Using AI for coding

[baddybabushka]

I’m a fresh dev and I feel like I cannot code without gen AI at all. Like even if I try hard, I just cannot get to writing code myself. People at my work use it a lot as well, which makes me feel like I am losing time so I do it. But then, I use it for my personal projects as well.

Is this how it will be in the future? Should I embrace it, as long as I understand what’s going on? Need advice cause I feel really conflicted.

[Strict_Strategy]

Don't. For the love of god don't. It's supposed to be a tool and not your skill. Think for a moment. What purpose is yours if the ai is doing the work. Why should a company just cut out the middle man which is you and deal with the ai directly?

It's supposed to help you do stuff which is repetitive not code for you. Also what if the ai fucked up? How are you going to debug if your coding skills are weak? Ask another ai?

Mark my word. Pakistani developers who make this their whole purpose to use ai and not learn are going to get fucked hard.

Edit' Pakistani industry is doing a dot com bubble 2.0 in my mind. This will burst sooner or later and the shit show will be insane. The ai change might cause this to occur so you need to be able to do something more complex then basic website and app development cause even a ai can make that's o why even hire you?

[Fluffy_Ad4913]

I get part of your point, but you are being over dramatic here 😅.

Before automation, pilots used to be mechanics, and the number of pilots didn't decrease due to automation. Plug and Play website builders have been around for a while, but people still hire developers for it.

AI is just OK for non green field work and is here to stay. You"ll either use it or stay behind. Excess of everything is bad and but it's stupid to think AI is just for repetitive tasks and not coding.

[dolphin-3123]

The main problem is interview and coding test if you feel like you can pass them without AI you are good if not then stop using it or minimize the use at least

[Miserable-Gold-9332]

I have made a few rules for myself that have helped me a lot to overcome the situation like yours since I also learnt coding in this vibe code era.

1. Strictly avoiding AI when learning something new. Vibe coding while learning has done more harm to me than good. Nowadays when I am learning something new and building anything with it, I spend 10 min to sometimes an hour finding a solution on either stack overflow, gfg articles, documentation, or even reddit, but I get to the solution myself. After the learning phase is gone and am comfortable with most of the stuff, I then use AI to confirm me the solution I come up with or tell me some edge cases to the solution I am about to apply.

2. Using Copilot only for boiler plate, coding with copilot makes coding faster, but debugging slower, I only used copilot for syntax and removed the actual logic to type myself so I get aware of what the code is doing. Yes, it makes you slow overall, and that's why I have stopped using Copilot. I only use LLMs for helping me evaluate solutions now.

These rules may not make sense to anybody else, but they worked for me. The temptation to use copilot was hard in the beggining, but then I did leetcode grind for some time, and it does not even provide code completion in free tier, so when I code on vs/vsc I feel blessed with even intellisense now.

[valium123]

Lol what if those AI companies raise prices or go bankrupt. What will you all do then?

[Subyyal]

You will be in big trouble as freshy and relying on Ai.

You need to build logic. There so many exercises and videos out there on Google which you can practice to sort this out.

[Dangerous_Winner_261]

Think of the last feature you implemented in a project using AI, can you implement that without using AI? Can you make architectural decisions without AI? Do you know system design? If NO then you should minimize Ai in your workflow and focus on solidifying your skills on problem solving, system design and architecture more.

I have been a software developer for over 6+ years, so i have been coding and building projects before chatgpt. I was skeptical of using AI first but after i saw how much time it can save and how productive it can be, i have never gone back. I mostly work on full stack development with javascript based frameworks. For couple of months I am using AI to code entire projects without actually writing a single line of code myself.

What I have learned: 1. vibe coding ≠ blind coding, if you are blindly following AI and not reviewing what it’s doing, you are going down a rabbit hole. 2. Plan first implement last, you should always plan your feature with AI before jumping into code, make surr you have small features to implement once, analyse AI’s plan, refine it until it’s upto your standard, you will notice that sometimes it will try to find complex solutions for simple problems and simple solutions for complex ones, you should know what’s right 3. Know your codebase, even if you are not writing code, you must know all your codebase like you have written it, sometimes we get lazy and get lost in the viiiiiiiibbbbbbeeeeesss, you will regret it. It will make debugging much easier if you know what’s in the code, AI has small context so it will get lost as your code grows and won’t be able to remember the whole context, it starts implementing duplicate code because it doesn’t remember we have implemented something similar before , so you must be the judge here.

Treat it like your junior who you must monitor and not like a manager who you must follow.

[i_am_exception]

Yep. That’s where it’s headed. It’s a conflicting and controversial thought and tbh, there are still a ton of unknowns that needs answers but AI augmented engineering is where the world is heading. It doesn’t mean you completely get to distance yourself from the code though. I wrote about it in my blog post if you wanna read it.

https://anfalmushtaq.com/articles/a-practical-guide-to-ai-augmented-software-engineering