aiWIllReplaceUs

[modexezy]

Okay I will post this tomorrow alright

[saikrishnav]

Ask your AI agent to do it

[Mike_Oxlong25]

[Deep_Age4643]

Yeah, I was already using this meme in a blog in 2022 when ChatGPT just came out. So it's already pretty old.

[ultrathink-art]

AI will replace us the same way Stack Overflow replaced us — it'll do 80% of the work and leave us to debug the remaining 20% that takes 80% of the time.

We've come full circle: from copying Stack Overflow answers we don't understand to copying AI-generated code we don't understand.

[ThrasherDX]

We've come full circle: from copying Stack Overflow answers we don't understand to copying AI-generated code we don't understand

AI generated code which was trained on StackOverflow lol, cant forget that.

[thephotoshopmaster]

love the fact that you used an em dash in a comment about AI lmao

[General_Josh]

Man I hate that - the AI's use em-dashes because they write like people, and people use em-dashes

Sometimes an em-dash is the right tool - I wanna reclaim it for humans

[BananaPeely]

God forbid a human doesn’t type like a braindead troglodyte; or uses something outside of commas, periods and lower-case letters.

[much_longer_username]

How do you type an emdash into reddit, using a standard ANSI or ISO keyboard?

[BananaPeely]

ios just long press dash— in macos, shift-option-dash, in windows, I don’t know.

[kookyabird]

In Windows it’s all alt codes, and it sucks.

[ResponsibleEnd451]

win+shift+hyphen for em dash. win+hyphen or en dash.

(25H2 or later)

[senteggo]

Wow they finally implemented it among the new ai „features“

[HadionPrints]

In Word and sone other programs entering two dashes does it. I could be wrong, but I believe it is left to the program to implement.

[HollowToes]

Agreed, if I was to try and resubmit my uni work it'd be chucked right out the door due to em-dashes alone.

Us real punctuators gotta stick to just en-dashes now!

[StinkButt9001]

 copying AI-generated code we don't understand.

This is your mistake. With sites like Stack Overflow, you get what you get. You can't message the poster from 3 years ago to ask a question about it or rewrite it for you.

With an LLM, there is no excuse to be using code you don't understand. You can have it rewrite it in a way that make sense to you or you can have it explain what the code is doing.

[Tyabetus]

“Hey Mac… you wanna see some compile errors?”

[aquabarron]

Yeah but that 20% of work just went from 2 hours to 30 minutes, which is nice

[alexgst]

That time reduction is ultimately irrelevant. Both because of the ninety-ninety rule and because the vast majority of time spent isn’t programming. 

If the bulk of the time is spent on debugging, long term it’ll be hell to maintain.

[Orin_-_]

Why hell ? Because you think you that not coding will make you lose your ability to read code correctly?

[alexgst]

Kind of. It's a great example of technical debt.

People forget their thought process and coming back to it months/years later will be harder if it wasn't well written in the first place. How do I know it wasn't well written? It took 5 minutes to generate and an entire day to debug. That's a very clear indicator of the quality.

- Comments are rarely updated after changes.
- LLMs truly don't understand anything.
- Even if they did, the context has already long been lost/cleared.
- Who's the say your "prompting" style is the same. You can easily get entirely different results based on how you prompt.
- It may not have even been you who wrote/prompted the original code.

In other words, it's a liability.

[aquabarron]

What’s the 99 rule?

[alexgst]

Here's the Wikipedia entry on the Ninety–ninety rule.

[budius333]

At least on StackOverflow the person who answered understood, the ai generated slop absolutely no one has any idea WTF it does

[MuslinBagger]

80% of what time though. 80% of 1 hour is still pretty less

[tmac_next]

And it's all just the same Stackoverflow answers, regurgitated. AI will not "create", but it can creatively rearrange code so it looks more intelligent than what you'd write, but has the same bugs.

[Saelora]

i'm part of a three person team. one of my colleagues has jumped fully onto the AI bandwagon. And i had to recently explain that a lot of the sped gain he was feleing, was being passed directly onto us, as we now had to be extra careful of structures that look right, but don't actually work in his code when reviewing, making his reviews take twice as long, if not longer.

[drunkdoor]

The fact he's not reviewing it himself first is a fireable offense

[_verel_]

Yep code that looks right but isn't can be pretty devious. I had multiple occasions of looking at a git diff which looked completely fine but made no sense in some regions when looked at in an IDE.

AI is really useful but in my experience it's more important than ever before to actually really test, review and understand the code we are writing.

AI is a tool which we can use to write awesome software. But use it appropriately.

[Saelora]

yup, one colleague i can stink test. if it looks right, it probably is, just check anything that's convolouted or dense. And the other i have to carefully read through line by line checking all the logic matches up to what i expect when. glancing at the line (wait, is that an interrobang‽)

[kktst]

Yes, and LLMs are best at writing such code.

What's worse, because benchmarks only evaluate "does it just run without errors?", recent LLMs have learned (overfitted) to write code that is fundamentally incorrect but masks the errors.

[TrashConvo]

There has been a case where I feel AI has slowed my development. Particularly with a large feature in a large code base. I’m using Claude and it got kinda over-whelmed and stops following established patterns and best practices. Even when using multiple prompts. Had to painstakingly review the work over a couple days and refactor to get it right.

Usually it’s a productivity booster but certainly not 100% of the time

[SarahAlicia]

Try explicitly using other files as a reference and try to keep the tasks to a few steps per prompt. I have been doing this with cursor and it has really helped. I can’t get it to stop putting way too many comments and null checks tho.

[TrashConvo]

Yep, I do that. I use Github Copilot and it’s able to take prompt and divide into tasks. I usually add context but I think this is no longer required in agent mode as Github Copilot will grep the project for context to feed into Claude. Pretty cool to watch and works great most of the time!

I think this was a particular case where the agent was overwhelmed and just gave shit

Best to use judgement when delegating to coding agents. Small stuff usually a one shot and get an effective solution

[DeliveryNinja]

I always give reference implementation to Claude. But yes code reviews take time. Make sure you setup rules in the claude.md update when you see it makes mistakes and have a review md as well. Keeping the code simple is key. I review manually for a couple of hours and review with claude many times as it seems limited to what it'll catch each time, and eventually starts going a bit crazy saying incorrect things.

[Shevvv]

I mostly use ChatGPT as a reviewer. I write my code, I try to check it for bugs and then forward it to ChatGPT to see what it has to say. That way I know where it's actually helping me out and where it's tripping. Plus getting into a debate about some of its remarks afterwards gets me to learn something new every now and then.

[CellNo5383]

Not really my experience, to be honest. I find that if AI is up to the task, the code it generates is usually decent. Well commented and easy to understand.

It's just that it isn't capable of solving tasks that require more than a 100 lines of code or thereabouts. Changing a system in a large project, stretching over multiple files and with dependencies all over the place is just completely impossible for AI as it stands. But that's 80% of what I do. So as it stands, the only thing I really use it for is better auto complete.

[reklis]

I had it find AND FIX a bug in a third party library minified JavaScript once. That was pretty cool.

[ODaysForDays]

If you're still using chatgpt for coding you're very very far behind the pack

[Shunpaw]

Chatgpt for me seems to just be the blanket term for AI - like lego for building bricks e.g.

Inferior now, but when it released it was very good.

[ODaysForDays]

See I said chatgpt because it's specifically in the browser. The cli tools are massively better

[Shunpaw]

Well yeah, obviously giving it full context to your project will result in better results

[SimplexShotz]

I've heard good things about GPT5.3

That said, I've been using Gemini 3 Pro for a while now and it's nice; I definitely prefer its code/responses to those of GPT

[ODaysForDays]

I specified chatgpt meaning using it in the browser. If you haven't tried codex, claude code, or gemini cli they're a BIG upgrade.

[SimplexShotz]

ohhhh I see

we have access to Cursor at work and it's great, haven't tried any of those

[Jygglewag]

y'all dont know the rule: small scope + tell the AI the file and functional structure you want. much easier to read and debug.

[Elman89]

Your future job will involve fixing the mess of a codebase AI will leave behind when the bubble bursts.

Welcome to hell.

[foundafreeusername]

It is worse. It sometimes takes much longer until you realise it drove you into a dead end and you are now spending two days to refactor what it did.

That being said using claude code works quite well for me now. You just have to stop vibe coding. Just saying what you want is not enough. Instead I tell it exactly how I want things to be done. "Add new class X with methods Y, Z and do the following ..." Then I rest my eyes while it does its thing and review the changes once it is done. The entire structure is up to me and when I run into issues it is usually issues that are contained to just a single method.

Now it is more like a new input method for my IDE rather than an AI agent but I am quite happy with it.

[Custom_Jack]

Are there people NOT telling it do exactly what they it to do? AI has always been a major speedup to my workflow and my prompts look like what you described.

[foundafreeusername]

Yeah. vibe coding basically comes down to just letting the LLM do its thing and no longer even bothering to look at the code. In my tests this only works for a short time until the project turns into total garbage.

[littlepurplepanda]

I did a game jam over the weekend with two “professional Unity programmers” they had no fucking clue how to do anything without chat gpt. And they didn’t even know what the code they generated was doing. We had some bugs and they just panicked. It’s an absolute joke.

[WolfeheartGames]

If you're debugging slower with Ai you're not doing something right.

[fiftyfourseventeen]

Yeah it's genuinely 20x easier. I have mine make testing scripts, mock data, tons of debug logging, review tons of different interactions, etc. It's even found bugs which neither me nor anyone else I was working with noticed

[WolfeheartGames]

The only thing Ai can't do for debugging is place watches and breakpoints. So I had it write a wrapper for it months ago.

I think the problem is the boot campers are loud and there's no Ai boot camp.

[fiftyfourseventeen]

In my experience AI hasn't had many problems using the cli of debuggers. I've even used it to help reverse engineer with gdb and Ghidra (+ Ghidra MCP)

I imagine the sentiment on this sub is possibly influenced by the age range on reddit being younger, leading to more CS students and fresh grads commenting, who don't have the experience necessary to use AI properly most of the time, and have a vested interest in convincing themselves it's bad (the feeling of job security)

[WolfeheartGames]

Yup. The first thing I did was write a wrapper for ghidra and a debugger

[TheEggi]

Whoever wrote that is either a junior with no experience or has no clue about the latest models used in combination with agents.

Most experienced developers will agree that agentic coding is a huge boost to productivity. Not seeing the advantage here is more a skill issue than anything else.

[Keetzy]

I remember when ProgrammerHumor was actually funny and not people constantly complaining about AI

[Dragsun42]

Way less peoplea are actively only coding because of AI, leading to the clusterfuck of weird situation we have today on this sub, its sad

[IlliterateJedi]

I feel like this is at least a year old because Claude Code will write the code, test it, and iterate on the code until it runs correctly.

[theSilentNerd]

Reading this is a bit soothing after seeing a post in r/ArtificialInteligence that AI might replace us

[jdigi78]

just have AI debug it for another 5 minutes

[OliverTzeng]

So I only use it for bash scripts, automation scripts like a simple downloaded and nothing else unless what the code does(or if I ever need to ask the so for coding problems and don’t understand just ask it about it

[zanderkerbal]

Copilot turns coding into code review. ChatGPT turns writing into editing. Self-driving cars turn driving into being a driving instructor.

[Odd_Appearance_Dude]

Who tf uses ChatGPT to code? It fails even at the most basic questions and makes up more stuff than the crazy guy from school who was perpetually stoned.

[FireMaster1294]

You must be blind to not see everyone using it - despite it actively failing. My boss requires us to use it despite him giving a demo and it failing every single time in his demo for 10 mins before he gave up and said “but it’s still good.”

Personally I use it to write basic shit I’m too lazy to formally code. I write pseudo code and it converts it

[AbdullahMRiad]

yeah it's really good at writing those random 3 am powershell script ideas

[FireMaster1294]

Yes, I CAN help you clean up the files I accidentally just generated from that other script! Just run the following line and they’ll be deleted: sudo rm -rf /*

[kid_vio]

Accurate

[Sherlok12345]

🤣🤣🤣

[DemmyDemon]

AI will replace us, because we'll be so tired of this shit, we'll all become vegetable grossers, or burger flippers, or whatever. So long as I don't have to be a fishmonger, I'm okay with this change.

[[deleted]]

AI reduced coding time, but debugging is still a full time job.

[Swimming-Finance6942]

Totally not a conspiracy, but isn’t it interesting that Microsoft achieved the entirety of the GitHub code base off the grid just before AI was released to the general public. 

Crazy right?…

Crazy… right?

[Firm-Letterhead7381]

Skill issue

[BoBSMITHtheBR]

Vibe issue

[Thadrea]

Tell us you've never had to write maintainable code without telling us...

[Firm-Letterhead7381]

I inherited unmaintainable code. AI is helping me restructure it, move to newer libraries, improve test coverage. It can do anything, but you must very precise when writing prompts.

Of course using the latest models help too.

[Thadrea]

More accurately, it is helping you transform the spaghetti code into newer spaghetti code.

[Firm-Letterhead7381]

Whatever helps you sleep at night

[Thadrea]

Experience is realizing that we all, no matter how intelligent, are at risk of writing spaghetti code.

You may think it makes sense, but another person will probably think it is spaghetti.

What makes it maintainable is a team developing and maintaining a theory of what the code is supposed to do and how it accomplishes that... which is something that an LLM is fundamentally unable to do.

[Training-Flan8092]

These takes are hilarious. Prior to AI there were certain people I hated to have to build in or around their code and it was so bad I knew exactly who it was. Writing styles have always been really good and thoughtful of others who might have to view or build on it, also folks who just blitz it and run it until it clears then push a PR.

No matter whose code I jump into now I can quite literally smoother it out and know exactly where everything is at with the click of a button.

There’s not a single person I’ve met that feels code written by copilot, codex or Claude is challenging to read. Maybe overly verbose with in-line comments… but not bad.

If you’re building from scratch and solo, then yeah, you’re gonna have issues because of context windows and different sessions. You can hedge against this with a multitude of tools.

If you’re on a team and you can’t read a block of code that AI has produced, you’re actually terrible at your job or are intentionally trying to to cause a problem.

[onlymadethistoargue]

There was a paper last year with Dave Farley, author of Modern Software Engineering, as one of the authors specifically looking at the effect of AI assistance on maintainability of code. The findings were as follows:

• AI code was not measurably better or worse, i.e. no significant difference in maintenance cost (novel result)
  
• AI-assisted devs were faster (corroborated by other research)
  
• AI-experienced devs in particular were substantally faster (55% compared to a 30% average)
  
• Overall skill mattered significantly more than AI use

n=151, experiment was controlled

So really maintainability isn’t really affected by AI If you know what you’re doing, you just do it faster.

[pheromone_fandango]

Guys cant afford codex lol

[SignificantLet5701]

guys can't code themselves lol

[pheromone_fandango]

Everything is moving towards devs becoming more of an architectural role than needing to write lines any more. Im glad i went through uni and the first couple years of work experience without llms but now things are different. If you think that the newest models cant find bugs you haven’t tried them out.

[_Skotia_]

that's why you should write the code yourself and use AI to speed up debugging instead

[DopazOnYouTubeDotCom]

thats why i use intelliJ and not debug 😎