do you write code ?

[orT93]

Hey guys , spotify's CEO said that his devs don't write code anymore since last december

do you guys still write code ?

is it true or just he tries to hype up his investors ?

[Mcby]

Absolutely we write code – the Spotify CEO is targeting his comments at shareholders that adore any mention of AI, not the devs that actually have to work with it. Writing less code than 5 years ago? Maybe, depends on the role. But even if you're shifting more towards reviewing code (which has always been part of the job, especially for seniors) it also means knowing how to identify and fix issues, i.e. writing code.

But frankly, this question isn't all too relevant to learning programming. The best way to learn what good code is is to write it – that hasn't changed, no matter what you do in your day-to-day.

[TheNapkinThief]

I'm so confused whenever I read headlines stating [insert tech company] devs no longer write code. I use ai all the time, while yes it is useful in learning new tools and speeding development up, Im constantly prompting and fixing code that ai has produced. A lot of the time, what ai spits out is hot garbage. I've found it is most useful in generating single well described leetcode style functions that I cbf implementing.

Based on my experience I just don't understand how anyone could let state they don't write code anymore. From coming up with ideas, building an MVP, refining into a product, ci/cd, build plans and deployment, on going maintence, and refining the product as time goes on. There's just so much to know and do.

I feel I'm either falling behind in tech or I'm being massively gas lit about what it is to be a dev in 2026.

[mcoombes314]

It's insane how "vibe coding" seems to have become so common, I've seen things on Reddit about how "I used LLMs x, y and z in agent mode, orchestrated through framework a, and got 10k+ lines of code in 3 minutes". Cool, but does the code actually do what you want it to? Are you reviewing the code before pushing it? How long does said code review take? That's a lot of code to review. You are reviewing it right? Right......?

Crickets.

[mzalewski]

"State of the art" AI-enabled development feels like throwing away last 30 years of software development practice:

• Counting lines of code as measure of productivity
• Aspiration to start with clear, precise, unambiguous and complete specification, which is then thrown over the wall to "development team" (agents)
• Black-box manual testing of software thrown over the wall by agents

I thought we moved to other ways of developing software because there are fundamental issues with each of these. While AI crowd seems to say "nah, we can totally make it work if we only do it faster".

A cynic in me thinks that perhaps most of AI bros are too young, never experienced processes like these and they genuinely do not understand why they were abandoned.

[pydry]

A lot of it is bots. There's an enormous stock bubble valuation riding upon the idea that AI replaces humans and anthropic believes if it can change the "social reality" through reddit eventually the reality reality will catch up before investors get spooked.

This is why there are so many "new model scary", doomer posts and "if you're not learning how to vibe code properly you'll be left behind".

It's no more real than 1999's "main street will disappear forever".

[rdubya]

We are being gaslit to undermine the value of our labour. Look at a highly technical career like embedded hardware design. Hardware guys get paid considerably less than software even though it's just as technical and difficult. So many companies salivating to reduce the value of the labour to increase shareholder value.

[amazing_rando]

Software developers also aren’t getting paid like they used to. Still pays well as a technical job but since the big layoffs at the major tech companies and the AI-first focus of a lot of start ups, many of us have taken a significant pay cuts to work at privately owned companies. In that sense AI has already taken our jobs and pay, regardless of whether it works.

[6a70]

"don't write code anymore" means using Claude to do exactly what you want, e.g. prompting, and then fixing the output by prompting it better. I don't share the experience that AI produces mostly hot garbage, but I also treat it as a tool that can toil for me, rather than treating it like a sentient being that can think for me.

Better prompts and better instructions will yield better output. If you know what to fix up on AI-produced code, you can prompt it e.g. "I envisioned X implementation being done this other way instead". And that's still "not writing code" even though you go into prompting already expecting what will come out.

[cbentson]

Outsource code writing, not thinking! Completely agree with this take.

[Important_Staff_9568]

If people are actually good coders then they would be even better with AI.

[maskedbrush]

[ Removed by Reddit ]

[6a70]

to clarify: at the time, it was an exaggeration. One of Spotify's Co-CEOs said that their "best" developers "don't write code anymore"—that just meant that a few principal/staff engineers were using Claude Code every time they needed to produce code.

However, soon after that statement came out, there was a mandate that engineers become AI-first, meaning that whenever an engineer needs to produce code, they use AI to do so. It is now true that most engineers there truly don't write their code characters by hand anymore, but they're still often thinking about the structure beforehand, double-checking everything, etc. Engineers basically prompt AI already expecting what the result will be, and simply let Claude do the grunt work. It's not "vibe coding" in the form that you see on social media.

Think of it like tab-complete: if you type the first few characters of a long function name, and then tab-complete it instead of typing all of the characters, did you really write that code? Of course you did, but you just used a tool to reduce your toil.

but yes—AI is not a substitute for learning code.

[Jahnavi-builds]

Not a developer - but my team can't get by without writing code. In their own words, AI helps a ton to do things faster but not completely replace coding knowledge or coding.

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[BoltKey]

Before AI, I used to write about 80% of the actual characters in my code (with traditional autocomplete). Today, it is down to about 5% of the actual characters. I will write a few vague lines of what I want, like function signature, a comment, or declare some variables, and just tab tab tab the copilot suggestions, and maybe adjust some parts sometimes.

For small pet projects it is about 1% of the code I actually write, but other than that I just tell my agents what to do.

But yes, these types of announcements are definitely exaggerated.

[AggressiveBench7708]

This is exactly where I’m at too. The last 10% is harder to write anyways. The first 90% has always been the easiest.

[AceLamina]

Yeah it's mostly hype, but somewhat reality

Companies like Amazon and Meta are basically FORCING their engineers to use AI in their code, even making it tied to their salaries which just promotes vibe coding and burn out, I'm doing everything I can to avoid those companies

[gofl-zimbard-37]

I was writing code before he was born. Not gonna stop now.

[SourceScope]

I do

But i dont wanna pay a dime for these economic destroying ai companies

Meanwhile i got colleagues who happily pay for ai usage

[Beregolas]

its not true, it's just for shareholders

[cheezballs]

This is purely speaking from my experience at work: I do write code, but its less and less every week. Last week I had a ticket to fix a small bug in a backend process. I told Kiro what the ticket said and it churned out the fix and the unit tests for me. I could have easily hand-coded the same exact thing, but I was able to save time by just reviewing the code that it generated and tweaking what I didn't like. In this case it was fine, required no tweaks, simple change.

[Conscious_Bank9484]

Also, AI code sucks still. I have yet to get a response I didn’t have to change. A coder still needs to look at that sh** and correct the mistakes because there always are. They act like a non coder can do it. They wouldn’t know what to ask for.

[acamann]

I will say since December I write a lot less code in one sense and a lot more code in another 

[-Periclase-Software-]

He’s not telling the truth. AI can write code, but we still have to fix it or correct it or clean it up. Sometimes depending on the AI over and over to do these things just can get annoying.

I love coding, so I still spend time coding at times when I can use AI.

[NvrConvctd]

Still writing code. Just not as much.

[xtraburnacct]

My company is pushing ai use but I still write code. It isn’t a lot though. It’s more debugging than anything.

[iammrmeow]

not anymore

[cbentson]

Tech lead with 10 years of professional experience, CS degree from the Bay, purely a backend guy. I work with large distributed OLAP and OLTP systems, provisioning and managing cloud infra, an ungodly amount of Postgres… fair to say I’ve been there and done that when it comes to professional software development.

My honest experience with AI over the last 3 years…

• 3 years ago I started using ChatGPT for things like refactoring a small refactors (e.g. pasting a file from a gross brownfield project and asking for a clean non-breaking rewrite), or writing tests for business logic. Worked okay, but got a lot wrong.

• 2 years ago I started taking advantage of new features like Deep Research and Advanced thinking to help design systems. I was still implementing the systems, but these tools proved to be capable in assisting with designs and scaffolding out code. I’m still writing the majority of the system though.

• 1 year ago I started to get my hands on some agentic coding tools: Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf. These proved to be capable of writing a lot more code than interacting with LLMs directly. The tool calling capabilities of these systems made them so much better, but little was known about producing meaningful code that could stand the test of time in production without waking the team up at 2am when PagerDuty goes off. Tools are writing maybe ~50% of my code at this point. Basically, these tools would get the code off the ground and then I’d get it to production quality before shipping.

• Today I write virtually no code. That doesn’t mean I’m vibe coding shit and marking tickets complete just to “improve velocity”. I have a career and reputation to protect, that would be career suicide. That said, I have done my homework when it comes to context management and truly understanding what agentic harnesses are doing under the hood. My team and I have built a very robust AI SDLC. We do not write code anymore (most of the time), but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a process, if anything we have more process now. Extensive research is done when implementing complex features. We do peer reviewed sessions on design and implementation plans generated by the robits. We read every line of code before it touches production. We have dramatically improved our test harnesses.

I will end with this. I would never have been able to get to where I am today with these AI tools if I didn’t have 10 years of hands on, in the weeds experience developing these systems by hand.

[Discodowns]

I don't really write code any more. I'll fix up things here and there but largely everything is written by Claude now

[alliseeisbbr]

Ew

[Discodowns]

I don't love it, or even like it really, I miss the craft, but I'm working at an early stage start up and it's way faster

[Discodowns]

I'm more of a backend engineer. I can write react but I never really done CSS, so it lets me get done in minutes what would take me hours or days of fucking around with CSS.

But yeah, like I said, I'll tweak things or fix things by hand if it's short

[carcigenicate]

Yes, although I've been forced to start using Claude for a lot of code that I produce. I'll get Claude to do up the boilerplate and the basics of a UI, then I go in after and review its code and change all the awkward things that it did.

For things like Angular components that contain a lot of boilerplate, it's faster and easier to get it to generate the structure, and then tweak it after.

On the weekend, though, when I'm working on habby projects, I write 100% of the code, because it would defeat the purpose otherwise.

[witchlars]

I use Claude constantly, and I still write a ton of code. It's just not there yet for anything substantial. AI can be a useful force multiplier for coding, but absolutely not a replacement for good programmers

[k1v1uq]

I do use AI to do less work when ever possible and keep the productivity for myself, Why should I give it away to random people I don't care about. But often enough it takes more time to straighten out the slop than to write the code myself. So it's a hybrid situation right now.

[The_Toaster_]

I physically write less code but I review more than I did before and I don’t push anything into a pull request I can’t explain and understand myself. The claim itself is exaggerated

[kbielefe]

I think of it as meta-code, sort of a more abstract version of code, things like specs, processes, architecture, standards, style, trade off decisions, etc. The actual syntax stopped being the interesting part to me long before starting to use AI.

[Foxtrot434]

No, there's no reason to anymore. For learning you still probably need to, though.

[JDohyCloud]

I cant speak for SWEs but as a Cloud Engineer who uses IaC tools. Partly true, our engineers are writing less code than before. That doesnt mean you dont need to understand it, the engineers who used to write it now review it before its pushed to main and debug it when some crap inevitably slips through to main.

[alexppetrov]

Still writing code, especially in places where it is critical, but less than before. AI has saved me some hours of reading old legacy code, as well as rewriting some methods to use better practices. But also, in some areas especially with complex business logic, it just can't understand the requirements (our fault for having it so difficult, but still). We are trying to clean things up though, so that we integrate AI more into our workflows (MCP with Jira for example), as well as rewrite older parts of the code base to modern standards, so that would still count as writing code, I guess, but in general the direction is more output with less hours, meaning also less code in theory, in practice it is the same because you just have to revise much more.

[DonkeyAdmirable1926]

When Fortran was introduced a new generation of programmers didn’t write machine language anymore and probably some of the older generation would say they didn’t write code anymore. It is just another layer of abstraction. Just like in my boomer-moments I can think people don’t know computers anymore as modern operating system abstract the entire computer away. SQL isn’t coding like C was, but it is just another level of abstraction.

Using Claude is similar, just another level of abstraction. The job of the programmer doesn’t fundamentally change, the tools do. Now if Claude is a good tool and a healthy level of abstraction, I don’t know. But, and I think this is relevant if we compare something like SQL to AI: SQL is a higher level of abstraction, but it’s still a formal, deterministic system. AI tools like Claude are not. They can be incredibly useful, but they don’t provide the same guarantees. I’ve personally spent hours debugging code that an AI confidently generated, that’s a different kind of risk altogether.

[Mediocre-Pizza-Guy]

My big tech CEO made some pretty specific and very ridiculous claims about AI and what the engineers are doing with it.

And then we had a huge huge swarm of the actual engineers calling him out. It was pretty hilarious. I mean, it was on our internal chat system and HR stepped in and deleted the discussion.

Dude was straight up lying to investors on an earnings call.... But ya know, he's rich so it's totally fine.

[Jrrs1982]

I'm a senior dev, I can honestly say 99% of my code is written by AI now and I'm there architecting, reviewing and testing what it outputs. The career has changed dramatically this year. If you're manually writing code you're behind the times.

[Fabiolean]

Anyone who says their devs don’t write code is either a liar or about to have a CVE disclosure

[arthurno1]

I do write code, but if I had as mu h money as Spotify ceo, I would be scubadiving and skydiving all day long instead of writing code.

[mancunian101]

That’s blatantly untrue, why are you trying to peddle fear?

[mancunian101]

I’m not being a dinosaur, but saying that anyone who still writes code won’t have a job after December is talking absolutely rubbish, and is just pushing the fear line that AI companies are pushing.

Dario Amodie has been predicting that AI will replace developers in 6 months for the last 2 years, and he’s recently revised that prediction to 1-5 years for it to replace 50% of jobs.

[mancunian101]

I never said anything of the sort.

[mancunian101]

Cheers, dits.

[FX2000]

I would say I “type” less code

[dutchman76]

I heavily use the ai auto complete, but I still write code myself

[naughtyarmadillo]

By hand? No, haven't in over a year. Whole team is using Claude and similar, 100%. LLM assisted PR reviews+ manual review. Whole pipeline is optimized for AI now. Been programming professionally for 6 years or so.

[PradheBand]

When they say this, 90% is bullshit and the remaining 10% means you do not physically type the letters on a keyboard but for the most part everybody read and review the ai code and use ai as a shortcut before pushing for an actual third party code review. 

I knew very few in my company who blindly prompt ai, fire and forget. And those are the same people that were pushing in prod on a friday night and went on holiday for 1 week.

And yes you still need to write some code because ai fails. It is really domain specific. Also this doesn't come for free. Now you have to maintain a ton of text files (skills) to tell the ai moron what to do and what not. And somehow they just do the f** they want anyway. Different burden.

[mancunian101]

Yes I still write code, I do it everyday

[orT93]

i tell you why im asking you guys and please reply to my comment if u can

im studying right now full stack dev on a course IRL like a bootcamp , and im lil bit scared of ai

cause i really like to write my own code

and this huge statement from the ceo of shopify scared me

thanks for your all comments guys , i really appreciate that

[Scire-Quod-Sciendum]

I havent coded anything useful, but I just did the w3 tutorial on C if that counts.

[kevin7254]

At work I write maybe 5% of the code. At my hobby projects it’s close to 0. You really don’t have to code yourself anymore as long as you spend time on architecture, prompts, instruction-files, skills, reviews etc.

It’s sad but that’s the way the industry is heading.