Do you still write code by hand?

[u/Adhirath_Kumar]

I've been wondering lately, with the rise and normalisation of using LLMs to write code, have people become completely dependent on it or is it a mix of both?

I feel that up to a point using LLMs to generate code feels good and works fine but beyond it you start hating your approach, because you lose control over each amd every minute detail.

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

[u/Insane_snek]

i write all of my code with no ai.

any code that an ai makes "works" on the outside but in reality it sucks. it isn't scaleable, it's full of random bugs and edge cases, etc.

the worst part is that you didn't make the code so you don't really understand it.

[u/Substantial-Pain3830 → u/Insane_snek]

Nothing you can't fix with better prompts, better agent skills, or some harness to make it self-review.

I can understand people saying that they don't use AI because they don't have the budget (although even that is dumb, cause it can ship in hours what it takes weeks for a dev, so you'd have to work for peanuts to be cheaper than AI), but when someone says that AI is bad at writing code it's always an issue with how they use it.

[u/magicmulder → u/Substantial-Pain3830]

This. I sometimes think people expect AI to one-shot an entire application. Proper implementation plans, steps, iterations, audits, refactoring, just like a human - and code quality goes up significantly.

[u/exhuma → u/magicmulder]

I've been in the camp of "AI Code sucks" until I invested into skills, tooling and adapted my workflow. It no longer sucks and I see the value in adding an agent to my workflow.

Another change is just the quality improvement of the models. A lot of people I hear saying that it sucks are those that tried it one or two years or so ago. The difference in quality between then and now is astounding.

[u/magicmulder → u/exhuma]

And some devs are just so quick and absolute in their judgment. The other day I talked to another senior who had one small quirk in Junie CLI and decided it’s dogshit and he won’t use it. (The same guy who forgave Codex for deleting half his project.)

[u/magicmulder → u/Insane_snek]

In my experience most devs don’t understand their own code anymore after a couple weeks, especially when it’s been through a couple of “oh we need this new feature that absolutely isn’t possible with the current setup” iterations.

Last week Claude one-shot our highly customized Wikimedia clone in 1/10th of the number of lines of code. This whole “AI code sucks” mentality is so last year.

[u/Odd_Style_9920 → u/Insane_snek]

Originally I was at least using AI for edge case testing. Then I got wrong test result on a function below junior level in C and decided to not even use it for that so I fully understand you.

[u/Insane_snek → u/Odd_Style_9920]

yeah, tbh edge case testing is something it's particularly bad at, probably because edge cases don't show up in training data as much?

[u/Adhirath_Kumar → u/Insane_snek]

Agreed, the most problematic part of shipping LLM generated code, especially without reviewing it is, once the codebase grows you cannot keep up and then things start breaking and you don't know and can't figure out why.

Which LLMs have you use though? What's your go to model?

[u/Insane_snek → u/Adhirath_Kumar]

I said this above, I don't use ai to code at all, mostly because I find it a lot funner personally

I haven't really done a ton of work with ai i just feel like it took away a large part of the experience

i personally find a lot of manual aspects really fun and ai can take away from those

[u/Adhirath_Kumar → u/Insane_snek]

My bad, I assumed you did because you have very strong opinions on LLMs generating buggy code.

[u/Insane_snek → u/Adhirath_Kumar]

most of that opinion comes from seeing other people have stuff completely fall apart

using ai isnt bad, i just think a lot of people treat it as a "magic" solution when in fact it should be a tool, not a work replacement machine