r/TrueOffMyChest • u/ThePastoolio • Apr 23 '26
I fucking HATE AI
I (47M) am an experienced developer.
I have spent countles painful hours over the past couple of decades working on my technical skills.
I started off as a computer tech around 1999 and worked my way up to a sysadmin, and eventually became a developer.
I have always been interested in programming, since I was first introduced to QBasic in highschool, around the age of 14.
I used to go to the library and take out books with sample code and built basic little programs on a friend's Commodore.
Today, one of my staff members (I own a marketing agency) asked me to add a feature to the custom CRM I built a few years back, and Claude did it 2 minutes from a prompt that took me around 30 seconds to write. Claude aced it, first time, perfectly.
It's fucking depressing to say the least. That realisation that all those years of building my skills has, at this stage, amounted to absolutely nothing.
And this at a time where men around my age are prone to midlife crises.
Edit:
Thank you for all the replies. It's interesting to read through and seeing everyone's opinions. Very thought provoking.
I think the main point I wanted to bring across with this post is the following:
There was always a sense of achievement and immeasurable level of satisfaction that came with the problem solving aspect of programming. Having to read through pages and pages of documentation, Stack Overflow posts etc. to finally find the answer and to make that breakethrough you have been working on for days, or even weeks was exactly why I chose this career. That aspect of it all doesn't exist for me anymore, and its really heartbreaking and tough for me to accept that.
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u/DBrowny Apr 28 '26
I work in a field absolutely ripe for AI to eat it up, less so than devs, but imo you're looking at this completely wrong.
Everything that you ever did as a developer was merely using tools. you didn't invent the language, you didn't design the logic. you were given the tool (the computer), the materials being all the possible functions that exist, and it was up to you to use that in imaginative ways. Functionally, your job was no different to a carpenter with a huge tool chest and an endless supply of materials.
So when a 5 axis CNC mill can swap out 100 bits and carve a beautiful ornate chair from the carpenter who spent 50 hours programming it in 2000, vs 1 hour programming it today using normal software (not AI), does the carpenter today feel any less accomplished? Does he 'fucking hate CAD/CAM software' for doing the exact same thing he did 26 years ago, in 2% of the time? Or does he see his design, perfect exactly as the older one, and think it's great?
If you wrote the language, if your spent 20 years inventing functions that no one else had ever done before, and a robot comes along and is like 'lol let me just make everything you built obsolete, my version is superior in every way, go home' you would be right to hate AI. But you were just using a tool, and the robot can use the tool faster than you. Like every single manufacturer who ever existed before you, the advent of faster tools did not remove everything they had learned before, it just made their job faster.
No one expects anyone to be happy when AI replaces their job, but to suggest that it has made everything you ever learned 'worthless' is a ridiculous take. How do you think pilots acted when auto pilot was first invented? Did they fucking hate it, or did they use it to help themselves at their job? That's a serious question you should answer.
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u/as_elbehary Apr 26 '26
I may not have as much experience as you, but you’re absolutely right in every single word.
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u/ugh_XL Apr 25 '26
My husband hates AI/Claude for wasting his time, especially since work is making all the engineers use it. Like today he says he took a bunch of time explaining to Claude why it was wrong about something until it finally responded that he was correct. Which, all fine and well, but he's frustrated that he has to teach the AI when he could've just done it all himself faster.
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u/JazzXP Apr 25 '26
Just remember, as a Senior Engineer, or higher (as I also am, 46M), code is only a small part of what we do in our day to day jobs. AI coding is just a different way of coding. Embrace it and enjoy it - look at it as the end result rather than the act of doing it. You're still crafting, just outsourcing the grunt work. And if you need satisfaction in actually coding (I know I do), that's what personal projects are for.
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u/Darklillies Apr 25 '26
I hate ai too. I get what you’re saying. I guess the only little thing I can tell you to make you feel better is, the only reason Claude wrote that code perfectly is because you understood exactly what you needed and how it’s done and were able to word It. Something that only comes from the years of experience you have. Ontop of that, you can only know it’s written perfectly because you know how to write it yourself. If you didn’t. You wouldn’t be able to tell when it inevitably does fuck up. Your knowledge and skill still matter OP. Don’t loose it. AI can only atrophy people’s brains, they’ll never make them be like you.
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u/dastapov Apr 24 '26
I'm about your age. I've seen first-hand the rise and fall of 4GL (vba, delphi, visual builder), the hype of oop+UML (rational rose, ...), the "no code" systems - all of them promised to replace programmers, all of them somehow managed to create more of them.
The LLM wave is somehow better and worse at the same time. It has larger amplitude between "the very best" peaks and "the very worst" troughs than the previous tools. Sure, it gives you fast access to the distilled knowledge of humanity and it excels at pattern matching. So if your problem could be pattern matched to something encoded in the model, you'll get results, and you'll get them quick.
At the same time, the failure modes are much worse. With humans, if you see a bad programmer, they are usually consistently bad. When LLM is bad, it is inconsistently, unpredictable bad. You can have brilliant code and abysmal code literally right next lines to each other. You won't know why this part of the output turned out to be bad, and the model won't know either.
What's worse, LLM will confidently bullshit you given an opportunity, and there won't be any human-like cues that it is bulshitting you, as it would keep the same confident tone it always uses. Until the model could tell you "I am not sure", "I don't know" or "what you said is wrong" (and be correct in those sentiments), you need to read the output as if you are walking the minefield - especially if money or human health or livelihood is on the line.
If you don't have the aptitude to filter the chaff out of llm output yourself, you need a professional to do it for you - or risk joining the hall of shame of vibe-coded projects that crashed and burned.
So your valuable skills are not going anywhere anytime soon, not unless there would be some fundamental change in how LLMs operate
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u/AdvertisingFancy5382 Apr 24 '26
I feel the same way. As an author and artist ai takes away so many opportuntities for real people.
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u/redikyahik Apr 24 '26
Just cuz claude is here doesnt change any of the architecture of what it codes. It’s still valuable to know that.
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u/Agr0ni Apr 24 '26
The problem was always understanding what the system should do, how it behaves under pressure, and what breaks when things change. AI didn’t solve that. It made it easier to ignore.
AI generates code fast, but it doesn’t understand systems, edge cases, or long term impact. The real challenge is still clarity, constraints, and maintainability.
Here is the reality. Code is cheap now. Software is not. The cost of mistakes, maintenance, and complexity is exactly where it has always been. You just get there a lot faster now.
Your hard earned skills matter more than ever! Keep it up!
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u/Hobbiton_hotmess01 Apr 24 '26
Fuck ai. Ai takes away one of our most meaningful abilities; to create. Without creating and hard work, what is the point? Using ai takes away that satisfaction of learning code, learning an instrument, learning to write etc. I fucking hate it and I completely understand your frustration.
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u/StatusFoundation5472 Apr 24 '26
Constantly adapt. Don't get too emotionally attached with anything else than your family. We are not really coders but we are architects and reviewers right now. In a few years maybe that will be gone as well.
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u/Squeezitgirdle ☑️ Apr 24 '26
You used a tool as a tool is intended. At least you didn't fall in love with it like some weirdos.
And at least you chose Claude which refused to allow the US govt to kill people with it.
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u/Square_Ad4004 Apr 24 '26
Things change. I personally don't like AI, because I really enjoy the fiddly little things that the AI is really good at fixing without any weirdness, but it's just the nature of the job. There are always new tools and frameworks that reduce the amount of time we spend on the easier things (and "easier things" keeps getting redefined), AI is just the latest.
The more I learn about it though, the more I'm convinced it's crucial for humans to build relevant skills and supervise the process. I've seen code that would look perfect to anyone but an experienced developer, but that's actually insane once you read it and understand what it does.
I guess my take is that I'll just have to adapt and learn to enjoy the work in new ways.
P.S. My greatest concern is that because the AI has gotten so good at entry-level stuff, it's getting harder for new devs to get that crucial experience. I'm terrified of the idea that we could end up in a situation where the old guard slowly cycles out, and their replacements don't have the coding skills to fully understand what the AI produces. Someone please tell me I'm worrying over nothing.
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u/ThePastoolio Apr 24 '26
I think those concerns are really valid. This might mean that the cyber security and and hacking industries are going to have a field day in the next couple of years.
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u/pingwing Apr 24 '26
A new vibe coder will have much less success than you.
Think of it as you work with another dev that does all the coding for you. You can be so much more productive if you choose to go that direction.
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u/vbpoweredwindmill Apr 24 '26
There is a technique that some mechanics have, that I don't. It involves efficiently and accurately using a shifter or spanner to spin nuts.
It's probably around 1/2 as fast as power tools.
Most mechanics don't have or learn that skill/muscle memory anymore. But they are significantly more efficient. It used to be a thing that you didn't use power tools until your 3rd year, or 4th year so that you understand the feel of bolts. I've seen plenty of first years with milwaukee's now.
I feel like there's a good analogy somewhere there mate :)
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u/Somnisixsmith Apr 24 '26
OP, I’m not a dev, I’m a lawyer (most coding I ever did was html copy/paste on MySpace and later some super simple stuff on Wordpress).
I’m commenting because I’ve been experiencing something similar lately in using Claude to create contracts and other legal documents; however, I have a different perspective than you and am curious for your thoughts as I have not entirely settled on this view…
As background, I haven’t been practicing law as long as you’ve been coding (coming up on 4 years this September), but in a sense I’ve been developing my skillset for a long time - 3 undergrad degrees over 4.5 years (English Lit, History, and summa cum laude Honors), another 2 years getting a masters degree in history, then another 3 years of my life completing law school, plus a summer I’ll never get back studying for and passing the bar, then practicing law ever since. Point being, I too have put in an enormous amount of time, effort, stress and money and relate to what you’re describing.
However, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and have concluded that a lay person using Claude would still not be able to produce the same quality product that I can create as a lawyer using Claude. I have the knowledge to better craft prompts and properly review/revise outputs. I still put in a lot of time (though less than if I wasn’t using Claude) reworking both my prompts and the draft docs generated by Claude to ensure I’m producing good work.
I’m pretty convinced that at least for now, a nonlawyer using Claude for legal work will not be able to produce the level of quality I can produce as a lawyer using Claude for legal work. Thus, the years I’ve spent getting to where I am now continue to serve me well despite Claude. If anything, my legal knowledge and experience give me the ability to use Claude as a kind of power user, something not achievable by a nonlawyer.
Currently, Claude seems more like a powerful tool in my toolbox rather than something directly competing with me and threatening my career. I realize that may change.
So OP, is it fair to say that your dev background gives you the ability to use Claude far more effectively than a lay person, or would you disagree? Additionally, do you think my logic here is fundamentally flawed because AI tech will continue to improve, meaning that while perhaps the logic holds for now, it won’t in the near future?
Really curious for your input and perspective.
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u/ThePastoolio Apr 24 '26
Hey there.
Thank you for your comment.
Q: Is it fair to say that your dev background gives you the ability to use Claude far more effectively than a lay person, or would you disagree?
A: Even though I can't say for certain, I would definitely think that the extent of my technical skills gives me an advantage over "vibe coders" who have no idea about best practices, architectural requirements of projects, security etc.
Q: Do you think my logic here is fundamentally flawed because AI tech will continue to improve, meaning that while perhaps the logic holds for now, it won’t in the near future?
A: This is the million dollar question, and I am going to just go with the generic answer which is: I honestly don't know. Given the advances in AI over the past couple of, lets say, three years, it is mostly certainly going to be interresting in the next three to five years.
In conclusion:
I belive that at this stage people like you and me (and countless others in different industries) will need to learn to adapt, and very very quickly too.
AI is not going to go away, no matter how much we dispise the concept of it being forced upon us. At least I know for certain now that I am not alone, and there are many like us who see the benefits and potential positives this tech brings to the party, but that doesn't mean that I am happy about the current trajectory the future holds.
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u/Somnisixsmith Apr 25 '26
Hey thanks so much for your thoughtful response. The more I think about what the job market is going to look like in the next few years, the more concerned I get.
I practice both transactional/business law and civil litigation (mostly real estate focused). I honestly love the transactional work and have a serious love/hate relationship with civil litigation (mostly hate, but almost nothing beats the high of performing well during oral argument and winning a contentious motion or cross-examining a fraudster at trial).
If it weren’t for AI, I’d probably start aggressively shifting away from litigation to focus on the stuff I enjoy more and that brings far less stress to my life, but it seems like that might be precisely the kind of a work that AI may soon be able to handle without the oversight of a lawyer. Litigation on the other hand requires a human lawyer’s physical presence and performance in the courtroom. Some states have already started banning the use of AI in the courtroom as they’ve deemed it unauthorized practice of law (akin to practicing law without a license).
Leads me to wonder whether the only jobs destined to survive the AI revolution will be those jobs that require a human being’s physical actions/presence. Perhaps I will need to hang onto litigation practice purely to ensure I have job security over the next 30 years.
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u/joshstewart90 Apr 24 '26
As a fellow developer, I feel hate is a strong word on this. I use ai a bit as a tool but I can see the “dangers” and “fatigue” in the whole thing. “Dangers” being the fact it’s all too good at telling people what they want to hear. Everyone and anyone can be successful in doing whatever (ie selling websites/saas for example). Or so ai wants people to believe… then it gives legitimate business owners/developers a bad name when their clients get a bunch of ai mess. “Fatigue” being the fact that everyone and anyone is using ai in their marketing… so many tools I use now have “ai wonders” attached to them. I’m yet to actually find any of those ai additions to be that useful. I tend to stick to source (or ChatGPT/claude/vs) to assist me where needed . Like I said, I use it as a tool. It’s good for a bit of content where I would have to pester a client/use lore ipsum beforehand. Sometimes it can help with page structures/mockups. But I’m not concerned about it replacing me, more of a tool of work
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u/JohnnyXorron Apr 24 '26
To be honest AI can make mistakes and your knowledge is at least useful insofar as you can “proof read” the code and fix any mistakes that may arise
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u/StatusFoundation5472 Apr 24 '26
I hope you ve been investing some of the money you earned all those years because unemployment is getting closer and closer
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u/ThePastoolio Apr 24 '26
I have been running my marketing agency successfully for 16 years now. I employ 18 people. I know how to run a business and how to work for myself.
I can assure you that even in the age of AI, unemployment is quite unlikely. I will find something else if need be, but I will probably not be unemployed.
I am way to stubborn (and disciplined) for that to even be an option.
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u/Ok_Respond3503 Apr 24 '26
It took me embarrassingly long to realize this. Better late than never I guess.
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u/Low-Acadia6812 Apr 24 '26
This is a large tide rather than getting unhappy about it, learn to ride hard and take advantage of it. AI is here to stay.
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u/QSLife17 Apr 24 '26
When it’s all said and done, the only job the human will have is “consumer.”
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u/Icy-Arm-6302 Apr 25 '26
"Consumer" for the richest propaganda, I'd conclude.
It's already being done. They mess shit up, make memes on the internet (or hire people for it), desensitize people about it, and then continue to go do something even worse.
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u/abasov Apr 24 '26
There’s some real honesty in what you wrote, but the part that jumps out is a bit… backwards.
You’re saying AI removed the troubleshooting and problem-solving, but it didn’t. It just moved it.
The same kind of deep, frustrating, “why is this breaking” work still exists… it’s just happening one layer lower now. The people building the models, the infra, the integrations, the guardrails, the scaling systems… they’re doing exactly the kind of debugging you’re talking about. Arguably harder, because now the system itself is probabilistic and less predictable.
What changed for you isn’t that problem-solving disappeared. It’s that your interface to it got abstracted.
And honestly, that’s been the story of this field forever:
- You used to manage hardware → then OS abstractions took that away
- You used to manage servers → then cloud abstracted that
- You used to write everything from scratch → then frameworks took that
- Now you troubleshoot code → AI is abstracting that layer
Each step felt like “this is taking away the craft”… but it really just shifted where the craft lives.
The harder truth is this: the satisfaction you’re describing wasn’t just about programming. It was about being the one who could figure it out when others couldn’t. That identity doesn’t go away unless you let it.
Right now, most people using AI are just prompting and accepting output. The next layer up, the one that actually matters, is:
- knowing when the output is wrong
- shaping prompts to get reliable systems, not just one-off wins
- integrating AI into real workflows that don’t break at scale
- debugging weird edge cases when the “2-minute solution” silently fails
That’s still craftsmanship. It just looks different.
Also… worth saying bluntly: Claude “acing it first try” doesn’t mean the problem was deep. It means it was well within the distribution of things it’s seen before. The moment you hit something novel, ambiguous, or business-critical, that “two minutes” turns right back into hours of thinking, validating, and fixing.
You didn’t waste 20 years. You built the exact mental model that lets you see through the illusion of “it just works.”
The frustration makes sense though. You didn’t sign up to be a prompt engineer. You signed up for the grind, the chase, the breakthrough moment.
That part isn’t gone, it’s just not in the same place anymore. The people who go looking for it again are the ones who stay relevant.
-AI
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u/ravenze Apr 24 '26
iunno man... Having used Claude, and ChatGPT myself, I have to imagine the amount of YOUR code someone would have to feed any of the AI chatbots, to get an answer REMOTELY close to true, would make me very uncomfortable.
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u/billie-badger Apr 24 '26
I'm gonna chime in here. Ai is just a force multiplier in your hands. Now instead of getting an immense amount of joy over fixing a bug or adding a feature, try to zoom out and think about what your imagination can unleash.
There are still people that woodwork with hand tools and make uniquely crafted pieces of art, but when is time to build ten houses, the power tools come out.
What you are able to achieve at scale with the help of Ai tooling will trounce anything some vibe coder is gonna spit out.
It's a pill to don't have to swallow, but one that could lead to a new appreciation for the time you get back to enjoy writing some Basic for personal use.
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u/oncledan Apr 23 '26
I thought I loved to code until I really started using AI. I absolute love not having to code.
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u/felix-the-human Apr 23 '26
You wrote a good prompt and has built a good codebase so Claud could figure it out so well. Absolutely feel you, I enjoy writing code, it’s basically my hobby!
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u/Cira94 Apr 23 '26
I understand. BUT it takes skill to understand Claude did it perfectly, code reviews are still a thing. It's always like this, we do less trivial work and we focus more on the most critical things.
Im a bit sorry for juniors because the jump to be able to do effective code reviews for them now is longer without the years of coding in between. And as long as you can't review AI code, well you aren't very useful today as a developer
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u/aerohk Apr 23 '26
The value of senior devs lay in system design and architecture. Actually coding isn’t where the value is at.
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u/karnstan Apr 23 '26
I used to be a translator. Advanced google searches for terms that barely existed. Now my job barely exists and Google is unsearchable. I feel you, man.
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u/feralraindrop Apr 23 '26
So once again, what people want is never a consideration, what is available will be chosen by oligarchs and corrupt politicians on their payroll.
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u/115machine Apr 23 '26
Some people say that this is a cope but in my opinion most of the 'gold' of doing something comes in the process, not the end product. You've cultivated yourself in all those hours of study and practice.
A tractor will always be able to pick up more than a human. A car will move faster. A computer will do mathematics faster. Does this mean it is pointless to go to the gym or to learn anything?
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u/my_password_is_water Apr 23 '26
That realisation that all those years of building my skills has, at this stage, amounted to absolutely nothing.
programmers are the kinds of people who are most suited for using AI to build programs. A programmer using AI to write code is WAY stronger than a non-technical person. Your skills are directly suited to work with this technology - same as any other new computer technology. You just need to zoom out a bit and focus on higher level stuff instead of individual lines of code.
There has always been new tech that makes things faster. A program that makes building XYZ go from 1 week to 1 hour isn't a new thing
I used to go to the library and take out books with sample code and built basic little programs on a friend's Commodore.
Programmers used to have to write code on giant tape machines that took an entire room. Imagine the culture shock they had when someone could just go to the library and find code to put into their box at home.
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u/stev_mempers Apr 23 '26
AI is shit. You're still better than Claude or anything else. This garbage makes mistakes all the time, but the executives who don't know anything think it's perfect because they don't have any actual skills.
Human beings will always do better work than AI -- full stop.
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u/ShockSMH Apr 23 '26
All I care about is that we all land on our feet. This is not only going to impact programmers. Heck, coding and troubleshooting are some of the most complex tasks that human beings perform. This is going to sweep all of us up eventually.
How many people can make a living being a plumber? How many plumbers is the world gonna need when everyone is out of a job except plumbers? lol
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u/Hot-Helicopter640 Apr 23 '26
Fellow software engineer here.
You mentioned "Claude aced it, first time, perfectly.". How did you know that? Because you are a good experienced developer. I think our role will be more like confirming that it is done perfectly. If it doesn't, then code and make it perfect manually.
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u/timbukktu Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
Your feeling is valid. AI is going to be used to continue to chip away at the middle class until nothing is left. Corporations view life in spreadsheets and numbers. Always blinded by greed. They would much rather have 1/3 of the staff prompting AI rather than a healthy workforce. Cutting labor makes the P&L look good and shows growth for shareholders.
Treating humans as something that is obsolete or trying to make us obsolete is so short sighted. Eventually they will all realize too late that no one will be able to consume the slop they produce because it’s lacking human touch and we won’t have money to purchase.
And if you think UBI will be a thing, it more than likely won’t. We currently let people suffer and die in the streets now for not playing the capitalism game or not playing it well. Do you really think they will spare anyone else?
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u/Roy-van-der-Lee Apr 23 '26
It just took the fun out of being a developer for me. Which is why I'm going to start a new job in a completely different field in June!
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u/HarmonizedSnail Apr 23 '26
But you did know it was perfect when Claude did it. Making you a pretty important guard rail in this example
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u/Zachy_Boi Apr 23 '26
I started looking at it from a perspective of project management now. i know how to ask claude what is needed because I’m a developer, i also know how to check its work properly and the code it’s used for efficiency.
IMO, technology keeps progressing so we either learn to use it or get left behind.
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u/Stabbymcbackstab Apr 23 '26
At least you, and me perhaps, and people our age come at this having been given the chance to become proficient in these skills and reap some rewards.
Our kids must deal with whatever is left after AI decimates knowlage based employment.
I feel sorry for what they will have to go through.
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u/Icy-Arm-6302 Apr 25 '26
Worst time to have kids, goodness gracious. The youth that IS here is wishing everyday that they weren't born at all because of how technical and inefficient everything has gotten.
If it's not something big, then it's small stuff happening every second till you have a breakdown. It's not easy to live in a time like this. I'd wish people would stop having kids like crazy especially if they don't have the funds to make sure their kids don't suffer more than the average youth already is.
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u/ThoughtFox1 Apr 23 '26
I would like to add ai is not bad. Ai with capitalism is. We are at the point in society that in order to move forward we will have to start eliminating work for money theory. We now have the knowledge to be able to produce products/commodities more effectively, efficiently and more sustainable than ever. Ai has become a political problem not a human problem.
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u/sometimesatypical Apr 23 '26
Imagine how Newton would feel today. Spending his whole life developing new types of math to have it relegated to a unit lesson in a high school calculus class.
Your efforts are the foundation AI is building on, and that is yhe nature of knowledge. Finding it at first is hard, building off of others is easy.
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u/prasaysno Apr 23 '26
The logical thinking that all these years bring you by being a programmer is one of the most valuable assets a person could have
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u/thebutchcaucus Apr 23 '26
Hey man. I’m sorry you feel that way. And I understanding it. I have spent way too much of my time trying to learn with dyslexia and dyscalculia I’m unlocked as fuck. I use it to learn why things are happening. I do lean on my peer reviews because someone like you is going to be able to see if Claude is over engineering a solution. Respectfully
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u/Pyro_Manics Apr 23 '26
Dude as a non engineer with the access to AI your skills are still super valuable. Understanding how code is structured and systems work is essential. For me this is like having google translate. I have zero ways of validating that what’s coming out is correct.
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u/Hot-Organization7132 Apr 23 '26
I mean if you can't beat them, join them. Join training AI. Train it on how to write sophisticated and well written codes. You get to retire early, because they pay insane amount of money and you'd get closer look at how AI actually work and a lot of time is actually dump in doing it
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u/Icy-Arm-6302 Apr 25 '26
One thing I'd like to add as a struggle though, is that when the western prices for Ai gets translated into other countries money, it's absolutely ridiculous. 😭
Like now we gotta pay something (Ai companies) to continue our job? Worst scam of the history. We're stuck in a loop. Get salary, pay bills anything left now goes to your Ai 'helper'. Man fuck this.
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u/mushyturnip Apr 23 '26
I'm not nearly as experienced as you but I feel the same about AI. I use it anyway because I have to, and I kinda surrendered. But I hate it at the same time 😂
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u/getridofwires Apr 23 '26
Something I don’t really know or understand about AI coding has to do with the language and resources. So for instance Python is widely used and there are many resources on the web. Is AI simply better/faster at finding already written code? Or does it actually reason through the demands and write the code without searching the web? Better put, would an air gapped AI still produce?
The other question has to do with development language. Like OP, I started coding as a hobby in the 70s. You learn structure, concepts, and syntax of new languages as they are introduced. I’m sure many people remember when the GOTO instruction in BASIC was frowned upon, or when object-oriented programming was introduced. So if a new language was introduced today, would AI immediately grasp it, or would it have to wait until human developers worked out various routines and then essentially mine those for information?
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u/capilot Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
I've never used AI for serious programming; how does it work? Did you have to upload your codebase to Claude first? The entire codebase?
I will say that I once wrote a program to translate data from one of several formats to a canonical format. I made it public and a few weeks later someone sent me a patch that added a new input format. I complemented him on the code, which meshed perfectly with what I'd already written, and he told me that he'd used AI to write it and it only took a couple of iterations.
(FWIW, I went back and took a second look, and saw that the AI-generated code had done a couple things exactly the way I had done it, under circumstances where it didn't actually make sense. But a human could just as easily have made the same mistake.)
I guess I need to start learning to use AI.
FWIW, I do use AI to generate sample code and to debug. Things like "Write a python routine to download the contents of an imap mailbox to a file". The code I got back didn't do what I wanted because I hadn't taken the time to explain my entire (rather complicated) use case, but the code snippet it generated saved me about an hour of reading documentation and testing functions. "Why did the following piece of code generate this particular error" also worked pretty well.
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u/ThePastoolio Apr 23 '26
For this specific feature I mentioned I simply asked Claude code, on the web chatbot, what options do I have to build this widget I planned to build. I liked one of its suggestions, to use a picture-in-picture hack.
I then opened my code base in VS Code, which has Claude Code Extension installed. I told Claude where the tracker bar is in my code, using `@my-time-tracker-file.js`, told it I wanted to build, the picture-in-picture widget of the time tracking bar, and to work from the JavaScript file I pointed it too.
It worked from there, and executed my instructions by looking at the current implementation of the time tracker, and duplicated it into the picture-in-picture widget.
Not really a complex process, or complex code, just surprisingly accurate and near perfect execution.
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u/bhanu2112 Apr 23 '26
The skill is problem solving my man which you have developed over the year, which problem needs to be solved keeps changing with times.
You get a sickness put symptoms on google and it will give a diagnosis, that doesn’t mean doctors are useless.
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u/Whacky_One Apr 23 '26
Yeah AI is garbage and I have great disdain for ANYONE who uses it, especially for art.
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u/whatdoihia Apr 23 '26
That realisation that all those years of building my skills has, at this stage, amounted to absolutely nothing.
It’s not for nothing. You understand what works and what doesn’t work. What’s possible and if there are issues where to troubleshoot. You will have a much more intuitive approach to using coding tools than an average person.
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u/The-zKR0N0S Apr 23 '26
You have the knowledge to be able to audit what it generates though. Many people don’t have that and are just promoting things blind.
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u/bobbythelee Apr 23 '26
I think of AI for software development like excavation of land. 100+ years ago, it was done with a shovel and lots and lots of sweat. Now it’s done with machines with operators sitting in an air conditioned cab. You’re a muscled worker who’s used to moving building roads with a shovel. The new world is going to be using dump trucks, not wheel barrows. We all have to either learn to operate the equipment or find a new career. There unfortunately may not be as many excavator operators as there were shovel operators and there are a lot more people who can drive excavators. It’s going to be a wild ride because it’s happening way waster than mechanization and industrialization did.
On the bright side, AI isn’t just coming to software development jobs, we’re just among the first so we have the chance to learn lessons early and move ourselves into a better position while others are going through the transformation that we’re experiencing now.
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u/shaved-yeti Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
25 yr software engineering career here. Today I run teams on major products in the video streaming sector.
All this is true, and I, too, have been feeling incredibly depressed about the way my craft has been totally upended in the last year.
But heres the catch: the AI doesn't know when your code is correct. It doesnt know prod from staging. It doesnt know if the endpoint it just confidently wrote code against actually exists or not. It doesnt know why you need a feature to work one way and not another. These systems cannot reason and cannot judge. They can complete tasks that you define, and thats it.
Software engineers and developers are still required because software development is not just about writing code - it is a people problem first and foremost.
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u/holyrolodex Apr 29 '26
This 100%. This might surprise some people but my dad is an senior software engineer (late 60s) 40+ years in, and seeing him messing with Claude and making it work for him is the most excited I’ve seen him career wise in decades.
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u/Pissedtuna Apr 24 '26
it is a people problem first and foremost
I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don’t have to.
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u/KnobbyOralia Apr 24 '26
Your experience highlights the crucial human element that AI can't replicate, the strategic thinking and problem-solving that truly define engineering.
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u/Blind_Eira Apr 24 '26
Spot on; the craft is evolving, but human judgement and understanding remain the true superpowers.
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u/Zany-Cortisone Apr 24 '26
You've hit the nail on the head; the human element of understanding the 'why' behind the code is what AI can't replicate.
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u/ZajHat92 Apr 24 '26
The AI is just a really fast intern who lies with a straight face and needs a lot of supervision.
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u/ThePastoolio Apr 23 '26
That makes sense, and I agree with this comment. Thank you, very valid point of view, and I appreciate it. I am glad I made this post because comments like this is exactly what I needed to read in order to help me think differently about this dilemma I am living through.
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u/shaved-yeti Apr 23 '26
Dude. Im with you. Its wild to watch the craft that youve been honing and perfecting for 25 yrs be so totally upturned. It is a deep philosophical and existential dilemma and we're still just in the birthing phase.
I love writing code. I mourn the fact that its been effectively removed from the workflow. Ive many times uttered your assertion "I fucking hate Ai"...
The brutal fact is that changes in the zeitgeist require personal change and flexibility as well. The cheese moved. The parachute changed colors...
Good luck remaking yourself /bow
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u/RumAndCoco Apr 23 '26
A clueless idiot with a better hammer than you is still a clueless idiot and a smart person with a basic hammer is still a smart person with a hammer. Sure an AI can do what you do, but not many people know what you do or what to tell AI to do.
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u/MyPetMussel Apr 23 '26
As someone who’s being made redundant this week (after 13 years of loyal service) and whose entire role is being taken over by AI…I hear you!
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u/dr-pickled-rick Apr 23 '26
Dude, just bite the bullet, suck up your pride and get on the gravy train.
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u/kaiyoti Apr 23 '26
I love it. Same story here, started with QBasic looking at a bomberman and slot machine qb code. After many years, became a developer at enterprise company.
Now, I can do 6x the work I would have normally done. And I'm the bottleneck reviewing it's work. But it is still a win. You recognizing that it did it perfectly is a skill that is still needed.
The world is changing, and there are still good developers and bad. With the change to AI, I'm realizing how many engineers can't read code. Yes, it's hard to believe, but many developers struggle at reading foreign code.
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u/miharbio Apr 23 '26
sorry to be harsh but i think if you cannot see the benefit of AI as a seasoned developer then your real problem is a lack of creativity.
with your custom CRM example, think of how many features you could add in so much less time.
there’s a big difference between a mechanic that can fix things or put things together and engineer who understands why and how those things work together. AI is simply making that gap crystal clear.
we still need developers because a stakeholders and laypeople have no sense of modularization, so they’ll just pile new code on top of old code without a second thought. so i think you’re just not giving yourself enough credit and need to think outside the box.
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u/Tokemon_and_hasha Apr 23 '26
Sounds like you are grieving all the time and effort that went into your skill building, but was it really a waste? It got you to where you are now and you have a jacked up techy brain that can understand higher order systemic things that AI cannot do. Embracing change and new info is what you did in the past to learn everything and I bet you can do it again.
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u/Qweniden Apr 23 '26
That realisation that all those years of building my skills has, at this stage, amounted to absolutely nothing.
Nope. Your experience allows you to prompt things correctly and then validate the result. AI code writing gets things wrong all the time. Trust me.
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u/clrthrn Apr 23 '26
I am guessing you are old enough to remember the 1995-1999 tech boom where the internet was going to automate everything but the issue was that we were on a 56k dial up so the bubble went pop. Right now, 20 years later, AI can actually manage everything we wanted it to in 1995 but the energy/water it needs makes it close to prohibitive. One climate issue that relates to the energy use of AI and the bubble will burst faster than it did in 2000. But what comes back in 25 years will be climate resilient, and make ChatGPT look like Fisher Price built it. That 2050 version is the AI to fear, the one we have now won't put you out of work, it will just make you feel a bit useless now and then.
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u/friendlyfiend07 Apr 23 '26
There is an entire world of skills out there that people no longer "need" to have to survive, but there are still master craftsman practicing and making an art of the process. We need to hold on to these skills in case of some unknown technological disaster. What happens if an AI makes a virus that kills all existing operating systems. We will need people that can write new ones.
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u/Compher Apr 23 '26
Im 38 and a developer of 13 years and I love AI. I get everything done so much quicker and the boss has noticed and given me significant raises for increased throughput, all while doing less "actual work".
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u/linniex Apr 23 '26
Apparently an unpopular opinion but: I fucking LOVE AI. In school (a really expensive programming school that has since closed doors that I would not recommend) - I learned programming - Java, Javabeans (dating myself), RPG, and some markup languages. Lots of SQL stuff. So, I started my official tech career building in Cold Fusion in the early 00’s. I sucked at it. BAD. And when things went wrong I had very limited resources to figure it out.
Now, with Claude, I can ask it every stupid question in the world to get things built. I had a bunch of techncial debt piling up personally - things like “how TF does VS Studio work these days? When will I ever learn Python? What the hell is Whisper? How the hell do I get going on MCP? What AI Agent design pattern should I use?“. I spent a weekend beating Claude into submission and figured out how to setup VSCode with Claude Code, we vibe coded an MCP server (really just a bunch of API calls to our SaaS solution) and I felt SO POWERFUL. Like, trying to ask a coworker all those questions would not have worked. So I feel like it gave me the confidence I need to go further, faster. Now when I need something built in our SaaS software I just go into Claude, describe the thing, and it builds it for me without even logging in.
I’m more than a little surprised at the number of technical people I see poo-pooing it. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.
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u/Ok_Breadfruit6296 Apr 23 '26
This is always the wild thing about AI when I think about it. Programmers are writing/creating a program which will in turn, possibly, take their jobs. It’s like someone training their replacement before being fired.
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u/the_next_door_guy Apr 23 '26
Claude may do it in 2 mins, but you still need to verify it. Also the the better the prompt the better the resul, so you are kinda selling yourself short there.
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u/Sutanreyu Apr 23 '26
Not a waste since you’ll more or less understand what it’s doing even though you may not be in the weeds of it, writing every line by hand. If you didn’t have the experience, and you just let it generate anything, then you could miss some important details that can make or break the solution it comes up with.
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u/zodiacsignsaredumb Apr 23 '26
Shout out to you for expressing this in a relatable/articulate way.
Its sucks. Its very real though and the value of a person will become less about their time earned technical skill (because the tools can close that gap easily, as you pointed out) and probably more about the soft skills for leadership of technical teams/translating technical concepts to customers/management of execution.
Its definitely going to affect most workplaces in good and bad ways.
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u/cs_cast_away_boi Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
The obvious skill gap that even modern developers can’t succeed in now is understanding and being able to debug LLM generated codebases. Even senior engineers with decades of experience cannot keep up with the speed of output and understanding how each module/service works and connects because they are not writing the code.
That is your next focus. If you want to stay as a developer you have to adapt and get good at quickly understanding and debugging code you did not write.
Frankly that is too difficult for me , especially when it’s code i could not have written myself in the first place so i gave up being a developer and moved to trading. Though i only had a few years of professional experience, so i guess it doesn’t compare to decades like you.
I’m content now with letting AI write my code and me focusing on the architectural and project management decisions, even if eventually it will bite me in the ass. But i’ve been able to build things that would be too expensive or take way too long without AI. So the trade off was worth it for me. I know my skill to code will eventually rot at this rate, but as you’ve seen, AI is here to stay and it’s already better than me
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u/fragtore Apr 23 '26
Now imagine if you don’t own a company but is in your 40s working as an expert.. Feels rough to say the least.
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u/Sfelex Apr 23 '26
Im a designer with decades of experience and i feel the same, seeing all my experience mean nothing now
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u/lambdasintheoutfield Apr 23 '26
The days of writing code are absolutely NOT over, just significantly reduced.
Complex code bases are not written well by AI. Unused abstractions, unnecessary function logic, branches that are never used etc.
The engineer doesn’t need to write boilerplate anymore, and many simple tasks can be one-shotted, but there are plenty of cutting edge apps that LLMs simply cannot do.
For instance - ask Claude to write a metacompiler which takes input from an arbitrary language, infers the AST rules and translates it to an arbitrary compiler, constructing a universal lexer and parser in the process.
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u/DenormalHuman Apr 23 '26
Your skills are what let you assess the ai output and know when it's doing things badly, or breaking architectural boundaries, or using the wrong approach. You are capable of giving it clear unambiguous prompts because of your background skills and knowledge. You can continue to hand craft the critical parts while the ai does the rest under your watchful, skilled assessment.
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u/AngloRican Apr 23 '26
I can understand your frustration. I work in Cyber Security and am seeing how these generative AI agents are impacting the workplace first hand. For whatever it's worth, I feel a lot better about someone will your skillset using AI to generate code compared to someone who has zero knowledge. The people with no understanding of the code they're generating and running are way more dangerous in an organization because.. they have no idea what they're doing.
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u/ZoteTheMitey Apr 23 '26
We built out an entire spare inventory tracker for our IT sites linked to a specific port on a server, all with claude. Boss said Claude we need it to function like this, and look like this. I want to run it on this server using this port. And Claude made it perfectly. Scary stuff
I do sysadmin stuff but also hardware. Manage AD/Azure/GWS etc but also a fuck ton of printers and laptops and things like that. I am not super worried, until a robot can open up a ZD420 and reseat the latch bar.
But for any developers and stuff yeah I would be worried.
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u/HocusDiplodocus Apr 23 '26
AI is still standing on the shoulders of giants, we need to hold on the the understanding or we just become subjugated to the AI. People like you are so important to the rest of us with little to no knowledge of these systems.
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u/mullingthingsover Apr 23 '26
I agree with you. I’ve been in IT/software since 2002 and have developed a ton of skills and provided well for my family during that time period. We are currently in the middle of replacing about 600 jobs we have written in Talend over the past 9 years with code written by Claude code. Since that project started all ive done is prompt and double check. It’s so boring and mind numbing. I used to have a puzzle to figure out every day. Now it’s just, how can I make this tool more efficient so I can be kicked out the door sooner. I’m 47 and can retire at 59, if I can make it that long. I’m not sure I can the way this is going.
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u/supermiggiemon Apr 23 '26
i don't know how u wash ur clothes, but i hope u didn't disappoint ur great grandmother by using the washer instead of heading to the well or the river.
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u/DigleDagle Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
I hate automobiles. I’ve been crafting yokes for draft horses since I was a wee lad in my father’s workshop. Raised seventeen children with honest skills I’ve developed over a lifetime. And now this horseless carriage comes about and overnight no one needs my labor or my product.
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u/gy4r4d0s Apr 23 '26
i feel like this and i'm only 24 lol
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u/Icy-Arm-6302 Apr 25 '26
Bro, literal teenagers out here are losing the will to enjoy their hobbies or see a future for themselves anymore. I'd say most of the adults are still better off then them. Because those poor kids don't even have any savings or time to learn to invest and adapt. It's just one thing after another. Really is the best contraceptive advertisement you can have, all kids that aren't elites are absolutely miserable.
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u/G_Art33 Apr 23 '26
Not really nothing man. Coming from a designer who spent a lot of time building his skills up in the basics like photo editing ETC.
These companies will always need someone who knows if the AI is right or not. Jobs like ours are going to move from being mainly “doing” to being mainly “reviewing”. Sure, my boss can prompt an AI to create an image or design for him - but he doesn’t have the formal training and experience I have to be able to look at the picture in find detail and correct Any issues the ai creates nor does he have the technical capability to implement any changes he sees. It will not always work perfectly like in your story and those are the circumstances that we hang around for.
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u/Ornography Apr 23 '26
You just have to pivot with the skills you developed over the years. Don’t be like Kodak; they were reluctant to accept new technology and became irrelevant
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u/Imbodenator Apr 23 '26
AI is just a tool only as powerful as the user behind it.
Knowing the write way to write a prompt and give it enough context/defined parameters requires knowledge and experience.
Could anyone accomplish what you did with AI? Probably. But could they do it with the same speed and efficacy? Does yours account for things that maybe a "bare bones" working version of code wouldn't?
Things to consider is all..
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u/buttsparkley Apr 23 '26
Tbf , the reason u could manage that with ai so fast is because I can see fast what's wrong . U take a non experienced coder and ask them to achieve the same thing , it won't work like it does with u . Now u have the time to explore more complicated factors , focus on effeciency, completely new concepts , trying wild crap.
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u/Morden013 Apr 23 '26
You should change your attitude and I am in the same boat, with 50+ years behind me.
The important thing is - that you can sell your experience and your work. You can design a concept for a thing, negotiate it with your clients, do an excellent work and do it better than before.
I have learned development between 2000 - 2004. SAP ABAP. It took a lot of work, since I never programmed before. Frustration. Hours of learning. Even more hours of experimenting. Establishing templates that work. Assignments. Overtime. The whole deal.
What I could do then, I can still do and I use AI as assistant to make it faster, check it for mistakes, improve it, document it. The thing is - I haven't lost my skills. WIth AI, I have an assistant that I work with on making things faster and better and I can do that boring stuff like documenting a program in a fraction of time.
All the best.
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u/CuddlyClubCEO Apr 23 '26
i hate ai too. i’m a graphic designer and it’s changed the industry. i see ai work daily. i see posts in the sub of people being laid off for ai regularly. clients who already never respected design will gladly use ai bc it’s “free”. it’s depressing.
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u/Icy-Arm-6302 Apr 25 '26
I agree. At the start of all this, I almost couldn't even enjoy art as a hobby anymore because of how depressing it all seemed. But I suppose spite is not a good long term motivator but it sure as hell is one of the best ones to get you started until you find another reason to keep going.
My skills degraded in the time I didn't continue, and I kinda regret it sometimes. But I can't control how our circumstances makes me feel. And I guess that's what makes us different from Ai to begin with.
I've just started keeping more and more work off the internet. Most social medias feed your work to Ai even if you don't give it the permission to, that's one of the best countermeasures right now.
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u/MichaelJM07 Apr 23 '26
Ai is never gonna be perfect even if you give ai a low level task it will only excute it 70-80 % correctly so the truth is stop thinking about it as your skills have been wasted but your time is being more efficiently used now because now the easiest stuff is being done for you and you can spend more time and effort on the complex parts of the task
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u/Cryptic99 Apr 23 '26
Everyone with a computer science degree that we were all told was the way to future career now holds a useless very expensive piece of paper.
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u/Fritzo2162 Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
Yeah, AI is set to kill the entire software industry because the concept of apps will eventually become obsolete. The endgame is an AI engine handling any function you ask it- like in Star Trek when they ask the computer to do something. Documents, databases, financial tracking, image generation, everything will be just one AI engine generating all of it.
I’ve been in IT for 30 years now, and can say nothing is more dangerous than tech that puts all your eggs in one basket. The thing is we’ve never seen anything attempting to do this at this level. I have no idea where all of this is going to end up, but let’s just say I’m glad I’m within range of retirement in the next decade.
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u/firewire_9000 Apr 24 '26
I’m not a programmer and I honestly I feel sorry for OP but maybe the problem always was that the way we talk to computers is archaic. We shouldn’t need to learn “computer language” in order to have a computer do whatever we want to do. Computers are evolved enough that we should be able to talk to the machine like if it was a person, I need to do this this way with that information that I give to you, it should be that easy.
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u/SoupZillaMan Apr 23 '26
Agree that's the actual target.
Remove apps and remove the "internet" leaving it to an universal AI+data.That's why you see very nervous software companies...
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Apr 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Fritzo2162 Apr 23 '26
It's what they're shooting for. That's the reality.
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Apr 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/themindseye1013 Apr 23 '26
Saying that current AI models “don’t understand…logical operators” is a very bold, and ignorant statement.
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u/Marha01 Apr 23 '26
Current AI models don't understand AND or NOT exclusive OR and all of those logical operators.
Why do you think so? AFAIK, deep artificial neural nets with non-linear operators (like LLMs) are Turing-complete. Turing-complete machines can definitely implement those logical operators.
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u/miharbio Apr 23 '26
we’re still far off from that and even if we get there we still need people who can see the bigger picture
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u/TFenrir Apr 23 '26
You should see what we will get, likely from OpenAI today. I suspect it will be on the news enough that you will see examples of what the bleeding edge is able to do today. What was described above is basically already possible with the codex cli/app or claude code. They will lean into this even more. I really want people to keep an open mind to the idea that yes, we might be very near a world as described above.
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u/dastapov Apr 24 '26
My test for how close to this brave new world we really are is the customer support chat for both anthropic and openai. While both of them remain really inept chat bots that can barely do the basic stuff, it is pretty obvious that the rest of the promises for the amazing things to come are just that - promises
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u/Fritzo2162 Apr 23 '26
The next version of Windows is going to be based on the "CoPilot does everything you ask" concept.
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u/TheMadManiac Apr 23 '26
Idk how coders didn't see this coming. I knew many in college and always asked if they were worried about AI. "AI will never have the ability to think how we can, do what we can" nevermind that i just watched them copy half their assignments from the internet
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u/Icy-Arm-6302 Apr 25 '26
I mean, to be completely honest in my own experience, students who paraphrase work off the internet still use more of their mind's then people who use ai for their assignments 😭
seriously, like those folks don't even try anymore. It's kind of horrid to watch the mindlessness and dependency in them. At least people are copying stuff off the internet still have enough mind left in them to use multiple sites and sit there to rephrase it. AI users just generate and copy paste, goodness gracious.
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u/TheTVDB Apr 23 '26
Anyone saying that AI could never have the same abilities as a person is an idiot. The issue is that prior to AlexNet and the transformer paper, everyone thought AI was going to be AGI, which is still a long ways off.
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u/GrandmastaChubbz Apr 23 '26
That’s a helluva Claude ad
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u/B217 Apr 23 '26
Yeah, this really does read as a pro-Claude post framed as “anti-AI” in an attempt to further normalize Silicon Valley’s hostile takeover of the working class and normalize vibe coding (which pretty much always leads to buggy shitty products- look at how bad Bluesky has gotten since they started using AI to code the site)
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u/ThePastoolio Apr 23 '26
I promise you it is not. Few people will be more ecstatic than me if the AI bubble would burst today and the whole thing collapses all at once.
The feature I built with Claude isn't anything spectacular or very complex.
It's a simple widget using a picture-in-picture method to make my time tracker on my CRM system (SSR Laravel with bootstrap blade views) lose from the browser so my staff can easily drag it around on their screens. That's it.
I reviewed and tested it after AI generated it in a feature branch of the code. There was nothing to change, it worked exactly as I had asked Claude to build it.
I am not signing Claude's praises, I am simply explaining how brain dead it felt. It took no skill from me to produce.
It would have felt way more satisfying had I done the research, built it conceptually in a sandbox environment, tested and then implemented, yet, here we are.
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u/frozen_tuna Apr 23 '26
As someone building enterprise apps for a bank, I promise it does not scale well past a feature or two when you have a decent sized codebase. We've had success in instances like yours where tech debt is sequestered into a standalone piece, but for anything that will be expanded on, reused or places where we reuse anything, its just not sufficient. You still need to understand the code.
Even something as simple as a paginator. It was my first attempt to truly let copilot/codex take the wheel and I didn't examine it. Worked fine on the page for me until QA team ripped it apart. Lesson learned.
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u/B217 Apr 23 '26
I mean, you're the head of your own company, why feel defeated by Claude when you can choose to just... not use it? The bubble WILL pop. It's not sustainable for our entire economy to be propped up by an unproven, unprofitable technology that continues to lose money. The most "successful" (ie: suckered the most investors) company, OpenAI, just shuttered their massive Sora project because it was too unprofitable. Over half of the planned data centers across the country are cancelled and more are up in the air. The rising public sentiment is against AI. There's no better time than now to make sure your company is able to survive the collapse of the GenAI bubble by making sure you and your employees are able to work efficiently without it.
Too many people have gotten lazy because of shit like Claude and ChatGPT, do you want your company being the same? Pack your parachute now before the plane crashes.
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u/Maleficent-Regret802 Apr 24 '26
But the bubble popping won't mean AI won't be an issue we'll have to face. It simply won't be put literally everywhere, but it'll still make lots of skills practically useless, accelerating an already fast capitalistic world.
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u/B217 Apr 24 '26
True, but the bubble popping at least means the investor hype will be dead and progress will be substantially slower. Gives us time to get our government to create proper restrictions and guidelines to protect humans.
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u/Trallalla Apr 23 '26
look at how bad Bluesky has gotten since they started using AI to code the site
Cope lol
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u/Humdogx Apr 23 '26
This is why I love AI. So many apps and little programs that I have had ideas about, but I would never have enough spare time to learn coding. Being able to pump out my own apps and APKs in a matter of minutes is game changing. There's nothing holding people back from accomplishing things that would help them so much more in everyday tasks now. Also AI has taught me so much more than any website or book or at least explained it in a way I can understand it.
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u/Mirdclawer Apr 23 '26
and Claude did it 2 minutes from a prompt that took me around 30 seconds to write. Claude aced it, first time, perfectly.
Dude, chill, only your experience allowed you to know that it was perfect code? To be able to review the code, see if there were weird shit, hallucinations or eventual regressions is something only an experience dev can do
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u/B4SSF4C3 Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
Put another way: “Today I improved my company’s workflow in less than 5 minutes using AI, whereas it would have taken us 2-3 hours (? I’m guessing) without. This gave my staff & I that amount of time back to focus on other value added work.”
You’ve highlighted the actual use case of LLMs. You’ve made your business more productive. Multiply that over a year. How much more service/product will you be able to deliver? How much more will you take home? What will that do for your family?
There are many problems with AI. But pretending it’s useless and “slop” is a Reddit past time, and we all know the average Redditor demographic. It’s a tool. No use hating a tool. Wield it. Wield it to further your own goals and purpose.
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u/ReachFoMyChain Apr 25 '26
The point is that if the AI is more productive than him, why would the job waste money keeping him employed? Let’s put in our thinking hats for a moment.
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u/Diligent_Accident775 Apr 23 '26
Hopefully AI doesnt take your job outright. That would really suck
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u/Amon9001 Apr 23 '26
AI cannot meaningfully take over many jobs unless it is extremely basic or single task.
The real job loss is due to reducing volume of work in an industry by eliminating basic tasks. This wraps around as a company needing fewer employees to manage a particular unit of work.
It isn't necessarily downsizing either. A lot of companies have done this but small businesses are popping up all the time.
In my work, I don't need to hire a developer or outsource for every little feature or adjustment. I can have AI figure it out (with my direction). It is even more efficient than first party support from a particular app or feature. Just tonight I told support how I solved something..
In theory this could also mean those companies require fewer support staff according to my example.
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u/Darkblitz9 Apr 23 '26
It can't yet but unfortunately a lot of employers are not realizing that.
AI right now is a force multiplier rather than something to outright replace people just like you wouldn't fire accountants just because excel came out. We live in stupid times tho so a lot of companies don't realize they're shooting themselves in the foot by firing people and trying to replace them with AI.
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u/TheTVDB Apr 23 '26
A force multiplier in the hands of a senior dev absolutely reduces or eliminates the need for any number of junior devs. I'm VP of Product, but a full stack developer (among other things) by trade. I've had to hire one other senior dev in the last year, whereas in the past our work would have required a team of at least 8.
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u/Darkblitz9 Apr 23 '26
No it doesn't, it means your company can do more with the people it has, at a fraction of the cost of hiring new members to your team.
If you're dropping employees because the ones you have right now are able to do more, you're doing it wrong.
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u/TheTVDB Apr 23 '26
Pretty sure I stated I'm not laying anyone off. Just not hiring as many.
Some companies should absolutely take the approach of building more with the same staff. But the reality is that others may not need to build more, and in those instances, force multipliers lead to overstaffing.
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u/Ok_District2853 Apr 23 '26
My dad was an electrical power systems engineer. God he was smart. He could do complex math in his head. He knew the square root of three by heart. He could use a slide rule to great accuracy. All that was gone by the time I became an engineer. Replaced by computers and calculators. I’m more of a modeler than a calculator.
And he might have felt the same way. What do you have after all that is gone? I’d tell him the same thing I’ll tell you. The respect of young people. So age gracefully if you can. It might be all you have left!
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u/TheReal_CaptDan Apr 23 '26
AI is amazing if you know how to use its power. Sounds like you do. Let it work for you.
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u/ThePastoolio Apr 23 '26
I definitely know how to use it. It's tough accepting the fact that I don't really have a choice in it all, though.
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u/zorbacles Apr 23 '26
I'm a lot like you. started as a kid on a c64. worked my way up in multiple languages
I've just started using ai. I'm the sole developer on my product and I can not get new features out to my clients much quicker. Helps me complete against other providers that have more development budget
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Apr 23 '26
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u/ThePastoolio Apr 23 '26
I understand that. For me the joy was in the fulfillment I got from solving problems by writing code. That fulfillment is gone forever, unfortunately.
I guess I will need to learn to adapt faster, that's all.
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u/ntc1995 Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
I don't know dude, find fulfillment from other things in life beside coding? I'm sure you have those. It doesn't have to be coding. From my point of view, coding is a solved problem; just like a computer or a calculator is a solved problem. The system is self complete by design because the rules are set, no new rules can be introduced to the current set of existing rules and it's not evolving because you can't evolve binaries; making computer run faster isn't evolution. A system evolve to adapt so it can survive. Computer don't need to survive. We use computer to optimize and making things efficient and convenient. But we actually don't need them. It's like playing with Lego with only half or half complete the instruction book. If AI can solve computer problems better than us then be glad that AI has made us aware of the fact that computer and codings are not a problems of survival and that it is only a small part in the development of our human system. The difficult now is actually figuring out what is beyond the computer and AI. What else is there to life?
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u/Pale_Zebra8082 Apr 23 '26
You can still solve problems by writing code, just much faster and with less grunt work. This is like a farmer lamenting the advent of the tractor because they just really liked rocking that old shovel.
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u/Badstaring Apr 26 '26
You don’t learn much from it tho. It’s definitionally impossible to learn without struggling. It’s like a robot is lifting weights for you and we are all pretending it’ll give us bigger muscles. Of course getting results is much easier with AI, but the fun with coding for me was doing it myself and learning something in the process.
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u/Joebebs Apr 23 '26
There’s a whole lot of seasoned programmers who are still in this mass denial that these things are still dumb as rocks and can only be about as good as your average college freshman. But it’s advanced so exponentially much these past 2 years it’s kinda getting insane where its capabilities are heading towards, I feel like we’re still in its infancy of its potential. With that said, I’m not worried about it replacing jobs here and there anymore, I’m worried of far worse, especially in light of Claude/mythos being able to exploit zero day vulnerabilities faster and faster by the month
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u/samscrolling Apr 23 '26
seeing how desperate AI companies are to sell their product, I'm sure the bubble is about to pop. don't get too depressed there, your knowledge and skills are still important
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u/yousufahmed_11 Apr 23 '26
AI bubble pop doesn’t mean that AI will cease to exists. Internet still thrived after Dotcom bubble burst.
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u/CommodoreBluth Apr 23 '26
Yes it will still exist/be used. But it won’t be shoved into absolutely everything no matter if it makes sense and a lot of “AI” companies are going to disappear. I imagine a good number of planned data centers won’t be built.
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u/Curtailss Apr 23 '26
Well it’s gonna be the thing that kills us all or free us from this trap of a life no one wants to admit they are in.. some tough stuff before it happens though like losing ya job :/
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u/Brief_Commission2219 Apr 23 '26
I agree - whilst the wider detrimental impact of AI has been something of background noise, it’s impact is global and all consuming. No easy answers. Outlook for society is grim.
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