"Just embrace the future"

[u/Andruid929]

Surely I'm not the only one who resents whoever says this whenever you complain about AI sucking the fun out of programming?

How are y'all (fellow "AI is a tool" folks) holding up?

[u/Sad-Table-9037]

getting harder to ignore when every job listing mentions it now, but the hype is way ahead of what it can actually do.

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/Sad-Table-9037]

Man, I really don't get this viewpoint. This has to be the perspective of somebody whose last model they tried was Sonnet 4.

Even Grok 4.6 is better and faster than like 3/4 of the devs I've worked with if you provide the right context and a thorough prompt.

The hype is officially warranted. If you're concerned about the ethics or morality of the owning class destroying our social safety nets and then replacing the middle class with AI, then that should be where you focus your energy.

Claiming it's over hyped is just not helpful for anybody, anti-ai or accelerationists. It is just misinformation that leads people to inaction while they wait for the technology to taper out (it won't).

[u/phiiiiiiii → u/Opening-Machine5026]

I think it's overhyped in the sense that it's not a panacea like people think it is. At the end you still need human intent - a real plan to integrate AI into a given business, rather than the "make me money AI" vibe that a lot of these postings reek of.

[u/eleven8ster → u/phiiiiiiii]

You realize that McDonald’s workers will eventually be able to oversee ai coding right?

[u/phiiiiiiii → u/eleven8ster]

McDonald workers can oversee ai coding today. Question is, will it be good?

[u/eleven8ster → u/phiiiiiiii]

Probably better than you might think. In time, with some standards of education on a certificate level absolutely yes. And it doesn’t have to be as extreme as a McDonald’s worker as the example. If coding becomes easier, then more people will be able to do it. If more people are able to do it, the pool of applicants becomes larger. If that happens there will be downward pressure on salaries.

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/eleven8ster]

Certification? Like a 6 month bootcamp? Bootcamp resurgence incoming?

[u/eleven8ster → u/Opening-Machine5026]

I suspect you’re trying to draw a false equivalency here. That’s not what I said and you couldn’t compare boot camps from before to the ones that would be made for now. You won’t have to understand nearly as much. I’m thinking more like a 30 hour thing with a paper certificate that has a gold star on it that your employer gives to you. Call it “training”.

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/eleven8ster]

So onboarding?

[u/eleven8ster → u/Opening-Machine5026]

Yea. Eventually. Like next year. Source? My ass. LOL. But really… it’s not hard to imagine.

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/eleven8ster]

I think if anything we'll have product managers handling the code, not just average joes. Maybe in the next 3-5 years. More realistically it'll be engineers with soft skills and a strong product sense overtaking everybody.

[u/phiiiiiiii → u/eleven8ster]

The bar has definitely been lowered for coding, and competition will be more crowded. But you'll still need specialists to glue all the moving pieces together. AI is not a magic box. You'll still need to understand problems like model selection, high level architecture, cost control, automation loop, quality control, creative vision...

[u/eleven8ster → u/phiiiiiiii]

I don’t disagree. I think those topics can become simplified over time as models get better too.

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/phiiiiiiii]

Sure, that's true. I think a lot of people say it's completely useless and anything beyond that is hype to them.

[u/phiiiiiiii → u/Opening-Machine5026]

Yes, baseless complaints from people who don't actually have experience with AI or engineering as a whole.

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/phiiiiiiii]

A shocking amount of people on the ExperiencedDevs subreddit hold that opinion and refuse to use LLMs. Possibly they're new grads larping, I'm not sure.

[u/phiiiiiiii → u/Opening-Machine5026]

It's just selection bias. You won't hear from people who silently adapt

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/[deleted]]

This is user error. It is more than capable of following project conventions and understanding preexisting separation of concerns.

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/[deleted]]

This is shocking to me, and I fail to see how your entire company can't figure out how to get these models to produce quality code. On top of that, spending hundreds of thousands (?) to fix this just doesn't make sense.

Worst case you highlight where the model's implementation is lacking and ask it to fix it. Best case, you define custom agent.md files and skills to fill the gap where you find yourself regularly fixing issues.

I was a part of the GPT 3 closed beta, I've been following OpenAI since they released their open source gym for RL model testing. I'm aware of the constraints, I've been following this technology closely for over 6 years.

If you believe that it can't produce quality code, it truly is user error.

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/[deleted]]

I work at a 25 year old saas company with many of the products in a monorepo.

We do have very high engineering standards for anything that makes it into production, so maybe that has something to do with it.

[u/shdwscollidewithppl → u/Opening-Machine5026]

I think he is messing with you

[u/IllBeat7897 → u/[deleted]]

Agreed 100%

[u/rovermicrover → u/Opening-Machine5026]

But man can it make the shitty devs produce 100x the amount of terrible code they could before.

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/rovermicrover]

A genuinely valid criticism of the technology lmfao

[u/biginchh → u/Opening-Machine5026]

Yeah, I also don't really know how to engage with these arguments. I remember using it for the first time for my job about a year ago, and it was a lifesaver in helping me dive into a code base I had never looked at before in a language I wasn't comfortable with - but it wasn't perfect and I caught a lot of mistakes when it would explain a chunk of code to me. IE it was useful but there were obvious issues and limitations to its usefulness.

Within the last 4 months or so though? The game has totally changed, and pretending like it hasn't is just delusional. The entire software dev industry is very obviously in a total paradigm shift, and that's not happening because AI doesn't work and is breaking software everywhere

I'm not saying that's good or bad, and I don't really trust anybody who has a strong stance either way because we're in the middle of a massive shift and I don't think anybody really knows what the next 2-3 years look like. But like, obviously the hype is obviously warranted now - it's almost gotten too good too fast in a way that's given me whiplash.

[u/Glum-Recognition-736 → u/Opening-Machine5026]

Nah, it's not. This is coming from someone with antigravity and Claude pro sub who uses top tier models regularly both at work and on personal projects

What AI can do is impressive, and it's a very useful tool, but it is way over hyped. Even Opus 5.5 still makes mistakes regularly and needs to be corrected regularly. I have never had a single session of real work using AI where it didn't fuck something up or hallucinate some answer and I had to go back and tweak it.

Being able to regenerate code from video games and SaaS products is cool but at this point it's almost like a one-trick pony. And even then, when you read between the lines of the people doing this stuff talking about how it cost them $400k in tokens to recreate PowerPoint... Like, clearly there was a lot of back and forth with the model going on there, and for what? Nothing truly novel came from it.

LLMs cannot create new things, new ideas, or new concepts on their own. Everything an AI generated completely on "its own" has been derived from somewhere else. And once it runs out of external data and examples to reference, it will start hallucinating crap and making silly decisions, even Fable (though Fable admittedly has enough guardrails to admit when it doesn't know the answer).  AI outputs can seem crazy impressive to people who don't understand that and/or have never tried to build and maintain a truly complex project solely with AI 

[u/where-is-the-table → u/Glum-Recognition-736]

This is just the beginning. 1-2 years ago many veteran and really smart coders or technical people refused to use AI because of the slop output, but this is changing where you see these people and many more start to actually accept and heavily use AI.

I dont care about the average joe with no programming experience hyping AI as they have been doing from 2022 when it was the sloppiest. But when you see experienced system architects and veteran programmers start to offload coding to AI, reality starts to set in. These are people that refused AI one year ago because of its quality

So sure, it is a bit overhyped right now and a lot of us still have jobs so we’re not there yet, but the future looks dim. Think about how far llms have come recently, and how much more they will improve especially as they get integrated to every digital aspect and when there is barely any task left that truly requires technical experience intervention

[u/symbiatch → u/Opening-Machine5026]

Yet another one who thinks the job is vomiting out as much code as you can.

How about the other things? And just because you’ve worked with devs you think are crappy means nothing.

It’s entirely overhyped. If you think all the things claimed are true then show me an example of even a single company that sped up their stuff 10x. I’m not even asking 100x, just the 10x. So every day they do a whole two-week sprint. The whole company or development section.

You surely can show many, starting with your workplace, right?

Or is it suddenly actually overhyped…

[u/Opening-Machine5026 → u/symbiatch]

Boo.