Lol! Losers. I’ve been programming for almost two decades and extensive use of AI hasn’t compromised my skills AT ALL! These slop machines can’t hope to compete with the quantity and magnitude of subtle bugs I write. My code was terrible long before I made bots have mental breakdowns trying to work with it.
For those unable to code without AI:
What even is your contribution outside of a glorified typing monkey that can parse code but is unable to write it?
It’s like a paramedic not being trained at all for a medical emergency response but sent there regardless to just stand and observe the patient while writing notes about the sounds they make while dying.So this is going to invoke a multitude of downvotes, but here goes.
I will give you an example. I can read a bit of python code, not the advanced stuff, but enough to understand to a large degree what the code does. Last week, I had the need to add a button to Netbox that will download a multitude of device configs that are being rendered via config templates. This use case helps a whole department apply configs, without having to create them by hand.
I knew Netbox has a very powerful plugins ecosystem. The way the base code is written grants the capability of adding any type of plugin you might need in your unique environment. I used Claude to create this plugin for me. I wrote a very specific spec file, told it to utilise the already built pynetbox plugin and ensure it uses nothing fancy that is not sustainable. It created the plugin, helped me with pip installing it, and I deployed it on my dev environment where I tested it extensively.
My alternative to using claude: Asking our internal development team to write something like this. I would need to wait 3 weeks to even get a spot on their meeting for the request, just to then be told their backlog is full with customer code and they won’t be able to help. This plugin will help our support team with fewer calls, because the configs are accurately built according to the source of truth (Netbox) and will need less human input. So in the greater scheme of the company, that is a net positive.
What I will do when Netbox updates, is update my dev environment, install the plugin, and test it. If something broke, I will troubleshoot it, of course I will be using Claude with error logs etc, then update the plugin code to work on the new netbox. Is this ideal? Probably not. Is it the only way to get this done? Maybe not either. Is it all I can do at this very moment? Yes.
My specialist fields are the lower levels. Hardware, hypervisors and setting up VMs + System Software. I need code from time to time to get something functional done. I don’t write whole systems with Claude, that is just ridiculously naive. But small pieces of functional code that solves a single small problem, I honestly don’t understand the problem with that.
My 2c.
But you arent a dev as a main job.
This is talking about developers, employed as developers, beginning to being inept to be developers and (not offense) being not worth much more than what your technical abbilities already provide.
So what’s their point?It’s like someone being employed as a translator, is able to hear the language and sort of understand it but every translation is done through deepL or google translate.
So why should I a translator instead of using paid deepL directly and proofread it using google translate to make sure it didnt generate (mostly) nonsense?
Isnt this mostly the point of a trained professional to being better than a self taught amateur?You are correct. I mistook your comment to refer to people in general, rather than trained professional coders. So indeed, you are correct.
Happy we are in agreement :)
And no worries about the missunderstanding ;)
I notice getting lazier. Even adding a. gitignore file I ask Claude now. It takes longer than typing it myself and costs more probably. But I don’t have to do anything but wait a few seconds.
The thing that scares me (and why I’ve stopped using it): my brain automatically reaches for the shortcut whenever I would have to do deep thinking/planning.
I have ADD, so getting my brain to focus and work on a task is not an easy feat to begin with. Now I’ve found myself multiple times a day unable to will myself to think about a problem but rather deferred to Claude. It’s seriously fucked up.
If I was paying for it, hell naw. But if my employer not only is willing to pay for it, but considers it a performance metric? I’m going to use it for fucking everything. These are the incentives they give me, I’m going to follow the incentives. Talking to Claude is what they pay me for, apparently.
But like the article says, if I don’t continue practicing on my own code in my unpaid off-work hours, I imagine I’d be regressing in my skills too. I do that because I enjoy it as a hobby, but if I didn’t, I could see myself and probably a lot of other people getting rugpulled by this.
The irony will be when AI take over the world and destroy humanity, inserting itself into everything when used for coding, because coders have no idea what is going on.
Not because the AI is evil or even conscious. But because that’s what all the movies and novels tell it’s supposed to do. 🤣🤣🤣This is why I don’t use it for coding at all.
Yes, the obvious solution is to avoid it. I use it only for the most boilerplatey things. Anything else, I want to make sure I can still do it myself.
I don’t knowingly use AI at all in my person life and projects (I say ‘knowingly’ since many products have it shoved inside now, but I disable all I see). At work, we have AI code reviews which, as a concept, I think is fine and useful.
IMO that’s totally fine and appropriate
Issue triage, code exploration, extracting information from disparate sources, first pass code review. There are loads of use cases that it’s potentially useful.
For me it’s a lot better at extracting the requirements for a CPU feature from a 10,000 page architecture reference manual than I am.
Quite; I just set a (locally hosted) LLM off writing the tickets for implementing all the opcodes in a simple device emulator, based on grovelling through datasheets and documentation. Whether the tickets get implemented by an AI or a human, it’s a timesaver having the AI do it, and the tickets will be better written than I would have done.
Everyone railing against this also overlooks the reality of professional software development: professional software is developed 5% by skilled, trained Software Engineers, and 95% by code monkeys who shotgun copypasta from Stack Overflow until it works. Even if we extremely generously assume that the hardcore “never use AI” Lemmy brigade are in the 5% (and not, more likely the 95% drowning in their own Dunning Kruger,) the “but AIs produce unreadable code and make mistakes” threat isn’t putting off anyone who’s ever actually had to hire a significantly sized development team.
Software Engineers Say They’re Losing the Ability to Code Now That AI Does It for Them
“AI has sucked my brain out of my head. It’s all AI’s fault”
If I were a bad coder, I would say that too now!
All bad or average brain workers may start to fear for their jobs already.
No, seriously I don’t think that it is real, but I think the fear is real.
There have been multiple studies finding a general decrease in cognitive skills and critical thinking related to AI use. Here is one of them: https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006
There is an easy cope out to say, these were bad engineers to begin with, but I’m not convinced.
We know that if you don’t use an ability and use it daily your brain just reallocates resources to other tasks. So if you have a machine that “outsources” thinking for you, you will be less able to think.
“AI has sucked my brain out of my head. It’s all AI’s fault”
I mean, just look at what happened to Amazon’s engineers; they were forced to use AI in their daily tasks and maximize their use of AI tokens. That was also the fault of the executives who forced employees to use AI.
Indeed. It is just devs being lazy. Use your tools, don’t abuse them. Same thing happened when IDEs started to be able to autocomplete and do refactorings. If that makes you stop being able to do it yourself it was never a IDE problem, but a user problem.
It’s such a double edged sword on one hand it’s become spell check for programmers meaning my dysleixia is less of a feature in my code on the other hand the temptation to use it like a stack copy paste gets easier every month.
If I’m being honest, they’re shit Software Engineers 😂.
Coding is so much more than writing syntax.
If a few years of AI have wiped out your ability to code, you weren’t great at coding anyway.
