble 6h ago
Yup, the industry has moved on from manual coding and alot of people are coping, but the fact is AI is faster and better than the vast majority of human programmers.
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u/MATTDAYYYYMON 6h ago
I think it really depends. Some places they even have their own ai to generate code so there’s less risk of data leaks but in truth I have a few friends that said they had to relearn how to do a couple things because they had atrophied their coding skill by having AI do a lot of the work for them, for a long while. Some jobs you really don’t want ai doing all the work like high security fields or very high privileged banking positions where all their access could be a massive liability if ai was maliciously utilized.
The truth so far as I can tell is that it’s just proving more and more that we need to be aware of how to code in the event AI isn’t an option or in a highly secured field but at the same time learn how to optimize it if it is utilized, not just giving it all your work but instead having it do the menial low level stuff that’s just boring so you can get your work done more efficiently.
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u/thesounddefense 6h ago
I still write plenty of code myself as a software engineer. There are plenty of small tasks where it's frankly faster for me to just do it myself than figure out how to correctly prompt the agent. There are also some very complex files I work with that I do not trust an agent to handle correctly. In general, I never tell an agent to do something unless I've learned how to do it myself. And I also code in my spare time without ever using AI.
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u/FilmWeasle 6h ago
I've run into similar problems when writing algorithms. The AI needs guidance for every last detail, and it winds up taking more time and more keystrokes to write prompts for the AI than it does to just write the code.
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u/got_to_laugh 6h ago
It's like someone in the 2000s telling you that no one is going to be using pens and paper due to laptops and phones.
In 2026, I had to write using pen/paper for the first time in years yesterday and my handwriting was soooo bad. All I really use it for is signatures.
So the 2000s guy was right... Eventually... 20 years later. Between then and now I have done a lot of handwriting though, it just tailed off.
Are BIC pens and Parker pens still in business? Yes. I wouldn't want to have shares in them tho.
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u/Acceptable_Lab_7196 11h ago
I'd hate to see whatever code you people are selling. AI writes shit code.
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u/Boot_Burner 9h ago
The code is only as bad as the prompt, which is entirely based on the person who wrote it.
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u/junglebunglerumble 10h ago
Still repeating the same points from 2023 I see - AI doesn't "write shit code" any more than "humans write shit code" - sometimes it does, sometimes it doesnt, just like with humans. AI has moved on to the point that you just seem daft with blanket statements that AI always writes shit code as that clearly isn't true anymore
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u/Substantial_Job_2068 11h ago
Web dev shops use AI. Serious companies use it sparingly or not at all.
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u/Trlckery 8h ago
What the hell are you talking about?
EVERY “serious” company is leveraging Claude right now and the majority of them are more or less forcing devs to use the tool through token usage tracking.1
u/Substantial_Job_2068 7h ago
Forgot to add an asterisk for companies that have an interest in burning tokens to portray that they are more efficient now. But that also falls in the non serious company folder.
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u/No-Slice-5926 7h ago
Haven't written code in awhile, currently building a ai os/is system and it's working beautifully
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u/hrm 11h ago
Talking to my friends in the industry it is everything from ”don’t even look at code anymore” to ”we don’t trust ai for anything”. It is very early days yet.
But everyone of them and their collegues can write advanced software by hand if they have to.