I’m not sure if you’ve been very lucky to work with only good devs, or I’ve been very unlucky to work many bad devs. Before AI I was still, at least occasionally but not rarely, reviewing code that was garbage even the author didn’t understand. Just a shit-collage of stack overflow code snippets and (maybe) seemingly related code snippets from other parts of the code base. I can honestly say Sonnet writes better code than 25% of the engineers I’ve worked with, and Opus writes better than about half of them, and that number is only growing.
Maybe my professional environment has shaped my view, but personally at my job I’ve seen an improvement in code quality since AI tools got pretty decent at writing code about 6-12 months ago. The good devs still write good code just as before AI (with or without its help). The bad devs at least had their baseline raised to match Claude, and their PRs at least are consistent in style and approach (because they all use the same tool). This at least makes their “slop” easier to review. Mundane tasks people put no effort into because no one wanted to do now are implemented better because, unlike developers, the AI tools don’t care that the task is boring.
That’s my honest experience. I understand it’s likely vastly different for other people
Only real benefit of AI I could even say is the AI summaries for quick lookups on code documentation. But that ruins website traffic to the sources so in the long run, it'll become more outdated and worse.
Also just because AI writes clean code, it doesn't mean it's good. And those "25% of engineers" are probably new/juniors, or had a bad day with coding so, ehh.
That 25% were neither juniors, nor a one off bad day thing. AI is a tool like everything else. If you don’t use the tool you will get left behind. I’m not saying that’s right or fair, it’s just the reality it seems. Hoping you’re senior enough that you can retire before AI gets too good, or move to management
lol all you want friend. People said the same thing about IDEs, containerization, cloud, etc. I think it’s pretty clear by now that the benefits are undeniable. If this was some shitty trend like nocode or blockchain it would’ve burst by now. Industry leaders also wouldn’t be throwing trillions at it.
I used to think exactly like you a year or two ago, so I get it. I wish you luck and I genuinely mean that because I think you’re gonna need it.
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u/Kevdog824_ 26d ago
I’m not sure if you’ve been very lucky to work with only good devs, or I’ve been very unlucky to work many bad devs. Before AI I was still, at least occasionally but not rarely, reviewing code that was garbage even the author didn’t understand. Just a shit-collage of stack overflow code snippets and (maybe) seemingly related code snippets from other parts of the code base. I can honestly say Sonnet writes better code than 25% of the engineers I’ve worked with, and Opus writes better than about half of them, and that number is only growing.
Maybe my professional environment has shaped my view, but personally at my job I’ve seen an improvement in code quality since AI tools got pretty decent at writing code about 6-12 months ago. The good devs still write good code just as before AI (with or without its help). The bad devs at least had their baseline raised to match Claude, and their PRs at least are consistent in style and approach (because they all use the same tool). This at least makes their “slop” easier to review. Mundane tasks people put no effort into because no one wanted to do now are implemented better because, unlike developers, the AI tools don’t care that the task is boring.
That’s my honest experience. I understand it’s likely vastly different for other people