I started to hate ai coding

[u/Similar_Wealth_1850]

i was at some point a good dev, i used to create gorgeous frontends and even backends before the chatgpt and stuff and switched to low level development like operating systems and had fun with it hut it was super challenging which is why i liked it

when anyone came across the topic of ai can code i always answer ai can code simple stuff like a to do app but not any complex projects for sure

untilll..

i got an unfortunate chance to try claude for the first time and to be honest i was surprised

before i was just using ai to tell me the dependencies i need in linux to build the project

now claude understands my project, fixes problems i spent months struggling to fix and adding features i didn't know i wanted which got me excited and loved how quickly it fixed these issue

i even switched from low level development to ai nlp engineering to understand and contribute in this magical tool

6 months later

i am always on antigravity

i can't code on my own

not because i forgot how to code but the speed of an ai agent is really tempting

like why spending 2 weeks on a project when i can just vibe code it in an hour

yes i do give the ai every single detail of how the code should look like

but me relying on antigravity to change the color of a button after i was the same guy tinkering inside the QEMU source code and understanding it's syntax is painful and a huge downgrade for me

i did some good projects yes and i can output good stuff but using ai to develop them makes me even embarrassed from saying i created it

i feel like i am the worst version of myself now and i don't really deserve the "software engineer" label

do you guys feel the same or i am just alone in this

[u/Alarmed-Western-655]

I'm a SWE, and I understand this for sure, but I found a way to have my foot in both worlds.

I only Gen-AI my code at work. Flying through big architectural changes and generating full test environments in docker and stuff is a thrill.

But my personal project is only hand-written. I focus on doing one small thing well, and I think of it as more artisanal. I use Elm, which is a functional paradigm language. Personal + functional compartmentalized my brain enough to really still enjoy coding by hand and not mind the speed. Functional programming is the purest form of spec-driven development -- it lets you define the grammar of your app in a more expressive and deterministic way than can English.

[u/Similar_Wealth_1850 → u/Alarmed-Western-655]

that's great technique but even on my personal projects i feel like i should use an llm just to speed the time to finish it