i want to be clear that AI can’t do your entire job for you, and if you start pushing vibe coded shit to prod, you should start looking for a new job. still,
AI is ridiculously useful- maybe not for you, but i’m an amateur with major gaps in my coding knowledge, so AI is incredibly useful for folks like me. of course if i actually get paid to do this shit, every line i write will have to be my own.
As a dev that recently transitioned from a decade of sys admin experience, to two years of ServiceNow admin/developer/et all, to now full stack development, I have found AI useful for somethings. I asked it how to do a thing, and it regurgitated a bunch of code that didn’t do what I was looking for, however, it did give me a framework for what files I needed to modify. I then put nose to the grindstone and write all of the rest of the code myself, researching the docs when needed, and I got it done.
For me, if I use AI to assist in something code, I always type everything out myself whether it’s right or not, because like taking notes, typing it out does help learn what I’m doing, not just finding a solution and running with it. I’ve disabled most of the auto complete copilot garbage in Visual Studio because it would generate huge blocks of code that may or may not be correct, and the accept button is the tab key, which I use frequently. I still have some degree of auto complete for single lines, but that’s it.
My advice would be to use AI as a prompt to get ideas or steer direction, but if you want to get better at coding and problem solving, I would suggest trying to find solutions yourself because digging through docs will be far more beneficial to your growth. AI does a good job of helping fill the gaps in packages or frameworks when your ignorant to all of the functions and stuff, but striving to understand them instead of relying on unreliable tools will make you a much better developer long term
AI is an extremely useful tool. I’m on the other end of the career track, but it seems to be that it’s almost like having a personal tutor. And as with any other teacher, if you use it as an aid to figure things out yourself I imagine it would help immensely, but at the same time if you use it as a crutch to do your work for you, you skills will be as weak as someone who cheats off their friends in school. I attribute a large part of my skills to spending lots of time reading other people’s code and understanding why they wrote it the way they did (usually because some library didn’t do what I wanted so I figured out how to beat it into submission out of pure stubbornness). If you use the AI as an aid and spend the time to really understand the code it’s producing (and the flaws in that code), I think you’ll build up your skills well.
My rant about code monkeys was inspired by people I’ve interviewed and worked with who had to be told exactly how to solve a problem since they apparently had zero problem solving skill themselves. The “programming is just writing code” attitude drives me up the fucking wall and “LLMs are going to make programmers obsolete” is just the latest iteration of that bullshit.
if i use AI to help me make a full stack app, for example, the learning experience wouldn’t nearly be as good as if i did it all on my own. but when i try to do everything by myself, i get lost and confused as fuck and eventually just abandon it out of frustration and move on to something else. i don’t get paid to do this so i have the luxury of just abandoning shit that gets too frustrating
i want to be clear that AI can’t do your entire job for you, and if you start pushing vibe coded shit to prod, you should start looking for a new job. still, AI is ridiculously useful- maybe not for you, but i’m an amateur with major gaps in my coding knowledge, so AI is incredibly useful for folks like me. of course if i actually get paid to do this shit, every line i write will have to be my own.
As a dev that recently transitioned from a decade of sys admin experience, to two years of ServiceNow admin/developer/et all, to now full stack development, I have found AI useful for somethings. I asked it how to do a thing, and it regurgitated a bunch of code that didn’t do what I was looking for, however, it did give me a framework for what files I needed to modify. I then put nose to the grindstone and write all of the rest of the code myself, researching the docs when needed, and I got it done.
For me, if I use AI to assist in something code, I always type everything out myself whether it’s right or not, because like taking notes, typing it out does help learn what I’m doing, not just finding a solution and running with it. I’ve disabled most of the auto complete copilot garbage in Visual Studio because it would generate huge blocks of code that may or may not be correct, and the accept button is the tab key, which I use frequently. I still have some degree of auto complete for single lines, but that’s it.
My advice would be to use AI as a prompt to get ideas or steer direction, but if you want to get better at coding and problem solving, I would suggest trying to find solutions yourself because digging through docs will be far more beneficial to your growth. AI does a good job of helping fill the gaps in packages or frameworks when your ignorant to all of the functions and stuff, but striving to understand them instead of relying on unreliable tools will make you a much better developer long term
AI is an extremely useful tool. I’m on the other end of the career track, but it seems to be that it’s almost like having a personal tutor. And as with any other teacher, if you use it as an aid to figure things out yourself I imagine it would help immensely, but at the same time if you use it as a crutch to do your work for you, you skills will be as weak as someone who cheats off their friends in school. I attribute a large part of my skills to spending lots of time reading other people’s code and understanding why they wrote it the way they did (usually because some library didn’t do what I wanted so I figured out how to beat it into submission out of pure stubbornness). If you use the AI as an aid and spend the time to really understand the code it’s producing (and the flaws in that code), I think you’ll build up your skills well.
My rant about code monkeys was inspired by people I’ve interviewed and worked with who had to be told exactly how to solve a problem since they apparently had zero problem solving skill themselves. The “programming is just writing code” attitude drives me up the fucking wall and “LLMs are going to make programmers obsolete” is just the latest iteration of that bullshit.
if i use AI to help me make a full stack app, for example, the learning experience wouldn’t nearly be as good as if i did it all on my own. but when i try to do everything by myself, i get lost and confused as fuck and eventually just abandon it out of frustration and move on to something else. i don’t get paid to do this so i have the luxury of just abandoning shit that gets too frustrating