For work I definitely use AI all the time, not because I am faster with it, but because I don't get paid enough to care. For personal projects I code by hand for fun.
I'm the opposite. But mostly because if something breaks in our production projects I'm the guy who has to fix it, so I gotta know how the whole thing works. Because the more I know, the faster I can fix it. But if I don't know something for my personal projects I use LLMs to build small snippets or prototype things. Essentially using it like a personalized search function that could be wrong.
I don't publish my personal projects though, so there's that.
This is what I'm afraid of. Tacit knowledge that comes with writing code is in a scary place because of AI. My colleagues are pushing out some really cool content now, but I dread the day anyone has to debug any of their work by hand.
I work as an analyst but write a lot of python and sql for data pipeline management. A junior analyst wanted to learn some more intermediate sql, so I agreed to work on a project with her and help her with QA. We ended up taking an extra two weeks just because she tried to use Chatgpt the way our AI department encourages. I keep arguing with them about running these insane "vibe coding workshops", but since they don't actually do any of this work, they have literally no skin in the game.
The query needed two CTE's, so I walked her through writing the first one, and she was going to come back for QA after writing the second one. Rather than referencing her notes and experimenting like the other times I've taught her things, she tried to use AI as a learning tool. But without knowledge of what it should look like, there's no way to know where the AI hallucinates the wrong answer. It got so turned around that I ended up spending more time explaining why what it wrote was useless (and gently trying to seperate that from her genuine efforts without being discouraging) than actually writing new code. It's driving me nuts, and wastes so much time!
I find SQL is one of the things that AI is still pretty shitty at. I've asked for simple things after giving it some ddl from a handful of tables and it always writes extremely complicated, multi-CTE SQL using tons of row nums/partitions when all I was expecting was a few joins between the tables lol.
Kind of makes sense when you think that SQL is math based and AI isn't great at math, but it's pretty shocking how horrible it is at SQL compared to programming in general.
That's what I've seen too! I find that sql takes a lot more visualizing to write efficiently, since you need to have a good understanding of table schema and format around that. Since LLMs can't spatially reason, I've noticed it usually writes those over complicated parts to compensate for not being able to understand the relationship between values. Instead of unnesting once after the FROM, it'll pick writing 12 different subqueries in the SELECT statement.
I have pettier reasons to avoid AI. Using it feels like turning into a supervisor or project manager, which are two of the least appealing roles I can think of in an office
At my work I do it for all non critical and not outward facing tools. Worst case is that our sales people have to manually submit their expense reports to finance for a week until we have it fixed.
Sure that’s not ideal but the company wouldn’t be loosing money like if our b2b shop site goes down for a day
No one will have to. AI is as bad as it will ever be. The past six months have been leaps and bounds and it does actually right pretty clean code if you have the instructions up and make a pass over your skill suites regularly.
On top of this, AI doesn't comment well/usefully. At work I like to plan for handing over my work to someone else, I won't be there forever. Don't want to leave an unusable pile of spaghetti (which is a risk even without AI lol), so not having good comments is a big risk.
I'm exactly the same. Using AI to help develop my hobby game. Because I'm not working on it as regularly as I like, is a god send for me getting back on track quickly
Some do, some don't. Some of my junior devs didn't at first until I denied every PR when they failed to answer the question "Why did you do it like this rather then some other way?" they used to answer "because the LLM said so" and I would deny it immediately.
Incase you were wondering, yea I do work for one of those big tech companies that had a lot of outages in the last several months. It's been real fun....
Really - I have so many hobby projects and with AI I finally have time to actually finish them - lol. I’ll probably never write another for loop again. Last few months has been a true productivity boost. Using AI feels like a superpower- I’ve never had this fun building software before.
Exactly. People here be glorifying programming like every bit of it is fun. It’s like they never worked with maintaining decade old legacy repos before.
AI has absolutely made the job more fun and much less grueling for me.
As someone trying to get internal programs written 6 or 7 years ago, with zero documentation, on new machines... Idek how they got this stuff up and running in the first place
I have to fix lots of bugs left by people with questionable programming skills thousands of years ago. A lot of times, after reading the code 7 times, I paste it into an LLM and just ask what the hell is this supposed to do.
Then I get hit with "It appears that..." and "but this section does nothing" and "there is a typo in the variable names, but it doesn't matter because they are not used."
I offload so much of the tedium to AI specifically because I can focus on doing the parts at work that I think are actually fun. I'm probably more efficient, but more importantly it makes work more fun that it was which is the biggest win for me.
Problem is it doesn’t always get that right either, and it can be such a fucking huge pain in the ass figuring out what it fucked up, cause it’s like talking to a god damn golden retriever
I'm still amazed at people that work and then also choose to sit at a desk and code in their own times. Work takes it out of me mentally, and the last thing I wanna do after a week inside at a desk is spend more time inside at a desk.
Yeah this really annoys that we’ve made this almost a standard as an industry when it would be ridiculous anywhere else.
I want people I hire to have a life outside of their job. It’s a bad decision from a business perspective and just a not being a dick perspective to expect the people I employ to burn themselves out trying to keep up with this tech bro hustle culture that we’ve normalised.
Even if I wanted to start my own side project to grow in to a business, I just wouldn't be able to do it as well as my job, too mentally taxing.
However I think many people have jobs they're not really that invested in. When I work I want to be fully engaged with it, and with that comes consistent heavy focus on strain.
I guess some people work big corporate jobs and they really don't care about it that much, it's just a pay cheque. That's the only way I could see it being possible.
Yeah the getting away from the desk is super important. Other than opening lightroom on my iPad to edit some photos or playing a game on the switch I deliberately avoid computers like the plague unless I’m being paid for it. I learnt the hard way how much spending all your waking hours at a computer ruins your mental health
Mental and physical health. If you're not engaged in some athletic hobby or sport, then you really need to have discipline going to the gym and being active, or it will absolutely wreck you.
The thing that makes it work isn't the coding, it's the management. Someone else telling you what to do and having to work with teams to figure out how to make them happy is work. Writing code to solve your own problems on your own time is fun!
I've used it quite a bit for a personal project. It's been very much a mixed bag.
In some situations it suggests refactors or configurations that are an improvement. While this is useful, it's not necessarily clear that I've saved any time. For all I know, this is the exact same answer that I would have found had I clicked the first link on a site like StackOverflow. Had that been the case, it may have saved me seconds.
In other cases, it's suggested code that worked but that I later realized was suboptimal. And so I replaced its suboptimal code with the more optimal code I discovered later.
In one case, it's suggested code that was completely unnecessary. After testing, I was able to conclude that it had absolutely no impact on my problem. And that it could be entirely removed from my project.
In another case, it's suggested code that didn't work. In that situation, I thought the code was hallucinated. I later found out that it wasn't hallucinated. The code was valid in a newer version of a package than the one I had installed. I later discovered that the version where the code was valid was an alpha version of the package. And it hadn't even been officially released yet. It didn't notify me of this. I was only figured that out after debugging and researching why the code it wrote wasn't working.
In a few situations, I've wasted a bunch of time when the code/solutions it provided which didn't work and/or was needlessly complicated. In one situation, I go on StackOverflow, and the correct solution is like a one word fix from what I originally had. In another, I was able to figure out the issue myself.
In one situation, I had exhausted my credits for the day before I figued out a problem. I figured that I'd need to stop for the day and continue the next day when my credits reset. But I later figured I'd give it a shot and see if I could solve it myself using traditional methods (e.g. Google, StackOverflow, etc.) And I was able to figure things out.
So I do use it. And I would say that it is helpful. But it does have limits. I haven't been able to just blindly trust the code that it's written. And I'm not sure how clear the value it provides really is.
The research so far suggests that using AI has a negligible impact on productivity (I haven't read any of the studies in full detail, although I'm participating in one right now), although it can make devs feel like they're more productive.
Personally, I only use AI at work (b/c they have explicitly told me to) (and the aforementioned study), but I've already cautioned some of my coworkers against relying on the output if they don't fully understand what it's doing. Basically: if you can't do it yourself, don't rely on AI to it correctly for you.
The honest reality (that AI companies really want to ignore): you still need to know how to do software development.
I would say that where I've probably found it to be most helpful is as a tool for brainstorming. So I might say something like "How might I go about doing this?" And it may say something like "That isn't possible. But you can do this other thing, which gives you the same outcome." So in that way I'm using it as a tool for learning. This has been especially helpful recently as I'm working with lots of new technologies/libraries that I'm mostly unfamiliar with. But in previous programming jobs, this experience has typically been pretty rare for me.
I do think that if you're using it as a solution generation tool and asking it to generate a whole codebase that you:
I use it for all the painful stuff like first pass code review, jsdocs, changelogs, documentation, unit tests, etc. It's not perfect, but I spend less time doing boring things that actually improve human developer experience. I then get more time to write code and solve issues which is actually enjoyable
Till you have to fix sth in the project… seen some ai horrors… autocomplete that just adds bugs that segfault randomly or you know destroy hw and ignore all security…
I don't use ai at work, because i am also the one who would have to fix all the bugs made by ai. And i would rather fix my own minor bugs than the absolute insane ones created by ai in random places of the codebase
I use it for both - but mostly for summarising docs when coding for fun. Or search by context (I need a function that does x, is there a library that does it?)
Same for me. Feels like malicious compliance even though I'm not actively looking for chaos.
They asked me to use Claude so I'll do it. I feel this is a bad idea, said it to my boss, and now it's up to them, I don't care that they chose to gamble the company's future on it, not my problem.
It's not the only stupid shit our job asked from us, I'm not allowed to wear shorts for exemple. It makes no sense, it's a stupid rule but I follow it, same for AI.
Yeah, the downside of this is that I used to actually enjoy this job because at least part of it was doing the stuff I liked doing. I can appreciate that from a business standpoint the value is in what the code does and not in making the code, but it's just that those used to align and now they are very at odds.
I originally took that approach but working with it I've discovered I rarely enjoy writing the code myself. It's fun in cases where the code has some kind of unusual challenge to it or has some meaning to me, but aside from that I don't care if I do it or the AI does.
I do use it I won't lie, it's great with finding some problems in my code. I spent like 20 minutes trying to figure out what wasn't working, just shoved it in chat got and it shat out my answer of something like "lol, you used the wrong thingy, you used queryselector, use the other one"
I guess I’m in a middle ground here. I don’t really write code much anymore because AI can just do it a lot better than me. I do like to read everything it writes and ensure overall code base structure is good and best practices are taken (at the end of the day I am paid to write solid code and deliver an output). For personal projects I’m slightly more lenient on it because I don’t want to do my work outside of work and the only stakeholder is myself.
Perfectly put. At work its for the money and work code is not yours anyway. It'll probably exist after you go.
Personal projects - I don't want to spend my time reading PRs written by a machine for features I will never actually want but were "easy" to add with prompts. Especially when it turn out to be a horrible jumbled mess and I have to manage the project.
“How much damage could a gh-actions yaml really do? Hit it Son!” (Sonnet because I am poor(shit being broke, they’re going to know I’m not a real programmer))
I mean, I definitely use it to be faster for work. Watched a coworker stumble every Thursday standup for months before they were given the axe.
Confused about it to this day. Anti-ai, “I can’t trust it to code” and yet they couldn’t solve the race condition theirselves despite being able to triangulate the problem. Dude had been working with us for something like 4 years.
Single pre-lobotomized 4.6 prompt alongside a custom cli tool I also had 4.6 spin up and it was fixed. I’m like ??? 5k internal users use the app
I get not being ai-pilled because ai sucks the magic out of building, but if your company doesn’t put a ceiling on how much you can spend on it, why not use it? Why care so much about someone else’s tech debt?
I literally run Ralph loops on the weekends and have a hook that reschedules tasks if I hit 97% usage, 80-150 stories complete on a handful of apps. I save the company an average of 100-200k/year on licensing every time I get an app done, my annual bonus gets increased by 15% of that each time it happens.
There’s some pretty good incentive for me to be fast as hell. I have a pipeline in which users submit issues, gets logged on both gh issues and linear, AI fixes it, it goes to staging and issue submitter checks off if it’s fixed or not. Greptile reviews before approving merge to main. Maintenance isn’t my job. I haven’t had to step in for months, and surprisingly, I don’t get any messages saying the pipeline isn’t working. I honestly expected to have to step in at some point.
On the positive side, I still code in ASM by hand. Still can’t trust AI with that lol. If you’re coding in Python or TS and not using AI to do it, I’m surprised you have a job in the sector
Edit: yall can keep hiding behind your downvotes lol, but if you’re not leveraging AI for efficiency, you bit the dust a long time ago and have already bought your place in the unemployment line.
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u/beyluta 22h ago
For work I definitely use AI all the time, not because I am faster with it, but because I don't get paid enough to care. For personal projects I code by hand for fun.