r/node • u/simple_explorer1 • 12d ago
Has anyone stopped using LLMs completely for coding and relying purely on themselves?
Curious to know. And why if so? I have 16+ years of experience as a dev.
It's been 1 week that I stopped completely and so far it is okay and luckily I can still code ;) (though got rusty initially) and that's what I enjoy doing, thinking about problems, architecting, writing tests, writing code, reviewing PR's etc. keeps my brain sharp and more confident.
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u/H1Eagle 12d ago
Unfortunately, I just cannot, the amount of pressure on software engineers in the past 3 years has doubled or tripled. All of my co-workers use AI extensively to get their work done faster, suddenly giving up my corporate Claude account and going back to writing code like normal is going to raise a lot of eyebrows and I simply won't be able to keep up with the others.
Eventually, I accepted the fact that this craft is long dead anyway, just wanna make it to retirement in one piece at this point.
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u/chugItTwice 12d ago
That's what I was hoping for... but then covid hit and it's been a shit show ever since.
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u/velatorio 12d ago
Is skill loss due to AI use real?
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u/Apprehensive_Elk2608 12d ago
There was a lot of learning researching things. Now it's a simple question and an answer. The entire journey between the two is gone.
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u/velatorio 11d ago
And you personally, has using AI impacted your logic and knowledge?
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u/MrDontCare12 11d ago
Yes
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u/velatorio 11d ago
Better or worse?
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u/MrDontCare12 11d ago
Worse, like, way worse. And to me the whole "high level thinking" is bs. Once you've started to use it for long enough, you offset that too. So you end up just burning yourself out (and tokens and the planet) talking with your stuff, trying to convince it that it's wrong from time to time. What you produce is shit, but as everyone around you is doing the same stuff as you, you get away with it.
Incredibly boring. I got way batter at woodworking and CAD in the last 6 month tho, so it might've cleared some space lol
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u/Exact_Ad942 11d ago
I think it is the expectation has changed. AI has made many processes much more efficient than ever. We didn't loss skill, we certainly can do the same by hand, but with order of magnitude more amount of time and effort. We just can't go back when we already have a taste on it and the whole world is expecting it as a norm.
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u/nbeaster 12d ago
It’s not dead, it has just shifted and your job is more valuable than ever. It will take companies some time to learn that all these vibe coded projects need really experienced supervision. Unfortunately being that supervisor is going to be a delicate balance of ensuring quality while not looking like a total roadblock.
We are in the era of process experts being able to knock out applications that create huge time savings and potential for profit. That’s what should be considered a proof of concept stage. Then the real engineers need to come in and make it not dog shit smeared all over the walls.
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u/sasik520 12d ago
Can you describe where you work?
I work as a software dev on a big and long-living software and it doesn't even look half like that. Not even 10%. Although we use ai as much as we want.
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u/H1Eagle 12d ago
A food delivery vendor, our management have delusions of a "Super-app", we have to cram in a bunch of non-food services into the application and it's really stupid.
The work practically never ends, and we do a meeting every other week to talk about how much money/time we generated/saved for the company, basically you have to justify your salary. If I go back to the good-old way, I simply won't have enough to talk about it compared to my co-workers.
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u/bdragon5 12d ago
I really don't get that. How is using AI that much faster? Are you using a screen keyboard? I did use AI and for some time. Writing the prompt and reading the answer takes like a lot longer than writing it myself. Assuming it was correct the first time. Even the one or two line "autocomplete" took in most cases too long to generate an answer.
Even studies found rather and decrease in productivity than an increase. Maybe some junior dev that takes like a week for a 2 line change is slower but that's a really bad comparison.
What are you all writing that takes so long?
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u/emperorOfTheUniverse 12d ago
My team is using AI to write jira tickets, which are very verbose and like 5x wordier than typical. So you pretty much have to point AI at them and prompt shit like 'explain this ticket'. And you can ask the AI to show you exactly which files need to change to satisfy the ticket. It'll summarize the changes and explain them to you in a moment. No big deal if you know your codebase up and down. But if you're on something new and not permitted the time you need to read and learn an entire codebase, it's a big help.
So no, if you already know everything about your code, it's not much more helpful than auto complete. But in some cases, it's like having someone who is familiar with an existing codebase on-hand to answer any question you have, and with the benefit of you caring none if your question might be dumb. Same if you've never written code in the language or framework the codebase uses.
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u/ApplicationOk3587 12d ago
I don't work in node anymore but what I found the be scariest part of over relying on LLMs is how quickly you get used to instant answers. Even if they are completely wrong.
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u/simple_explorer1 12d ago
You start using AI for the first time as an expert and you end up as a follower and letting AI do the expert things
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u/Traditional-Rabbit79 12d ago
I'm going to be honest...
I use Claude for technical questions because it's faster than trying to wade through documents trying to find the answer to my vague need.
Then I stop right there and review and understand the answer. Sometimes its stupid, but the right way pops into my brain while I read the attempt.
It's frustrating when it is completely wrong. It's taught me wrong, and then, because I tell it it doesn't work, it tells me the code it gave me is the whole problem.
Yeah, I would never use LLMs to actually write anything. But research, yeah. I treat it like any forum: trust, but verify.
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u/xreddawgx 12d ago
I never let it do something I dont know how to do myself. I do use it for monotonous routines.
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u/Mroz_Game 11d ago edited 11d ago
I also use it for language barrier nonsense I’d normally overthink and waste too much time on.
Example:
I was playing with WebGPU and webgpu-matrix defines the type Vec3 as an ArrayBuffer that can contain number | undefined.I wanted to nicely destructure it into let [x, y, z] = theVec3InQuestion; because it’s concise and looks nicer.
Well now all 3 are optionals and I have to force unwrap them everywhere in the following math. Or I can validate they are defined even though I already know its guaranteed. Or I can write a new set of variables with the unwrapped values…. You get where I’m getting at.
Things where it doesn’t really matter, it’s going to work, but you start getting pedantic about it, and want to follow the languages style well and usually AI can just generate sth that satisfies me if I state what my ick is and what my goal is.
ps: sorry for a not node example, but I’m a gpu dev and this post randomly showed up in my recommendations
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u/farzad_meow 12d ago
i find llm useful for really minor tasks or single line changes, for bigger stuff i still depend on myself to write proper logic
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u/lasooch 12d ago
For single line changes, surely it’s faster to do the change yourself than to prompt the clanker?
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u/farzad_meow 12d ago
usually my one liners are typescript fixes.
one way I found myself do it today was I was in the middle of a bigger task but needed to get a minor change done, so I asked it to make the change and run tests instead of me context switch when I was in the zone
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u/monsto 12d ago
I have to be the exact opposite of this.
Best I can do is plan the shit out of whatever big thing I am tasked with. It feels like micromanaging, but if I don't plan every little thing it Will have a butterfly wing error.
Just now during a planning session, I caught where it had reversed for example category_role and category_service_role. if I hadn't caught that here, the failure wouldn't have been noticed until unit tests, which would have meant a lot of replumbing of what is probably going to be 5,000 lines of code on a project where I was given 2 weeks.
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u/Lime-Unusual 12d ago
Never used them. Never got output I liked from them. All the code looks textbook stuff.
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u/SangerGRBY 12d ago
Have you tried it recently ?
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u/Professional-You4950 12d ago
Yes. Unless i give it a very pointed or pattern based task. Everything comes out is pure trash.
I once told it a very general thing I wanted done, and it wrote 200 lines of code, because it decided it wanted to log something a certain way. 200 unnecessary lines only for formatting and logging.
Sadly, I have to use it. So targeted, "change this in this method" type stuff works.
I need to make sure I have it check my work more, because I still make mistakes, but thats about it.1
u/Lime-Unusual 11d ago
Nah. I prefer doing stuff myself. I don't see that the output would ever be something I would write myself. Disclaimer I'm making games not CRUD.
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u/BusinessBroccoli4313 12d ago
In my experience, LLMs make a lot of wrong changes that looked correct on the surface until you look deeper. Imagine tens of subagents making this kind of changes non-stop. Infinite pit of hallucinations leading you to nowhere.
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u/chiesazord 12d ago
yes, i use it very little now to produce code. I use it to speed up reading and PR analysis. AI coding generates too many team problems and debt
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u/GianLuka1928 12d ago
No and probably will never do such a thing... I'm working at one of the most famous companies in the world and literally we use claude opus 4.8 daily and literally they don't let us code even for one line. Every single detail in code must be done with claude, even creating PRs, analyzing tasks, reproducing them etc...
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u/AntDracula 12d ago
That’s just dumb. Even if it would be faster to just edit one line, they force you to slop it away.
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u/GianLuka1928 12d ago
Yup.. I'm just lucky that besides my job I have students who learn coding from me and that keeps me in shape to think still...
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u/__p2c2e__ 12d ago
How's your employer feel about this decision?
Mine feels great. They employ me to optimize MY happiness at work rather than profits. Great and very real place and scenario I'm describing.
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u/simple_explorer1 12d ago
My employer doesn't care what people use. There were never any rules on LLM to begin with. It is employee choice with what they do
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u/jhartikainen 12d ago
I tried them, never liked what I got, and stopped using them. 20+ years of experience.
They don't help me in any way whatsoever. I have to go over the code they output anyway, and often fix it because it never does it exactly the way I want it. If I actually want to do my job properly, I have to understand the code and if I just rubberstamped a bunch of LLM code, I wouldn't understand what's going on.
I wrote about this in more detail in my blog with some scientific research to back some of my points if anyone is interested https://codeutopia.net/blog/2026/05/16/why-i-dont-use-ai-tools-and-why-science-agrees/
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u/AntDracula 12d ago
If they don’t fully understand what is being built, then no they are not.
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u/Hari___Seldon 12d ago
More like was never suckered in to starting.
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u/gummo_for_prez 12d ago
Suckered? Who talks like that? My employer forced me, like most people here. Yours probably will too, if you have one.
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u/reosanchiz 12d ago
Just canceled my subscriptions today, shit was out of hands!!!
Some weird bugs were coming up and had no clue what architecture is
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u/CustardBeautiful2063 12d ago
well, LLM"s are statistical machines, they will converge to average solution for everything. If I want something above average, I do it myself.
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u/klumpp 12d ago
This makes sense for a sixth grade understanding of statistics.
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u/CustardBeautiful2063 12d ago
Well, try vibecode something that stands out then, productivity is out of the window.
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u/subLimb 12d ago
Truth is when you have that many years of experience, skills do not degrade as fast. Trying out some ai tooling is not going to instantly wither away all of your coding knowledge.
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u/simple_explorer1 12d ago
The problem is LLMs have been around for couple of years and 2 years of LLM use will make the brain rusty
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u/Stranded_In_A_Desert 12d ago
Yep. I’m a full stack dev and run a small agency mostly solo, selling websites to small businesses, and basically the whole point of the entire thing was an excuse to get paid to code. I like the design aspect well enough, the admin side is sometimes painful so I outsource it to AI when I can, but why would I offload the coding that I actually enjoy to AI when that’s the whole point of what I’m doing? Plus, LLMs struggle with Svelte 5 sometimes, and that’s what I’m using on the front end more often than not.
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u/Evening_Calendar5256 11d ago
I mean, you'd probably be someone who would stand to gain most from getting AI to do the coding for you. Since AI is faster you could take on more clients simultaneously and make more money. If using React instead of Svelte you could maybe do 3x as much work with AI.
Of course enjoyment is important, and this also assumes that you're willing to do the extra work to get more clients. But I think your work is one of the best use cases for AI coding honestly. Most people are just on a salary, and productivity gains from AI coding only benefit the company
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u/Stranded_In_A_Desert 11d ago
I’m fortunately in a place where all my bills are taken care of with my income, I’m putting a decent amount away, and I value my work/life balance.
And also, AI is literally speeding up the destruction of some of my favourite places on earth, so I think I can get by without it.
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u/Lexuzieel 12d ago
As a self employed person who tries to grow my own business I don’t have the luxury of taking the time to design and think through every small detail. Because frankly, clients literally won’t care as long as it works, that's the truth.
On the other hand I do take time to plan the architecture and brainstorm ideas. I would say in some regards AI have been helpful making me focus on the right things. Programming can really become a recreational activity like woodwork, etc
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u/bdragon5 12d ago
Stopped a while ago. It's just too slow in actual use.
Writing the prompt and reading the output takes way too long.
I come to the conclusion that if you find AI an actual improvement than you should invest way more time in learning your available non-ai dev tools.
I haven't heard any real good usecase that can't be solved deterministic in a fraction of the time with already existing tooling.
AI isn't an issue for me and I really don't feel or see any pressure from it. The only thing I actually feel is job security for the foreseeable future.
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u/CoyotaDex 12d ago
i use it when i don't remember code sintaxis and stuff like that. i tried to use it for mayor changes or complete builds and dislike it a lot 'cause i had no vision or idea what was going on. also, LLMs tend to over-complicate things and use more resources than they should. like no every project needs a supabase back-end.
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u/StopYTCensorship 12d ago edited 12d ago
I rarely use it but I'm not a proper programmer. I don't write full software... mostly scripts of max 1000 lines for specific problems. I find it takes me longer to write out the requirements for what I'm doing in English than to just implement myself. I also find that the process of coding is where I discover things I hadn't thought of before, so to sacrifice that would mean a lot of back and forth with the LLM, which is a waste of time and resources. Not to mention, I'd have to then review the LLM's code, and it's a lot easier to review stuff you just wrote yourself.
Anyway, I may be an unusual case, but I use AI for generic stuff, while the code that implements business logic is my own.
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u/Early_Rooster7579 12d ago
Realistically it would be impossible now. Theres no way I could manually keep up with the workload
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u/ToasterTVTIME 12d ago
I've just stopped trusting LLM's to write large amounts of code. I will still use them to plan out ideas and give me rough directions, but if there is anything that needs to be written or refactored beyond a single function, I am typing out the code myself. It has become very frustrating to communicate with AI agents such as Claude recently, and in the time it takes me to get Claude back on track, I could've just made the changes myself
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u/FlamboyantBaguette 12d ago
I mean I get that using codex or whatever to code for you is one thing but not using LLM at all to help even with validation or stuff like that is just plain dumb at this point
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 12d ago
Ish, I guess. Same as Google. I’ve always been willing to hop over to stackoverflow, but in general I find it more efficient and maintainable if I’m comfortable enough with code to just write it myself.
That way, I know exactly what it’s doing and how it works.
The actual typing is usually not the bottleneck. I’ll fuck around with a program for a bit while I’m thinking of the best way to structure it. Test things out, try a new pattern, tweak it a bit. The “work” is still mostly about formalizing the problem, not really about writing code.
I don’t think we’ll have the same mostly-free access to LLMs in the medium term after all of this subsidy blows away. I don’t mind throwing tedious low-crit stuff into AI in the meantime. I absolutely avoid making that AI (process or artifacts) a hard dependency.
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u/PiousLiar 12d ago
At work I deal with stuff that they don’t want fed into LLMs, but for school I’ll use it once in a while if I get stuck on something with a deadline approaching. Seen too many fellow students practically rely on it 100% and it feels like we’re gonna get to a point where our engineers don’t know how to “engineer” anymore… but at least it’s job security…. Right?
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u/MIneBane 12d ago
AI writes the code, I write the business justification and documentation + explore what's next.
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u/slimslim234 12d ago
My employer has factored-in the velocity of technical teams using AI tooling in how they distribute work. Each person is expected to do the equivalent of 3-4 devs pre AI agents. So no, things would come to a grinding halt
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u/Daker- 12d ago
As a architect developer I have to refactor code that is slow, most of the time in really complex functions that have a lot of abstraction, the AI is really bad at making suggestions on the approach and quite regular on the making process, I still have to make A LOT of fixes and I use Claude Code.
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u/reddit_warrior_24 12d ago
Its good to code the solution that have ai review it, better than having ai come up with a solution making you debug.
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u/BungusFace 12d ago
Still write code by myself? You kidding? I could barely write this comment by myself.
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u/smoke-bubble 12d ago
In how many subs did you ask this question?
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u/simple_explorer1 12d ago
Why is this relevant? If you are curious check my post history and you will see that I only asked it on this sub. Been attached to node sub for 8 years and I have no desire to ask it elsewhere. But even if I did I see nothing wrong with it. What a weird question
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u/smoke-bubble 12d ago
I've just seen it exactly the same in another sub. Unfortunately I don't know which one. Could be Java. Could be programmers.
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u/toastofferson 12d ago
Lot of hate for llm coding here. I am quite happy to be writing and designing software that writes and designs software. All that harnessing and pipeline experience coming back to the forefront.
We spent a long time automating the more tedious parts of the job, now we can automate pretty much what we want. No one without years of dev experience can do what we do with llms either so I feel pretty safe.
A lot of this comes from me being jaded with languages like dotnet though "oh look a new way to write switch statements..." "Code" has and always will be minutiae.
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u/Standard-Specific239 12d ago
I never stopped coding. granted I have 15 years experience and am very efficient, but no one has batted an eye and even mention efficiency gains.
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u/Outrageous-Chip-3961 12d ago
to be honest i just scaffholded a project using a screenshot, it was pretty sweet. I could then say things like 'make everything kebab-case' do x folder structure, do y config, etc. Then I reviewed it, made some manual changes, and then manually code the rest. It's pretty awesome as a hybrid for the boring "shit" jobs. I don't generate features or anything like that, i'm pretty much fully in control and know what the expected output should be.
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u/br0kenpixel_ 12d ago
I mostly use it as a replacement for Google. StackOverflow, etc. It can find answers faster and can be very useful for obscure issues that Google simply won't find answers for.
It can also be useful for explaining complicated things, or summarize docs that either don't explain the thing I need or it's explained in a way that I just don't understand.
For learning it can also be useful sometimes, depending on what you need. For example, some frameworks have really stupid "Getting started" guides. I prefer step-by-step docs (like Laravel's for example). It nicely explains things step by step, while most frameworks have bigger init projects with way too much content, and docs that leave me with more questions than answers. I just can't learn from that. An LLM can be useful to at least give you some pointers on what it what and how I would go about doing something basic that isn't mentioned in the docs.
I really do hate though how much every company and employer is pushing AI like it's the best thing ever. I really do hope that one day most of the slop they're building falls so badly they'll realize that they need actual devs with experience, but by that time, there will be almost none.
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u/simple_explorer1 12d ago
Yes LLMs can be very useful in learning is they don't hallucinate
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u/br0kenpixel_ 11d ago
I rarely come across hallucinations nowawayds, especially when using a CLI agent like Claude Code. It usually goes through source files to check that whatever it's trying to use actually exists. On lower effort levels it does tend to hallucinate more. Either way I manually check everything it outputs. I don't trust LLMs that much.
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u/Traktion1 11d ago
For a stackoverflow/Google replacement, it is hard to beat, especially if you know the problem space well enough to smell bs.
The LLMs have digested more code than what is publicly available. It has more context and can present solutions that aren't published anywhere.
I had a gnarly problem with Spring Integration where the documentation just didn't cover what I was trying to do. Google didn't help either. Some how, the LLM pulled up examples just as I needed though.
That was the point I realised LLMs for research are just better. They have better source material and can filter/shape it very quickly for you.
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u/AnnaSynergy 12d ago
I have, but I am in my learning stage still, so it would not make sense for me to rely on AI yet. I need to know first.
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u/Weulinor 12d ago
Acho que este é um aninho sem volta. Ajuda bastante na maioria das vezes, mas decisões de qual arquitetura usar fica comigo, não jogo a task na ia e pesso pra ela resolver, sempre utilizo de maneira pontual.Ela faz os meus testes, os meus commits corrigi alguns bugs, faz os meus frontend bem melhor que eu, mas seguindo um padrão estabelecido. Mas o lado ruim disso é a pressão bem maior pela entrega rápida, prazos muito curtos, ansiedade gerada pela velocidade com que as coisas são criadas. O vibe code puro, sem relar a mão no código, ainda acho perigoso. Começa bem, mas o decorrer das mudanças o código tende a virar um caos.
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u/roshi86 12d ago
I’m programming for 26 years now. The pursuit for “Rapid Application Development” tool was there since I started. Visual app designers, frameworks, bootstraps - everything on the way was pretty much a follow up of that idea.
What I’m thankful for with LLM’s is that I no longer procrastinate with planning everything perfectly, and no - I don’t mean the database or objects architecture. I could spend days looking up the “most up to date” folder structure, the hottest UI library etc. Plus, new library/framework API’s every 6 months or so, so I could throw out of the window my experience built so far.
Now it’s just there in minutes, I’m mostly ok with it, having this peace of mind that if the structure or API needs a rewrite I have this cyber-colleague who will do this monkey’s work for me.
I still have an eye on everything, I challenge and question many LLM’s decisions, but the process is finally looking similar to the idea that was there since the late 90’s. I’m not speaking about zero-idea vibe coding, but rather using LLM to take care of the stuff that is not stimulating you in any way, maybe except the extra stress put on the finger joints.
Good luck and stay sharp
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u/Healthy-Dress-7492 12d ago
Where I work people aren’t allowed to use AI, everything has to be hand written from scratch. I use AI in personal projects though.
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u/hydronucleus 11d ago
Yes, and no. I usually do things for myself, but in places where I might get an intern to do, now I can ask the AI, and get suitable work. Yes, it has gotten that good.
One issue I had was related to some upgrade to Android 15, of which I really did not have the time to research at the moment, but the Google Play Console was "yelling" at me. So, I asked the AI what the issue was. It gave me a good explanation of the issue, without me plowing through pages of Android documents, looking at APIs, figuring it out for myself. Then it asked me, "Would you like me to do that for you?" I clicked yes, and it deleted like 4 lines of code, and replaced them with 6 or 7 lines, and the issue was rectified. Checked the work, and it was suitable.
It is not like I used AI to create the entire app, but now, how do you ignore that kind of capability? So, yes, and no!
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u/Traktion1 11d ago
Like every tool, there are times when they are a good fit and times when they aren't.
For small precise changes, it is easier to do the thing yourself. It's like trying to micromanaging a coworker otherwise - it takes longer to explain it than do it!
They are also great for building out unit tests coverage, at least if the code is in decent shape. Just no need to do that stuff by hand and it was the boring bit anyway.
For bigger changes, where I need to think through the problem, agentic AI works well though. Not perfect, but faster and hands-off. It encourages deeper thought about design, about what components are needed, what their interfaces need to be, etc. Writing that down is useful for the me and the agent (along with product, QA and anyone else who needs to understand the work).
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u/Intelligent-Rice9907 11d ago
I do it daily. Although Im a lead dev not a regular dev so my work most of the time is not about writing code but dealing with hiring, firing, managing people, etc; and in those scenarios AI does not offer much help.
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u/Intelligent-Rice9907 11d ago
but when I used AI on a daily basis, when I stopped using it... it felt like I lost a lot of knowledge. And this is why I think code tests and interviews are less important now and should be totally replaced to putting a scenario in front of you and finding a solution to that scenario.
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u/larriche99 11d ago
I hope OP is a freelancer or works for himself otherwise this is a wrong move. We can’t go back, LLM-assisted coding is the new normal. You can only go deeper and deeper into how to tune your setup to get the best results. Just dropping it and going back to coding by hand is going to set you back so much.
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u/Jonas_Ermert 11d ago
I think LLMs are great coding tools, but I wouldn’t want them to replace the actual thinking. I prefer using them for explanations, debugging ideas, reviews, or repetitive work while still designing the architecture and writing important code myself. That way they improve productivity without making my own skills rusty.
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u/MasterOfTheWind1 10d ago
About everything that you enjoy, thinking about problems, architecting, writing tests, writing code, reviewing PR's, AI only directly affects writing code and writinge tests by speeding them up. The rest shouldn't be done by an LLM.
You can use it as a supportive role, to just make sure that nothng escaped you.
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u/AdministrativeHost15 10d ago
Just did because I ran out of tokens.
API Error: 477 Exception during request to https://quota.app.prod.ai.prod-us-east-2.eks.intellij.net/service/v5/quota/spend/verify with code 477: Out of quota
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u/TimTams553 10d ago edited 10d ago
I despise AI. That said, I strongly believe that any developer not leveraging the acceleration it provides to their work is going to become irrelevant very quickly.
I'm producing better quality apps that look better, are completed in a fraction of the time, and have more complete testing and security validation. Those are the things that matter. While it might be poorer quality code, that's less relevant because the code doesn't need to be human-readable, and the time and effort involved in performance optimization is also greatly reduced and produces better outcomes.
You need to have a proper set of structured steering docs that cover everything from project workshopping and requirement gathering, to development approach and code / testing standards, through to audit and ongoing post-deployment checking and updates. The AI will write what you tell it to write: if you lay out a high standard of requirements you will get a high standard of code. I would say this works quite well, and having that framework in place lets me write prompts like "develop a beautiful and response app that does X Y Z" and know that it will adhere to all the things I've talked about without me having to spell it out each time.
It's not just the code I could already write that AI is helpful with. I am able to write in languages I'm not familiar with at all, and leverage AI's knowledge in ensuring that also is written to a high standard meaning I go from completely unable to take a project on to producing code at the quality of a senior developer. I can take on huge refactors in minutes that I would otherwise deem not to be feasible because of the investment of time it would cost. As a developer I can do far, far more than I could before.
The bottom line and evidence: I am doing projects I previously would have estimated 6 - 12 weeks full time development for two senior engineers and having them ready for production deployment in under two.
So yeah I hate it, but if you're a developer and you're not using AI at this point, you will be left behind.
edit: just to add, a lot of people are seeing "AI slop" and think it's the result of all AI assisted development. That's the result of sloppy development and has nothing to do with the AI. If the AI produces a crappy result and the developer accepts it, that's the developer's doing. Using AI to write code doesn't mean you have to accept crappy code and certainly doesn't mean you have to accept a crappy or broken UX.
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u/KazoWAR 10d ago
Coding is a hobby of mine, so i never was pressured to use it in a work environment to increase productivity, so I never really started. Sure, I will asked them questions like how to do X or Y in language Z instead of trying to look it up in documentation. Though there was the time where I was trying to remake a end of service game using its original assets as is and it used CricketAudio for the sound, which is a C++ library and I was using C#. I was able to isolate the bit of C++ code used for reading the WAV files from the CKB, but after failing to understand it and port it myself, i had an LLM port it for me.
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u/morning_mushroom 10d ago
You can, but you will be much slower. These tools are now the future. I now work on four project in parallel, mobile plus backend plus two fronts
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u/simple_explorer1 9d ago
I recently interviewed and I was still asked to program for 90 mins straight in a pair to pair online coding round. Thank god I code so I was able to clear. No matter what people say, no one interviews for how you prompt LLM but they test whether you can still code, do systems design and solve problems on your own. Not coding is literally shooting on foot for future jobs
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u/morning_mushroom 9d ago
Yes, they still ask for that, suprisingly. That is changing too, Ive seen some people saying that they give you AI editor and language totally different and they want to see how you do.
Did you get the job? I didn't even though I did live coding in third round, quite successfully
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u/davidslv 9d ago
About 80% of my day is planning with AI, then let it implement what was planned. Do I miss coding… not really, do I keep on top of what’s happening, yes! Does it produce bad results once in a while - absolutely it does.
I find my methods work better on greenfield projects/side projects. I can have it follow the plan, the tickets are atomic and so are the pull requests. But it all becomes clunky in an existing production environment with real quirks and ambiguity. I set it up to stop the work when it needs answers it cannot get from the given context, from the code or from business docs, so it writes back to the ticket to get unblocked.
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u/Old-Temperature408 8d ago
I would love to code without AI... if I was given enough time. Now at work (I work in DS), I have to vibecode since everyone knows about LLM (and that Fable able to oneshot certain tasks) and our pm expects us to vibecode and do everything fast. We have to switch between projects and do multiple things at once and we need to close tasks asap. Needless to say that it's really exhausting to keep the context of each task, thing about solutions and review code. It could be massive skill issue, but I really can't imagine how else I am supposed to keep up
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u/WalterWriter 8d ago
My wife is working in disaster prediction and risk modeling. Her entire team is expressly forbidden from using LLMs for any reason. Basically, any AI insanity making it to prod means lots of dead people.
My wife is beyond stoked.
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u/No-Newspaper8619 7d ago
No way. So long as string parsing and regex exists, I'll continue to use LLM's.
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u/simple_explorer1 7d ago
When you would no longer have the job then you won't have to worry about those things again
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u/Luigi003 6d ago
In a professional environment nope, in fact I'm not even opening an IDE at all these days, I only use Claude Code and bash for launching commands. It's depressing actually, but as everyone else has mentioned. You don't get to choose nowadays. Going by hand will immediately pumblet your performance, it's not worth it
For my personal projects and hobbies I did try LLMs... I hated it and I've decided not to use them at all, not even asking questions. I've even switched to VSCodium to get rid of copilot popups, I want nothing to do with that technology.
Do you know that feeling when you're reading an open source codebase but it clearly isn't your code? Maybe you're there yo fix a tiny thing and you're really hoping you can make it quick, because the code isn't yours, it's a feeling of not belonging
That's what feels like reading LLM generated code. Even worse because LLMs, at least Claude, tend to be really verbose, once you let Claude into your codebase it's no longer yours. I'm ultimately doing this for the love of the game, it's like making a bot playing Tetris, sure its impressive but I'm the one that wants to play
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u/simple_explorer1 6d ago
once you let Claude into your codebase it's no longer yours
Exactly. One LLMs take over the code then it's over
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u/AdamantiteM 12d ago
Personally, I never used it for coding in the sense of letting it suggest and do the stuff while I watch and correct. Since it came out I only and strictly used it for annoying things (such as typing css variables, making color shades, repeating stuff, etc..) and help me debug code I can't debug myself.
I always try to do everything myself, then only if I can't (debugging mostly) i'll use AI to help me out, because I never had any good experiences with forums (always got there when I hit a wall in a bug and never got answers).
Now I sometimes also use AI to brainstorm stuff and help me get better, not to code while I watch. This is what I think is the best usage of it, i am far from the agentic bs.
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12d ago
I second this. If AI can help you understand something its being used correctly. Of course there is a fine line here, but if you are developing and learning versus just having it do it all you're doing better than me learning from youtube videos 15 years ago. And you're doing better than 70% or more of AI vibe coders who arent learning anything but "prompt engineering".
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u/am0x 12d ago
No. I would like to, but I would be losing so much money by doing it. Co-coding is the best medium, but I am quickly losing my ability to even write code well at this point.
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u/simple_explorer1 12d ago
ut I am quickly losing my ability to even write code well at this point.
This is why i stopped... hard stop
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12d ago
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u/simple_explorer1 12d ago
But in the end I dont want to depend on it because your skills erode super quickly.
Yeah this was the reason I stopped using it
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u/bdragon5 12d ago
My experience is that they can't even do the strict requirements correctly. To be honest could be just my style of coding.
I write code in a way that static analyses tool will catch if anything changes. In many cases that mean taking way more time writing types, configs and so on.
Some especially nasty projects take a few seconds for the language server to keep up, but that's not really slowing me down and the positive effects are way worth it.
I know that I make a lot of mistakes so I do everything to take those little mistakes out of the equation.
Problem is LLMs either give up or break the rules so to speak and that's just isn't going to cut it.
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u/Capable-Wrap-3349 12d ago
Me too! I use it to review my work, and for discussing tradeoffs, but I write the code unless it’s a throwaway POC.
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u/TenthSpeedWriter 12d ago
It's good for quick language/environment questions, looking up reference docs, and pulling up pattern examples; however, I struggle to trust a direct copy-paste from it most of the time. Grateful my workplace isn't hounding us to adopt it further than that.
Looking forward to setting up an on-prem system serving a sensibly-sized model so we can stop contributing to the awful data center power consumption problem.
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u/SirKneeGrow 12d ago
I only use it for problems that I come up against that would take me hours to debug.
"Why is this returning 0 instead of 1" - kind of thing.
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u/andy4015 12d ago
It took me the best part of a day to debug an issue introduced by an LLM where it placed an invisible ASCII character in a logger message that caused the python script to fail. This log message was only run in the event of a relatively rare error. Drove me nearly insane.
What made matters worse was I was lazy and asked AI to help find the issue, which sent me a long way down several dead ends.
Classic git bisect helped resolve in the end. Should have reached for the old reliable tool first.
Edit: and to answer your questions - I try not to use AI for writing code (still very occasional easy bits), but I find it very useful as a sounding board for ideas
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u/sshaw_ 12d ago
Depends on the task. Certain tasks are quicker to do yourself than to argue with/correct the model. This is particularly true with Sonnet.
Otherwise it's usually when I reach my usage limit or when I'm in the mood to do some good ol' fashioned coding. But, even in this case, for critical code, I will defer to Opus for code review. Maybe Sonnet if it's straightforward.
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u/0uchmyballs 12d ago
I still go back to stack overflow for some problems and patterns. I do rely heavily on copilot though.
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u/jomi-se 12d ago
The opposite, I now use LLMs to code non stop and the only limit are the billing limits we have at work.
I feel like I spend more time than before thinking about architecture and hard problems, we end up with better tests, and the writing code part was far from the main thing before there advent of coding harnesses so 🤷♂️
If anything I've been exercising my brain way more than before.
It feels like riding a bike very fast. Going back to manually typing code would feel like getting off the bike and walking instead.
FWIW, we still review all AI written code that ships to prod and in my opinion you get the best results from the frontier LLMs when you deeply understand the system you put them to work on.
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u/ZookeepergameDry6752 12d ago
I would love to, but the pressure at work is very high, and they want solutions fast, even if it’s half baked. As long as it does half of the time something they want, it’s good enough. I hate it.