Yeah... It's useful for summarizing searches but I'm tempted to disable it in VSCode because it's been getting in the way more than helping lately.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Experienced software developer, here. "AI" is useful to me in some contexts. Specifically when I want to scaffold out a completely new application (so I'm not worried about clobbering existing code) and I don't want to do it by hand, it saves me time.
And... that's about it. It sucks at code review, and will break shit in your repo if you let it.
Not a developer per se (mostly virtualization, architecture, and hardware) but AI can get me to 80-90% of a script in no time. The last 10% takes a while but that was going to take a while regardless. So the time savings on that first 90% is awesome. Although it does send me down a really bad path at times. Being experienced enough to know that is very helpful in that I just start over.
In my opinion AI shouldn’t replace coders but it can definitely enhance them if used properly. It’s a tool like everything. I can put a screw in with a hammer but I probably shouldn’t.
Like I said, I do find it useful at times. But not only shouldn't it replace coders, it fundamentally can't. At least, not without a fundamental rearchitecturing of how they work.
The reason it goes down a "really bad path" is that it's basically glorified autocomplete. It doesn't know anything.
On top of that, spoken and written language are very imprecise, and there's no way for an LLM to derive what you really wanted from context clues such as your tone of voice.
Take the phrase "fruit flies like a banana." Am I saying that a piece of fruit might fly in a manner akin to how another piece of fruit, a banana, flies if thrown? Or am I saying that the insect called the fruit fly might like to consume a banana?
It's a humorous line, but my point is serious: We unintentionally speak in ambiguous ways like that all the time. And while we've got brains that can interpret unspoken signals to parse intended meaning from a word or phrase, LLMs don't.
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I have limited AI experience, but so far that's what it means to me as well: helpful in very limited circumstances.
Mostly, I find it useful for "speaking new languages" - if I try to use AI to "help" with the stuff I have been doing daily for the past 20 years? Yeah, it's just slowing me down.
and the only reason it's not slowing you down on other things is that you don't know enough about those other things to recognize all the stuff you need to fix
I like the saying that LLMs are “good” at stuff you don’t know. That’s about it.
When you know the subject it stops being much useful because you’ll already know the very obvious stuff that LLM could help you.
They're also bad at that though, because if you don't know that stuff then you don't know if what it's telling you is right or wrong.
I...think that's their point. The only reason it seems good is because you're bad and can't spot that is bad, too.
To be fair, when you're in Gambukistan and you don't even know what languages are spoken, a smart phone can bail you out and get you communicating basic needs much faster and better than waving your hands and speaking English LOUDLY AND S L O W L Y . A good human translator, you can trust, should be better - depending on their grasp of English, but there's another point... who do you choose to pick your hotel for you? Google, or a local kid who spotted you from across the street and ran over to "help you out"? That's a tossup, both are out to make a profit out of you, but which one is likely to hurt you more?
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Fun how the article concludes that AI tools are still good anyway, actually.
This AI hype is a sickness
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Explain this too me AI. Reads back exactly what's on the screen including comments somehow with more words but less information Ok....
Ok, this is tricky. AI, can you do this refactoring so I don't have to keep track of everything. No... Thats all wrong... Yeah I know it's complicated, that's why I wanted it refactored. No you can't do that... fuck now I can either toss all your changes and do it myself or spend the next 3 hours rewriting it.
Yeah I struggle to find how anyone finds this garbage useful.
You shouldn't think of "AI" as intelligent and ask it to do something tricky. The boring stuff that's mostly just typing, that's what you get the LLMs to do. "Make a DTO for this table " "Interface for this JSON "
I just have a bunch of conversations going where I can paste stuff into and it will generate basic code. Then it's just connecting things up, but that's the fun part anyway.
Most ides do the boring stuff with templates and code generation for like a decade so that's not so helpful to me either but if it works for you.
Yeah but I find code generation stuff I've used in the past takes a significant amount of configuration, and will often generate a bunch of code I don't want it to, and not in the way I want it. Many times it's more trouble than it's worth. Having an LLM do it means I don't have to deal with configuring anything and it's generating code for the specific thing I want it to so I can quickly validate it did things right and make any additions I want because it's only generating the thing I'm working on that moment. Also it's the same tool for the various languages I'm using so that adds more convenience.
Yeah if you have your IDE setup with tools to analyze the datasource and does what you want it to do, that may work better for you. But with the number of DBs I deal with, I'd be spending more time setting up code generation than actually writing code.
I have asked questions, had conversations for company and generated images for role playing with AI.
I've been happy with it, so far.
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Writing code is the easiest part of my job. Why are you taking that away?
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no shit. ai will hallucinate shit I’ll hit tab by accident and spend time undoing that or it’ll hijack tab on new lines inconsistently
I study AI, and have developed plenty of software. LLMs are great for using unfamiliar libraries (with the docs open to validate), getting outlines of projects, and bouncing ideas for strategies. They aren't detail oriented enough to write full applications or complicated scripts. In general, I like to think of an LLM as a junior developer to my senior developer. I will give it small, atomized tasks, and I'll give its output a once over to check it with an eye to the details of implementation. It's nice to get the boilerplate out of the way quickly.
Don't get me wrong, LLMs are a huge advancement and unbelievably awesome for what they are. I think that they are one of the most important AI breakthroughs in the past five to ten years. But the AI hype train is misusing them, not understanding their capabilities and limitations, and casting their own wishes and desires onto a pile of linear algebra. Too often a tool (which is one of many) is being conflated with the one and only solution--a silver bullet--and it's not.
This leads to my biggest fear for the AI field of Computer Science: reality won't live up to the hype. When this inevitably happens, companies, CEOs, and normal people will sour on the entire field (which is already happening to some extent among workers). Even good uses of LLMs and other AI/ML use cases will be stopped and real academic research drying up.
My fear for the software industry is that we'll end up replacing junior devs with AI assistance, and then in a decade or two, we'll see a lack of mid-level and senior devs, because they never had a chance to enter the industry.
That's happening right now. I have a few friends who are looking for entry-level jobs and they find none.
It really sucks.
That said, the future lack of developers is a corporate problem, not a problem for developers. For us it just means that we'll earn a lot more in a few years.
You're not wrong, and I feel like it was a developing problem even before AI - everybody wanted someone with experience, even if the technology was brand new.
That said, even if you and I will be fine, it's still bad for the industry. And even if we weren't the ones pulling up the ladder behind us, I'd still like to find a way to start throwing ropes back down for the newbies...
They wanted someone with experience, who can hit the ground running, but didn't want to pay for it, either with cash or time.
- cheap
- quick
- experience
You can only pick two.
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You're not wrong, and I feel like it was a developing problem even before AI - everybody wanted someone with experience, even if the technology was brand new.
True. It was a long-standing problem that entry-level jobs were mostly found in dodgy startups.
Tbh, I think the biggest issue right now isn't even AI, but the economy. In the 2010s we had pretty much no intrest rate at all while having a pretty decent economy, at least for IT. The 2008 financial crisis hardly mattered for IT, and Covid was a massive boost for IT. There was nothing else to really spend money on.
IT always has more projects than manpower, so with enough money to spend, they just hired everyone.
But the sanctions against Russia in response to their invasion of Ukraine really hit the economy and rising intrest rates to combat inflation meant that suddenly nobody wanted to invest anymore.
With no investments, startups dried up and large corporations also want to downsize. It's no coincidence that return-to-work mandates only started after the invasion and not in the two years prior of that where lockdowns were already revoked. Work from home worked totally fine for two years after covid lockdowns, and companies even praised how well it worked.
Same with AI. While it can improve productivity in some edge cases, I think it's mostly a scapegoat to make mass-fireings sound like a great thing to investors.
That said, even if you and I will be fine, it's still bad for the industry. And even if we weren't the ones pulling up the ladder behind us, I'd still like to find a way to start throwing ropes back down for the newbies...
You are totally right with that, and any chance I get I will continue to push for hiring juniors.
But I am also over corporate tears. For decades they have been crying over a lack of skilled workers in the IT and pushing for more and more people to join IT, so that they can dump wages, and as soon as the economy is bad, they instantly u-turn and dump employees.
If corporations want to be short-sighted and make people suffer for it, they won't get compassion from me when it fails.
Edit: Remember, we are not the ones pulling the ladder up.
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Code reviews take up a lot of time, and if I know a lot of code in a review is AI generated I feel like I'm obliged to go through it with greater rigour, making it take up more time. LLM code is unaware of fundamental things such as quirks due to tech debt and existing conventions. It's not great.
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I’ve used cursor quite a bit recently in large part because it’s an organization wide push at my employer, so I’ve taken the opportunity to experiment.
My best analogy is that it’s like micro managing a hyper productive junior developer that somehow already “knows” how to do stuff in most languages and frameworks, but also completely lacks common sense, a concept of good practices, or a big picture view of what’s being accomplished. Which means a ton of course correction. I even had it spit out code attempting to hardcode credentials.
I can accomplish some things “faster” with it, but mostly in comparison to my professional reality: I rarely have the contiguous chunks of time I’d need to dedicate to properly ingest and do something entirely new to me. I save a significant amount of the onboarding, but lose a bunch of time navigating to a reasonable solution. Critically that navigation is more “interrupt” tolerant, and I get a lot of interrupts.
That said, this year’s crop of interns at work seem to be thin wrappers on top of LLMs and I worry about the future of critical thinking for society at large.
That said, this year’s crop of interns at work seem to be thin wrappers on top of LLMs and I worry about the future of critical thinking for society at large.
This is the must frustrating problem I have. With a few exceptions, LLM use seems to be inversely proportional to skill level, and having someone tell me "chatgpt said ___" when asking me for help because clearly chatgpt is not doing it for their problem makes me want to just hang up.
Just the other day I wasted 3 min trying to get AI to sort 8 lines alphabetically.
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Great! Less productivity = more jobs, more work security.
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