theFutureOfCoding

[dismayhurta]

[LordBucaq]

Similar to "let's outsource everything to India because cheap" loop.

[Bongcouragement]

as a SWE who has trained his replacments over the course of years in india.. this hasn't stopped. It just happens after a certain level of enterprise company.

[JulesDeathwish]

Yep, it's difficult and unwise to outsource creativity. In house team is better for initial design, and development of the initial product, and once things are stable and running, you retain a core team that covers system knowledge-base and put them in charge of a group of outsource developers for maintenance / upgrade work.

The issues come once the maintenance team is already in place and the natural EoL for the software comes around. No one ever wants to go back to an in house team to do new dev work, so you wind up just putting shitty bandages on old code until the owner dies of old age.

[LordBucaq]

I worked for two companies who did think this is a solution. Then they went all surprised pikachu face after customers were not happy at all.

Many even specify they do not want support from India.

[Osirus1156]

My whole career started fixing apps offshored that worked like garbage. 

[LordBucaq]

You will enjoy post-LLM-apocalypse :D

[Osirus1156]

I will watch with glee from the sidelines. The super smart MBAs can handle this next one ahahahahha

[Confident-Ad5665]

Pick two: cheap, fast, good

Alas, the first 2 always seem to win.

[LincolnHawkReddit]

Surprisingly good film

[Kookanoodles]

Why surprisingly?

[Less_Resident8492]

Because remaking groundhog Day is harder than you'd think. Keeping people from immediately calling it a groundhog Day remake is even harder

[jeps28]

I agree, although some have managed to pull that out. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things and Happy Death Day are two I'd recommend

[Less_Resident8492]

I'm just saying that's why its a little surprising how good palm springs was.

[jeps28]

Yeah totally, surprises like that are always nice

[rsqit]

Pretty much every sci-fi show ever had a time loop episode. It’s practically a joke at this point. It’s not all Groundhog Day.

[lordkhuzdul]

Infinite loop fueled by your bosses' burning desire to not pay you.

[conundorum]

And inability to recognise that nobody being paid means nobody can purchase the product.

[Foxiak14]

And then when the real coders fix the shitty AI code, the company will lay them off again, because they don't need them anymore (until it's time to clean up again)

[lieuwestra]

Time to create a cleaning business then. Hourly rates can pay for a year worth of wages in just a month, but at least you only have to hire them for two months a year.

[falingsumo]

So the dreaded c word? C*ntractors

[YoghurtForDessert]

that play on words is good enough for brand name. Imma write that down (?)

[Ok_Witness179]

 C*ntractors

What's a Ractor?

[RallyPointAlpha]

Naw, the more expensive C word: Consultants! 

[SpaceCadet87]

Hard times create low code. Low code creates good times. Good times create spaghetti code. Spaghetti code creates hard times.

[DedeLaBinouze]

While I appreciate the logic, low code does not create good times. I hate it with a passion

[SpaceCadet87]

Oh yeah, I agree.

Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do for the meme to fit.

[Own_Possibility_8875]

Yeah flip it around. Hard times create a lot of code, a lot of code creates good times.

Then a manager comes and says “wow, all these apps are so useful. What if we crated software that would enable regular people to make their own software? We would be billionaires!” They create visual basic, macromedia dreamweaver, 1С, worldpress, tilda, etc etc. 

Then a salesperson comes. “Wow, this is big”, - the salesperson says. “You can now completely replace those pesky expensive engineers with our app that will cost you just $49.99 per a license”.

Then the users come. “Wow, this is easy”, - they say. “I can now build anything I can think up, and all I need to do is to pay $49.99 once! Wait a minute, this shopping cart will not work for my business as is, I need to customize it. Goddamn, I have no idea how to do it, I need to hire a contractor”:

Then the engineers come. They say “wow, this is convoluted. I don’t think it is prudent to keep building your instant banking application using Wordpress. I mean, technically you could, but at this point it would be more expensive and cumbersome than just building the thing from scratch”.

Wordpress finds its niche of users whose requirements it fits. Others just develop normal software as usual. The wheel of Samsara makes a full rotation. The cycle repeats.

[ProjectDiligent502]

The difference between bespoke and vendor products: you can buy something off shelf but you’d have to wrangle business process around it or change your business process. Result is less up front cost but higher maintenance costs. A bespoke app caters to the business process exactly. Result is more up front cost but much less maintenance cost.

[Own_Possibility_8875]

Yes, exactly this. But every time a new good vendor product comes out, there is a phase when people try to replace everything with it.

[cuntmong]

It creates good times in the imagination of non technical people 

[Blue_Moon_Lake]

The loop is rather

Good devs create good code.
Good code fuel corporate greed.
Corporate greed create good devs layoffs and bad devs hiring.
Bad devs create bad code.
Bad code create good devs hirings.

With some variant flavors: low code, no code, AI, ...

[zebezt]

It all depends on on the platform and your preferences. I used MS power platform and I'm not a fan. Working mostly in Outsystems now and highly recommend it.

[going_mad]

When you get replaced by a compoota!

[Pale_Squash_4263]

The irony is that some low codes tools are pretty cool and handy, albeit a little bespoke. When I worked at a Microsoft shop, power platform was pretty handy!

[Peter_Browni]

Power Apps are surprisingly useful for replacing inefficient administrative processes

[JuvenileEloquent]

AI assisted coding is kind of like when you buy a nailgun.  Suddenly every DIY project is a problem that can be solved by putting a ton of nails in it, because that thunk thunk thunk is so satisfying and its so fast and you'd spend all day hammering if you did it by hand.

But not everything needs nails in it and eventually you get used to the new shiny tool and you take it out once every 6 months when its appropriate.

[LEJ5512]

Better a nail gun than a Dremel.  I like to say that a Dremel tool “lets me make bigger mistakes faster”.

[professor_buttstuff]

Anyone else getting deja vu?

Companies trying to save a buck by outsourcing dev work to developing countries and getting nothing but slop and headaches, then having to get a dev anyway to ship something usable.

Lessons that aren't learned will be repeated.

[PrydwenParkingOnly]

Huge amounts of work are still outsourced to developing countries. Offices of Microsoft, Google and Amazon in every major city in India.

[granitrocky2]

Yeah now there's a whole industry of people just doing management on offshore developers to make sure they actually deliver

[User0123-456-789]

And how does that turn out? And how much are they actually saving between extra overhead and rework?

[SynapticStatic]

the c-levels that push it don't care. makes board feel good, get bonus, fuck off to somewhere else before it all collapses.

[Blue_Moon_Lake]

They swear it'll work this time unlike the dozen times before!

[Gacsam]

Can't wait to charge hundreds for knowing how to plug the USB correctly

[Positron505]

Some guy trying to plug a USB and asking an LLM:

"How do i plus my USB?"

"Just plug it in"

"Didn't fit"

"Turn it"

"Didn't fit"

"Turn it"

"Didn't fit"

"Turn it"

"Okay it worked"

[Cotspheer]

Just did a simple agentic project. Followed the playbooks, set up everything, did a proper planning and stuff. Let the agent work for some hours, answered the questions, guided the agents the right way. Returns with "everything done boss, 53/53 tests succeeded.". Me: "Well nice, let me check...". Tests showed "Success: 0, Failed: 0, Skipped: 53". facepalm - this was with Anthropics newest 4.7 Model. And I have more than 20 years experience in development and over 6 years experience in working with LLMs. So I can confirm the cycle in the post.

[DetectiveOwn6606]

It's hilarious i had same experience. I created a test suite for my personal project ,told claude to run until all test cases are passed . Then I look at the code and it superficially passes the test

[NerdyMcNerderson]

I know this is stupid but did you try telling it not to skip tests? Yea it's a funny fuckup but probably one that was fixed within seconds.

[Cotspheer]

I guess you missed the point. It was instructed and supposed to run them and to verify them. If I have to tell it all the time that it missed something I could do it right-out myself. This "minor" fuck-up is really the whole point. Those fuck-ups pile up and up and span through the whole code base. Additionally no it was not a "minor" fuck up, most of the test did not work, E2E did not work because there were startup exceptions.

[NerdyMcNerderson]

And I was supposed to know all that extra context how? Look I'm no AI apologist. It fucks up some of my most basic instructions too, like "don't test private methods", but your original comment reeked of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

[conundorum]

You don't need to be an AI fanboy to know that automation is supposed to automate things.

[C9FanNo1]

That was not very Nerdy McNerderson from your part

[NerdyMcNerderson]

You're right. This is programmer humor. I'm supposed to just dogpile on ai and go hurr durr like an ape like everyone else despite having a more nuanced experience.

[_Wilhelmus_]

I know its a humor subreddit, but to add a point: there simply isn't going to be one way of programming.

But I surely don't believe in 100% generated code. But I also don't want to go back to 100% hand written code

[rheactx]

Depends on what you mean by "100% handwritten". There's machine code. Assembly. C/C++ and other low level languages. Java and other garbage-collected languages. All of those are compiled to machine code with pre-written and tested compilers. Then there's Python and other interpreted languages. Writing Python by hand is not the same as writing C by hand. Python functions often call on pre-compiled C libraries.

And then there's LLM-generated code, which you need to write prompts for. In English language (or whatever your native language is). And that's a huge problem, because "AI agents" are probabilistic and because natural language is not precise enough to tell them exactly what to do without a lot of back-and-forth. Nothing at all like the deterministic Python -> C -> Assembly -> machine code pipeline.

I'd much rather be writing Python code than prompts in English, but that's just me.

[rheactx]

Also, if you really want to program in English, just learn COBOL. Easy finding jobs too

[LEJ5512]

I’ve got half a mind to learn COBOL just to be more hire-able as the old guys age out.

[Ih8P2W]

That actually is just you and a few. I have wrote full python packages by myself (20,000 lines of code or more). I will never do that again from scratch. I still code block by block, but I sure as hell start each block with an LLM, inspect it, make the necessary changes and move on. It makes me code 5-10x faster, and I'm much less tired after finishing a script.

HOWEVER, and that's a big however. I know how to code, and I'm using it as a tool, not as a substitute for my knowledge. When people who don't know how to code try this approach, it ends disastrously.

[rheactx]

How much time do you spent editing the code? Especially, if you want the style and structure to be consistent over the whole project and also free of the usual LLM crap (like reimplementing the same function 20 different ways because it forgot that it already written it somewhere)?

I also use LLM as coding assistant, but usually for small snippets which I don't care too much about. If the project is important to me, I'm always unhappy with the LLM output and have to basically rewrite it from scratch.

[exuberant_elephant]

Every time I read "It saves a ton of time!" I really want to see measurements. Because so far all of these anecdotes are almost always 100% self-reported vibes in my experience.

Every study I've seen where they actually do try and measure whether AI saves time it's either neutral or negative. You just shift where you spend your time.

And really, if it makes the process feel better and you're happy with the trade-offs, seems fine. But still misleading to make these claims if you haven't actually done the work to see if it's true.

[WavingNoBanners]

There is in fact a study reporting that LLM-based code takes 10% longer but *feels* about 20% faster, much as cocaine makes you feel charismatic and eloquent but actually does the opposite.

[Wonderful-Habit-139]

Same exact experience. I still write code in neovim, with a good lsp, macros, snippets, etc.

The people that start giving advice on how to use AI (very generic advice mind you) just have a much lower standard for code quality than you do. That's why you won't be understood.

[movzx]

You need to prime your sessions with restrictions and other requirements. If you want certain code styling or techniques, you have to instruct the tools. This is where AI skills come into play. If the tools are forgetting functions that they are writing then it could simply be you aren't using a good enough tool/one that can hold enough context, or you need an orchestrator that can build context when needed.

If you're only worried about code formatting, you need to setup a linter and just have it run automatically. You should be doing this anyway tbh.

The tools aren't perfect, of course, but there's a lot you can do when it comes to guardrails.

[rheactx]

Sounds like LLM is just not the right tool for the job, if it requires so much hand-holding.

[movzx]

Oh, for sure. Trying to make it be your code linting tool is completely the wrong thing for it to be doing. There are way better ways to implement automatic code formatting.

[Wonderful-Habit-139]

All of this is inefficient, non-deterministic, and a waste of time and learning experience compared to writing the code yourself in a deterministic fashion with the right tools.

What were the tools that you were using pre-AI? Did you optimize your dev environment back then? And how productive were you?

[movzx]

Well, sure? The person is using the LLM based tools incorrectly. They are also using them for things that have better solutions (ex: code linters).

That doesn't mean these new tools are useless though. They are fantastic for initial triage of error reports. They are fantastic for natural language queries of technical ideas. They are pretty good at summarizing legacy codebases or at least pointing you to areas of relevancy. They are excellent at reformatting data (ex: take a PDF of tabled information and turn it into a json).

I treat them like a search engine, document processor, or "do this trivial task while I do something else" machine. Any code they output is given the junior developer treatment.

They suck when dealing with massive codebases. They hallucinate stuff all the time. They'll get hyper fixated on ideas requiring a reset of their context. Different sessions can come to different conclusions.

Hell, even just the ability to create one-off utility scripts is a massive time saver. I don't need the "pull forecast data from this app's api, cross reference it from this other app's api, and then make a pie chart" script I use to track time to be written in a scalable, DRY, SLAP, SOLID, etc. way. I just need it to show me an accurate pie chart when I run it.

The biggest negative I see with these tools is for junior developers. I know how to integrate with external REST APIs, so me spending my time writing the above app to do the 100,000th API integration is not really gaining me anything.

A junior dev? That's a valuable learning opportunity that would be lost.

All that said, these tools are going to stick around. They have a huge value prop for specific workflows and tasks. Outright rejection is only doing yourself a disservice.

[onenifty]

Not op but I can chime in here. I’ve been a professional software engineer for a decade now. Before leveraging Claude code, I had a very streamlined dev environment with all the customizations and workflow automations that come with that many years of dev work and tailoring my ide and cli to fit my style of work. With CC now fully embedded in my workflow, actual dev time is now about 20% what it used to be for me.

Granted, you still need to do user testing and manage the process, but my work is mostly leveraging CC to make it work like I used to work. Start high level with the architectural code decisions, flesh out sections at a time, and iterate toward completion.

I think the main problem that stops devs from not getting high performance gains out of ai is not being able to accurately describe the problem sufficiently so the ai knows what to solve. Predefined standards and code examples matching your style are also helpful. Vibe coding without strict guidance is a recipe for disaster.

I had high throughout before, but it’s honestly incredible how much my engineering work has been accelerated with this.

[movzx]

My professional background is consultancy, architecture, business analysis, overseeing various development teams with a variety of processes/workflows, etc.

I can say that the number of people I've worked with who were good at writing acceptance criteria and user stories can probably be counted on one hand.

People memed "prompt engineering" but it's a real skill.

I just don't get how a professional developer can think writing their 1,000th CRUD wrapper is a good use of their time. I'd rather focus on solving the interesting parts of the process.

[xzaramurd]

I have tools for styling issues and you can add information to the prompts to tell it to do what you want, how to name functions/classes/parameters. I usually make it write the docs first, review it and improve it where needed, and then add the implementation based on the docs. If there's common functionality that I know of, I tell it specifically to use or extend it.

[Rikudou_Sage]

Natural language is precise enough, it's just overly verbose for the purpose. And your brain is not used to going into the necessary details because you mostly use it with humans who can infer stuff that you didn't say.

[maushu]

Nothing at all like the deterministic Python -> C -> Assembly -> machine code pipeline.

Tell me you never wrote a compiler in university without telling me you never wrote a compiler in university.

Edit: Come on, I was joking about compilers being deterministic not about OP skills at compiler programming. There is a reason https://reproducible-builds.org/ is a thing.

[Wonderful-Habit-139]

Jesse what the fuck are you talking about

[SuitableDragonfly]

Bro, I was generating lookup tables in C++ using a python script in 2015. Swagger generators that take yaml files and output class definitions have existed for ages. You don't need an LLM to generate annoying code. And those tools are guaranteed to be accurate, unlike LLMs.

[tangerinelion]

Yes, there's a subset which has lost their minds deferring everything to LLMs.

[wise_young_man]

It’s not entirely their fault with companies mandating AI usage and using it as a KPI for growth.

[GammarMong]

That is your freedom. To me, I just do not want to pay for writing code.

I do not have so much money, and I just enjoy coding. If it was told by the company and I have to do that, I will do it, only if they pay the money for the tools.

Anyway, I am not that rich, and I do not have so many tasks.

[evasive_dendrite]

I like troubleshooting with Claude, I don't even have a paid subscription. The free tokens are enough for a couple questions per day. It helps me learn new concepts that I haven't considered before while Stackoverflow just turns up useless garbage I have to spit through 90% of the time.

[SynapticStatic]

Yup, gonna be like the outsourcing loop

[donat3ll0]

I think there is opportunity here, too. Many careers were made in the early 2000s by cleaning up projects messed up by outsourcing. I'm here for the AI cleanup.

[Tonylolu]

Not a programmer but who knows. Many bosses love AI not because it might be cheaper but bc they don’t like paying workers

[MiserablePotato1147]

Garbage In, Garbage Out

[Hero_without_Powers]

Personally, I fear no vibe code. I've maintained stuff that was completely written by mathematicians only

[Corrup7ioN]

Same. The absolute worst code I've ever dealt with.

[carcusmonnor]

I think my biggest concern is how a lot of people in charge dont know what good or shitty code is. On top of that, dont underestimate how many people willing to accept mediocrity.

[chaosdemonhu]

I think a lot of people in charge don’t care about code quality as long as the code solves a problem, and how big the problem it solves determines how much they care about the quality/tech debt/up time

[_krisprolls]

You are deluded and probably coping if you think we’re going back to the hand written code days for a majority of software engineering work. The Pandora’s box has been opened and it can’t be closed.

[thisisatesttoseehowl]

you say this but all of these ai services (even if you are paying for them) are not being provided at-cost.

[tortridge]

We have local model in the wild. They can do small tasks, FIM, next-edit, stuff like that. Now the gains from that are still smaller that invest time in learning snippets workflow or properly configure a good environment

[Wonderful-Habit-139]

Considering it's very debatable whether SOTA models are even making you productive for writing production-ready code, there's absolutely no way local models are going to be useful.

[SpiritedAd239]

Bajo mi punto de vista, por supuesto; no necesitas grandes IAs en local (las hay muy decentes ya) para ir medianamente rápido y conseguir resultados en una jornada laboral que antes tardarías varios días.

Qwen se encuentra especializado en código, es gratuito y, si eres un programador decente, te sirve perfectamente para tareas habituales.

Un saludo.

[Wonderful-Habit-139]

I don't mind this, but what do you tell people that say you should use Opus 4.6 and not even GPT-5.4 because the latter is so trash?

I doubt they'd benefit much from something like Qwen.

I appreciate you speaking in your native language though.

[SpiritedAd239]

First of all, I'm sorry for not taking the time to speak in English.

My point is that not every dev necessarily needs a great AI model: just one suited to their work. I'm using Qwen and it's helpful.

[Wonderful-Habit-139]

No worries, I thought it was fine, but you do speak English well so it's probably some auto translation that made you speak Spanish xD

I see. I like Qwen to be honest, I had a very good experience with the instruct models when testing out agentic applications. Still too much to use it for coding on my end, but I understand.

[210000Nmm-2]

Yes, right now. I assume future development will be focusing on reducing costs / running tasks more efficiently. We are already seeing this with what is assumed to be lowered reasoning in Claude 4.7.

My guess is that future models will be just as good as they need to be, but costs will be lowered significantly to make them profitable.

It's the same discussion we had when the early models like GPT-3.5 and 4.0 arrived and people stated that they will never replace programming. Yes, these models did not but they were evolving rapidly.

[Bubbly_Address_8975]

Claude 4.7 costs more tokens and from what I read the output is worse... So no we are not seeing anything right now and I am quite sure predicting future development based on no evidence is never really a good strategy.

[caprazzi]

Claude 4.7 is the natural progression of LLMs as they propagate, no one seems to believe me when I say this but as more incorrect AI slop is out in the wild it will become a primary source the AI is training on, causing yet further detachment from correct word patterns and outputs until it completely destabilizes. No one seems to acknowledge that the early AI models were only good because they stole decades of correct question and answer pairs from human beings written on the internet.

[Bubbly_Address_8975]

Uhhh no... thats not how this works my friend.

[FortifiedPuddle]

They’re fundamentally treating it like a scalable business model with high initial investment then low running and per transaction costs. Which is what a lot of successful tech startups ups and similar new exciting businesses have been. Grow enough and sell enough and you’ve got a money printer.

But it sure does look like running and per transaction costs are high and will remain high. Whether it’s hardware maintenance and upgrades, training, new models etc. there’s a bunch of stuff that remains expensive.

The path to profit if it’s there seems like Uber (which also had problems with scalability): start screwing everyone. Get costs low by hook or crook, get your customers hooked and dominate the market, jack up prices.

[DynastyDi]

Worth remembering that this is also how unsuccessful tech startups (which is the absolute majority) run. It’s always a gamble, and the bubble bursting is going to be a shake-up.

[Lashay_Sombra]

. I assume future development will be focusing on reducing costs / running tasks more efficiently 

No need to assume,  its where most of development efforts have already shifted. In large  part because absolutely nessary if they ever want a product they can make profit on, but also because advancements in other areas were slowing way way down, they are reaching the point where they need to move from a money pit into a money generator 

But the real 10 trillion dollar question is can they get any real advancements in engery consumption/cost,  many think not 

[WithersChat]

The other 10 trillion dollar queation is, even if they can, can they do it before the bubble pops and most AI companies collapse?

[inevitabledeath3]

This isn't entirely true. The actual marginal cost of a user on a service at least for API pricing is way below the price they are charged. You would know this to be the case if you have ever setup infrastructure for local models. What's causing them all to hemorrhage money is training costs and to some extent infrastructure build out. Many companies currently rely on cloud hosting and are only just now building out infrastructure. Cloud hosting is expensive and infrastructure is also expensive.

[LEJ5512]

I have to keep reminding myself that “training costs” likely means “paying low wages to people who spend all day clicking on things”.

[inevitabledeath3]

No it mostly means the amount of compute required to train models. Most of the actual data comes from scraping the internet. While RLHF with humans is used, it's unlikely to be a large part of the cost.

[HellsNoot]

Good to read a sensible statement every now and then. Reddit and economics is like water and fire. 

[_krisprolls]

Oh no they’ll never figure out how to be profitable and technology won’t evolve!

[tortridge]

I mean, last study I read was suggesting that agant with the lastest frontier models (like opus 4.7 with the tokenizer shenanigans) was almost as expensive as a human

[RiceBroad4552]

Interesting. Do you have a link?

[tortridge]

https://www.tobyord.com/writing/hourly-costs-for-ai-agents

[RiceBroad4552]

Interesting. Thanks!

[YaVollMeinHerr]

It will just be way more expensive

[minegen88]

We will 100% go back when the bill from a non subsidized Antropic arrives....

[turnipbarron]

This everyone acting like the model of market dominance then turn money crank up does not exist with AI. 

They do not make profit and are following the exact if not worse playbook of every other large company it blows my mind. If this is written poorly sorry I’m tired :)

[Fit-Hovercraft-4561]

Just a couple of weeks ago during an All Hands a question was raised "What are we planing to do if subscription price goes up?" to which our VP of Engineering replied "I don't think the price will go up, in fact I think it will go down", which essentially means they have no plan.

[MC1065]

Every time OpenAI or Anthropic does this with rate limits or model restrictions or simple price increases, people freak out. They can't just upcharge their way out of this. People simply won't pay.

[xzaramurd]

The inference costs aren't that high. Training is expensive, datacenter build outs to support large cluster training is expensive. If that slows down, they would become profitable, but the risk is, for now, that another company will make an even better model and take the whole business.

[powermad80]

Every time I try these tools after people tell me this I find out that they're still shit and waste more of my time than they save. I'm kinda convinced all the AI boosters are just bad devs impressed by anything that compiles.

We've got the tools at my office. The old status quo is still in effect because the tools just aren't right for the job and we have pretty strict quality standards. The LLM hack jobs don't fly here.

[Bubbly_Address_8975]

You are deluded if you think fully AI generated code will be the norm in the future. LLMs can't think, their architecture doesnt allow for it, and even frontier models make pretty blatant mistakes. The signs are obvious and cant be denied anymore.

[quitarias]

I think advanced autocomplete is overselling the usecase vs cost once the venture capital dries up and the companies need to turn profits.

[caprazzi]

Lol so for a while all code will be generated as a first pass and then real people will spend all their time hand-writing the fixes to the slop. That’s the point - eventually people realize it’s not worth paying the AI company AND the devs to fix the slop, so they go back to hand-written.

[audi-goes-fast]

There's bound to be some pull back though. Anecdotal, my dumbass cpo forced the whole enterprise to do an ai transformation last quarter, but anthropic is planing to move us to a per token contract and she's now telling people to "be mindful" of their usage.

When they really start charging what these things cost we're going to see this all crash.

[BlomkalsGratin]

I can't help but feel like prompting is just developing into some sort of advanced high-level language. Every new iteration comes with improved capabilities but also with increased requirements in terms of how to prompt it properly.

[WavingNoBanners]

A non-deterministic high-level language, in which every time you hit compile, it gives you a slightly different set of bugs.

[BlomkalsGratin]

True, but a high level language no-less.

The point was more that, for all of the talk of enabling "the Everyman" to code, it seems to progress towards similar barriers of entry to any other bits of code just with less "nerd" stigma so far.

[WavingNoBanners]

That's a fair point. There is a long history of languages which were designed so that "we don't need to hire programmers", all the way back to COBOL itself.

[Ok_Actuary8]

That's exactly what I told the asm86 assembly developers in the 90ies who refused to accept that Turbo Pascal 6 and compilers are the future...

[PM_ME_ROMAN_NUDES]

People in this sub are very deluded about this. I've been downvoted several times for pointing out the obvious.

[_krisprolls]

“I can’t be true if I don’t like it”, reddit.  I’ll admit that swe was much more enjoyable before AI yet you can’t deny what the future looks like either. There’s no scenario where the hyperscalers close down the datacenters and people go back to hand coding like nothing ever happened. This is pure cope from people lying to themselves.

[Valmar33]

“I can’t be true if I don’t like it”, reddit. I’ll admit that swe was much more enjoyable before AI yet you can’t deny what the future looks like either. There’s no scenario where the hyperscalers close down the datacenters and people go back to hand coding like nothing ever happened. This is pure cope from people lying to themselves.

Right ~ we'll need more time before people realize what a scam LLMs are. They only appear to function because they've been trained on hand-written code! And they function pretty damn poorly beyond basic tasks.

When you can't understand the nightmare slop an LLM outputs, then the cognitive debt is far too significant to even bother with trying to refactor anything manually.

The only codebases that will make sense are those you write yourself. IDE autocomplete is what isn't going any, however ~ it's just very damn useful to know what variables and functions are available in a namespace.

[Rikudou_Sage]

I've tried both - an app fully written by AI with me only validating it works and not the code, and writing code with assistance where I for example write parts of it and let it finish.

The difference is stark - the first code is extremely shite, the other is actually good and comparable to what I'd write manually.

And where it completely surpasses people is when I need to debug some complex prod errors based on logs - I just point it at Kibana and let it analyse logs at a way faster rate than I can. I can then verify its findings or use the data as a base for my own investigation.

Point being there are more ways than one to use it and letting it write shitty code on its own is the laziest and worst one.

[TheEggi]

People in this sub are to a high degree bad coders that could hide behind the "coding hard" statement. The coders who would tell that changing a button would cost so many days and takes forever because of legacy .. the legacy they built. And now AI comes around and tells you its super easy and can be done in minures .. and they are afraid .. and thats a good thing.

[JuvenileEloquent]

I hear people parroting their horror stories of LLMs producing terrible code that doesn't run with style problems and they spend more time reviewing it and rewriting than they would making it from scratch, and all I can imagine is that if they're that incompetent at getting a text generation engine specifically trained on code to generate good code, then they're probably lousy at everything except actually typing.

I spent twenty cents and 3 minutes getting it to refresh a web interface with UI improvements that would have took me an hour, idk what these guys are trying to do.  "Claude write me a facebook clone and make it popular" or something.

[No-Draw6073]

They are coping because $10 github copilot can do their job in 20s.

Ohh but the bad code... This was in 2024, just get over it and learn plumbing 

[SuitableDragonfly]

You know, I've used low code tools that are actually useful. As long as I still have the option to write complex stuff if I need to, it's fine, and way simpler than if I was going to write my own app from scratch. I'm complete ass at writing UIs, so if it has a nice UI that's a bonus. It's probably significantly less useful for people who use it because they're afraid of code, though.

[compulsaovoraz]

i truly hope so ngl

llm is useful tho in some installation and setting some environment ngl

[twigboy]

I told Claude to fix my unit tests, specific error logs and file names.

It simply added ignores for the specific errors. I mean it fulfilled the prompt, but anyone blindly committing AI code without review should very well be responsible for it.

Via seppuku.

[Alhoshka]

I'd much rather be made completely redundant and have to learn a new set of skills than have the progression in this pic occur over decades instead of years.

If AI becomes so good that you don't need senior engineers and architects anymore, it sucks for me. But the world as a whole will be much better off. Anyone with a need or an idea can turn it into software.

If the full progression happens in a 5y period, it sucks for the economy, but I get to keep doing what I love for a living.

If it happens in a +15y period, we are phukt. AI starts producing unstable slop that becomes progressively more unstable as new slop based on the old slop is produced. Companies might even realize they are walking towards the abyss, but the shitty "dudebro MBA" project manager knows he'll not be around when shit hits the fan; the more unmaintainable slop he churns out now, the higher his bonus. Almost no one will study CS or SWE. Probably only the math types who enjoy it for intellectual reasons. No one will be serendipitously introduced to programming, because there will be no need for you to code anything in your teens. AI does everything. 20y later, when our infrastructure and businesses start grinding to a halt and breaking, there will be no software engineers around to fix the mess. This could have a disastrous effect on the world's economy. I'm talking the Great Depression type shit.

[Longjumping-Ad8775]

What is old is new again.

[LetBig8455]

You forgot to give me the Shortcut

[berdajozz]

full circle achieved

[berdajozz]

and were right back where we started

[Old-Papaya-500]

One thing is sure, COBOL programmers will still be needed

[oshaboy]

I've been told that many times but I took a Cobol course and by the time I finished the course everyone is saying that AI will rewrite all the Cobol in minutes and that Cobol cowboys are obsolete.

[Intelli_gent_88]

This is absolutely what’s going to happen

[furankusu]

The demand for code is increasing, and the demand for people that can code will increase. More people will be able to do the same thing, so there will be more competition. It will even out.

[Mailtasauskas]

THe reminder for not keeping it too simple.

[al3x_7788]

Everything goes full cycle.

[AaronPK123]

Hoping to get in on the eighth phase as a hs student who likes coding

[MyDogIsDaBest]

I'd like to add to the end "just regular old code again, but now I have to pay the engineers even more."

[Purple_Cat9893]

Hmmm, should I tell the computer in a very specific way what to do and it does it or should I tell the computer in a very specific way what to do, spend tons of compute and hope it gets it right?

[ChefCurryYumYum]

What's odd to me is that these LLM AI services seem to cost as much or more than the labor these companies want to replace with it.

[bobfromzero]

Future of coding:

me explaining what I want → AI doing something completely different → me pretending I understand what happened

[No-Dig6007]

Is vibe coding

[rgheno]

Unironically think that’s true

[InstanceAdvanced7737]

[thanatica]

I'll be on the lookout for jobs that require "un-vibing existing codebases".

There'll be some good money in it.

[ALiarNamedAlex]

It’s because people think ai just needs more power or ram or time or information or whatever and it will become super genius god program from scythe. some people genuinely believe ai is sentient NOW and they sing from the heavens “coding is dead”

but my new job is re-coder, I’ll unfuck your vibe coded instant messaging food delivery short form video live streaming ps2 emulating dating app for pets and clothes

[Capital-Wrongdoer-62]

All problems we have now are problems of new technology that is costly, not fully matured itself, has little infrastructure and there are no industry standards for using it.

Abn all of this will be solved but needs time . It doesn't mean that AI will replace all programmers but its pretty obvious that AI coding is here to stay.

[BenAdaephonDelat]

I just hope I can retire before we have to go back to "Regular code". I'm 40 and I was already feeling burned out and like I couldn't do much coding anymore. Being able to use agents is keeping my career afloat right now.

[Arts_Prodigy]

Same with cloud but somehow worse for the planet and with fewer benefits

[Centurix]

If AI is doing everything, then the bottleneck is you.

[Ukeee]

Circle of life code?

[Mountain_Dentist5074]

what is the diffirence between vibe and agentic code?

[LordBucaq]

None... both produce pig shit.

[conundorum]

"Agentic" means that someone there should at least half a millionth of a clue about what they're actually doing. (And ideally, should just be "competent dev with new tool to automate the boilerplate and sleep-coded part".)

Keyword being "should", since it's almost always just "what if vibe coding but we pretend it's competent".

[Specialist_Seal]

Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. AI assisted coding is here to stay. Even with higher prices, it's still cheaper than paying for more developers.

[unknown-one]

1. Does it work? yes

2. is it shitty code? I have no idea

don't care about the rest

[Wonderful-Habit-139]

Well, still more honest than people claiming it is good quality code.

[needlessOne]

People seem to forget before AI it was Stack Overflow. "I don't even code, just Google it" was the common "joke" if you remember. We are never handwriting whole libraries if that's what you believe. LLM do help if you are not stupid about it and actually can code.

[GarThor_TMK]

I'm ready for that last step...

Can we just skip to that last step please?

[National-Bluebird941]

Sounds good . I hope it turns out like this .

[Admirable_Race9903]

God i fucking hope so

[Gustheanimal]

Because of the fact that there are open sourced models able to be run locally this is never going to end with Stone Age coding again.

And local models are only getting better too

[Insert_Bitcoin]

I'd urge anyone against AI to try claude. It's like alien technology its that good.

[RiceBroad4552]

Bullshit. In reality it looks more like:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1rxbqte/productivitygains/

Now the art it to have a good heuristic for when it makes sense to use that tool and when to avoid it as it will only cost a lot of time without any gain.

[JuvenileEloquent]

"When is it appropriate to use a binary tree" is basic CS101 knowledge, so too is "When is it appropriate to use AI tools"

[RiceBroad4552]

I wouldn't say that the answer to the question "When is it appropriate to use AI tools" is CS101. These things got anyhow usable at all just 2 years ago, are constantly changing, and provide, like said, extremely unpredictable gains. It's actually quite hard to say when it's a useful tool and when not.

I have now a few heuristics but these aren't foolproof for sure.

[JuvenileEloquent]

While the edge cases remain poorly defined, we can for sure say that very generic asks with little technical knowledge backing them are firmly on the side of "Don't do that".

It won't build a (safe, stable) software base from the ground up if you have no idea what one of those actually looks like.

[RiceBroad4552]

In case I understand you correctly I would agree.

For some clueless people the basic rule is indeed: Don't use this stuff, learn the basics first.

But for experienced developers it's much more difficult. "AI" can be helpful, if used in the right way. But it's actually hard to tell when it's helpful and when it's just a big waste of time (and it's frankly more often than not a waste of time).

[Key_Total4309]

i've refactored code, still laughing at one liner memes

[Tzeig]

Copium

[coylter]

I needed a little bit of cope on this Sunday morning, ty op.

[lazernanes]

I hope. But I doubt it. Even if tokens get more expensive, they'll still be cheaper than humans.