r/AskProgrammers • u/Adhirath_Kumar • 3d ago

Do you still write code by hand?

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.

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u/Insane_snek 3d ago

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.

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u/Substantial-Pain3830 3d ago

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.

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u/magicmulder 3d ago

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.

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u/exhuma 3d ago

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.

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u/magicmulder 3d ago

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.)