I don't understand prompt based coding workflows
Posted by ahspaghett69@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 122 comments
I have been trying to use agentic coding patterns to boost my productivity at work, but it so far has been a complete failure and I feel like I'm going insane?
I used to use copilot but due to data concerns it was taken away. I always found that it gave me a very clear and measurable performance boost. It actually felt like a significant leap forward.
Now, I have access to Claude Code and the latest models. I tried to code a very simple project for a demo, so not something that would go production or had security concerns etc.
I followed the latest guides and setup subagents and wrote out some style guides and basic instructions about thinking and planning etc then I got started
First of all it completely ignored my subagent instructions. So, ok, I guess I'll specify them in the prompt instead, whatever.
Then, it started writing code, but it clearly misinterpreted what I wanted, even though I specified it as clearly as I possibly could. Ok, I'll prompt it to fix it and update my instructions.
Now, it produced something, and it tried to test it, great! Except it didn't work, and then it got stuck in a loop trying to fix it itself, even though the error was extremely trivial (an issue with indentation in one of the files), and in trying to fix it it completely destroyed the code it has written.
So, I prompted it on how to fix it, and it worked, but now the code was an absolute mess, so I decided to start again and use a different tactic. Instead I would create all files, lay out all the code, and then just tell Claude "autocomplete this".
Well, that worked a lot better...except it hallucinated several parameters for API functions, which, while not the end of the world, is not a mistake a person would make, and the code was absolutely disgusting with heaps of duplication. I guess because it had to "fit" the structure it lost any sense of reusability or other patterns.
Has anyone else had this experience? Am I missing something? I obviously didn't expect it to be a literal "oh yeah you write one prompt and it's done" situation but writing code this way seems incredibly inefficient and error prone compared to writing it the traditional way. What took me 2 hours of fiddling with prompts and agents to get done with prompts I did in less than 1 hr the normal way and the code was far better.
I sort of feel like I'm in a twilight zone episode because everyone else seems to be having a ton of success but every time I've tried to use it I've had the same experience.
spacemoses@reddit
I'm using Claude Code exclusively on a personal project. I'm on my 3rd iteration of the project, from scratch. It has taken me a great deal of time investment to learn how to drive Claude Code correctly. Now, I am doing everything by the book as you would on a dev team and pair programming. I work with it and iterate many times on design docs upfront, I have it write out guideline docs as I work with it for future reference. I have it make Jira tickets and refine those tickets. Then, when enough is speced out and solid looking, I let it start working tickets one at a time, but I scrutinize every single line of code it proposes. I have it make PRs and I do a final review of changes.
You can't just let it start shitting code out with poorly defined instructions. You'll get something that seems correct and a mountain of extra or unwanted things that bloat super quick, not to mention you have no idea what's going on when you actually hit a problem you need to debug. I really feel like AI has the ability to boost performance and, frankly, quality, but by god you cannot just let this stuff go on autopilot. That I think is the disconnect people have with it, the AI tool is going to really be as good as the skill and input of the person driving it. Also, note that what I'm working on is a greenfield project as well. I haven't tried to use it on a tire fire legacy project for anything yet.
United-Baseball3688@reddit
That sounds so incredibly exhausting. And it doesn't really sound fast. As you yourself have said.
But more than anything - it sounds boring and miserable to me.
Accomplished_Pea7029@reddit
It basically sounds like a senior managing an unreliable junior. Which is not what I want to do as a job
Kernel-Mode-Driver@reddit
Oh the irony
DWu39@reddit
Unfortunately that's what mentorship for human engineers is like too haha
Accomplished_Pea7029@reddit
At least they will get better over time and you get the satisfaction of contributing to that.
DWu39@reddit
Which part?
The multiple iterations in the beginning is just part of the learning curve of a new tool.
The rest of it just seems like standard project management. If you're going to implement a large project with multiple milestones and even delegate to other teammates, you will be doing the same kind of process.
What would the alternative process look like?
United-Baseball3688@reddit
I don't want to do project management. It's annoying. The more explicit I have to be, the more annoying it is. That's why I've got PMs who do that shit for me.
robhanz@reddit
ShoePillow@reddit
Tire fire... Haven't heard that term before
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
On tire fire legacy projects (sigh) I've found them most useful as research assistants and rubber duckies. Gpt 5 is notably good here
bluetrust@reddit
I don't think you're in the twilight zone. I think you're being intellectually honest and experiencing AI dissonance. If everyone is so productive with AI coding, how come it's unobservable? Shouldn't there be a massive impact on the world at large? Shouldn't we be in the midst of an indie revolution of new software of all shapes and sizes? Shouldn't we be drowning in shovelware?
I wrote a well-received profanity-laden rant recently where I put forth this exact argument, and I brought together charts and graphs of new apps, new steam games, new domain name registrations, new github public repos, basically new software of all kinds -- growth is flat despite 80% of developers using AI weekly to help them code, and 14% of developers saying it's now made them 10xers.
My take is that any initial gains from using ai coding are obviously offset by the cost of reviewing code -- it takes a long time to read two or more pages of code, then by github's own numbers you're going to reject it 2/3rds of the time. That's already not good. And then you factor in skill loss and not even being familiar with your own codebase anymore, and it's all just kind of a shit sandwich.
I still use ai coding, but only in really limited, really lazy ways where I know it'll succeed.
tskim@reddit
I'm building something but my repo is private. Also, I don't think coding tool productivity would be the main factor to determine whether or not, or how frequently someone starts a new solo project.
possiblywithdynamite@reddit
What is going on here? What are you people missing? Do people really just think so differently that some get it and others don't?
I'm at this new startup. founds are ivy league grads with 3 phds each, coders, they don't understand the usefulness of agentic coding. don't even really use llms.
been fucking relentlessly explaining how it works to a close friend for over 6 months, brilliant engineer, just don't get it.
The only other engineer I've worked with who actually understood and I was able to commiserate with was just hired by open ai.
There's some divide. It's fucking wild. different world views at some deep level. This entire sub is like steeping into the a parallel universe.
think about this, hear me out: claude code was an internal tool. it is being used to make fucking claude. the proof is in the pudding
United-Baseball3688@reddit
Idk man, I still have to meet a good dev (someone where I *know* that they're good) who doesn't tell me he barely uses it for very specific things only. Otherwise it's pretty useless.
possiblywithdynamite@reddit
I've voiced this confusion and made this claim probably a dozen times. I've never been asked once to elaborate. No one is ever curious, only defensive. Maybe it's an ego thing. Maybe that's the difference
recycled_ideas@reddit
Because no one can be bothered arguing with AI evangelists.
99/100 people that I've encountered who make the claims you're making have less than five years of experience, usually less than three, sometimes absolutely none.
I will grant you that AI is better than most junior developers, but that's because most junior developers absolutely suck (that's not a put down we were all junior developers once and we all sucked once).
But being better than a developer that produces negative work isn't a ringing endorsement and junior developers can, with a lot of patience and understanding be taught to not suck.
The remaining 1/100 is using it to write tests or documentation that they don't actually verify are accurate or useful.
United-Baseball3688@reddit
Whatever makes ya float, man. Ain't nobody stopping anyone from using it.
darksparkone@reddit
Not only reviewing but also planning if you want to get something bigger than a method.
On the other hand, while I don't see a major boost to the implementation side, this may lead to a decent improvement of the documentation and planning, which is nice. (And probably get into a mix of the same AI slop and outdated design docs pretty fast, but that's another story)
-Knockabout@reddit
I feel like the biggest benefit to AI is it makes you stop and explain the problem you're having/architecture you're considering lol. Rubber ducking.
Perfect-Campaign9551@reddit
Which also in my opinion is what TDD forced you to do, and the only reason it works is because of that. It's not the technique. It's taking the time to ask the proper questions, which many programmers don't do. So any method that forces you to slow down and think first before coding always results in better code
-Knockabout@reddit
Agreed! Test driven development always helps me refine any requirements I might be shaky on too.
Kissaki0@reddit
I don't trust my colleagues writing thoroughly good docs or planning, I certainly won't trust an AI to do that.
For me, it seems like it would be the same thing.
What good is documentation with logical errors, redundant confusing repetition, excessive text, or that leaves out significant issues?
Just like with Code you'll have to review in depth to the point where you probably didn't gain anything.
At least if you want to produce good docs and plans. My desires and expectations are quite high in that regard, higher for me than others, but I certainly point out improvements to docs of my colleagues, and by doing so guide to a better, more consistent, and overall sensible and structured documentation. I'm doubtful AI could help me to a significant degree with significant self-reliance.
Most people apparently dislike and evade writing docs. I don't have that issue. It's part of my work, and I do it naturally. I don't know if you had an unspoken thought of "better than nothing".
ProfBeaker@reddit
As best I can tell only one dev I work with is using AI to write docs in a serious way. He has massive output, but it's utterly useless. Think 3000 line PRs that contain 300 lines of actual content, and then a ton of repetitive, useless, or just wrong stuff. And it's awful to review, because the AI writing style is literate enough to make you wonder if it actually makes sense and you're just not getting it.
We do have a few other devs who are non-native English speakers that use it for editing and "English-ifying" their docs. I haven't noticed the same problems for them, likely because they're using it very differently.
Individual_Bus_8871@reddit
How come? Go to r/vibecoding and they will explain you everything.
roger_ducky@reddit
Most people, in addition to the basic setup, also had the agents do it in phases, with human review in the middle.
Aside from that, LLMs are way more successful writing something that’s been implemented to death (say, a CRUD web app) than anything else.
DWu39@reddit
Yeah they're just pattern generators. I think the better you can break down a novel problem, so that each part is less novel, the better the AI can implement it.
The process of breaking down a novel problem into standard problems is called engineering hahaha
localhost8100@reddit
I had to migrate from one framework to another. No architecture change. It did the best job. Migrated the whole app in 3 months. It took 2 years to build the app in original framework.
I had couple of features, I couldn't use the same sdk as the previous framework. Oh boy. Had to struggle a lot to get anything done.
orihime02@reddit
For me, I use AI that way I would gives tasks to a junior. I scope out the task, figure out all the hard parts, and then give it the execution to do. I've been experimenting with letting it do some of the scoping. I basically first tell it to explore the codebase, and make a plan for how its going to tackle a specific task. I go back and forth on those plans, discussing different approaches. I then ask it to code in phases, and review and test each phase.
I feel faster in the sense I can work on another task while the code is executing. In the end, developers read code way more than they write. However, there are a lot of times the ai agent goes off the rail, and in those times, I feel I wasted more time using AI and lost both the skills and the execution I would have learned by taking on the issue myself.
One other aspect that AI helps me with is using it as a better 'fuzzy search'. For example, I want examples of how something is done in the codebase. I can just ask AI to search for examples for me. I don't need to ask around (as much). In those ways, I feel like AI makes me faster.
But I do wonder if I'm going to get to a point where my reliance on AI is going to make me slower over time. If I'm offloading all the execution to AI, where there come a time where I no longer know how to execute on my own? If a tougher issues comes along, that AI can't do, will I have to struggle through it harder than I probably would if I had built up my experience and execution skills overtime? I'm not sure.
micseydel@reddit
I would absolutely love details on how you measured it.
ahspaghett69@reddit (OP)
To be more specific the way I would measure it, and the way you can measure it, is to turn autocomplete off, entire the code, time it, then turn it back on and do the same. It's measurable because when using tab completions it's literally writing the exact same thing I would have written manually, it's just saving the keystrokes.
UntestedMethod@reddit
Somehow this reminded me of those meme/games where you keep tapping the phone's auto-correct suggestion. For example, I will manually type "AI-generated code is" and then hit whatever word my phone suggests next.
AI-generated code is often a bit of a bit of a lot of the most important thing is that the same time as a result of the most important thing is that the same time as well as the registered player whether the use of the most important thing is that the same time as well as the registered player.
fckingmiracles@reddit
AI-generated code is a LinkedIn account and information about AI and collaborative development of the question was if you use acronyms to redefine this is not the intended recipient of the question was an open message to redefine and collaborative application for the article.
-fallenCup-@reddit
AI will mirror back to you how well you can explain what you want to a child. If you don't understand what you want and can't explain it well, AI will crush you.
qkthrv17@reddit
typing letters is not a bottleneck ):
micseydel@reddit
I encourage you to make a follow-up post with your measurements, along with details for how we can attempt to reproduce it ourselves.
ahspaghett69@reddit (OP)
I didn't say I measured it. I said it was measurable. I considered it clear because I would hit tab to autocomplete whatever I was writing a lot every session. I wasn't using it to write entire functions or whatever but it would do stuff like, if I was writing a list comprehension it would know what I wanted straight away.
Sheldor5@reddit
do you even english?
if you haven't measured your performance how do you even know it was measurable?
Sufficient_Dinner305@reddit
If it has saved some time at any point ever, it's measurable, with a clock, for instance...
Sheldor5@reddit
no
you just know the time it took without any reference or comparison which is worthless
that's why all studies resulted in the contestants being ~20% slower while they thought they were ~30% faster
Schmittfried@reddit
You‘re misapplying the study and you clearly don’t know the meaning of an adjective.
johnpeters42@reddit
Yeah, in fact that study demonstrates that this sort of thing is measurable, because they did measure it (and then compared it to what people thought the measurement would be).
Schmittfried@reddit
I still think those results are heavily skewed by situations that boil down to this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1319/
As OP said, it’s hard to imagine that better autocomplete would increase development time (though it probably doesn’t shave off that much either), unless other factors are at play like, like developers feeling enabled to write more complicated / over-engineered code and thereby wasting more time.
FetaMight@reddit
You seem to be the one with poor reading comprehension.
Measurable != measurably better.
datanaut@reddit
I think if you re-read your sentence as written you are implying that you can't in principle know whether something is measurable without first measuring it, which is a little ridiculous.
What you likely mean to ask is how can you know there is a measureable performance boost as opposed to a performance loss unless the performance has actually been measured. Obviously knowing whether or not something is measurable does not require you to have already measured it.
I am in agreement with the point you are trying to make but the fact that you questioned their English ability and then followed up with a pretty nonsensical sentence that requires generous interpretation is interesting.
Sheldor5@reddit
he clearly found the performance boost 😂
InterestedBalboa@reddit
Same experience here, tried really hard to use Kiro and Roo on a Microservice and it just produced tightly coupled AI slop. It worked but not maintainable and hard to reason about code.
Two weeks in and I’m writing it from scratch as it’s costing me way too much time using these tools.
I dont understand how people are gaining productivity with these tools.
yetiflask@reddit
If it's writing tightly coupled code, you most certainly are giving it nonsense prompts.
Sheldor5@reddit
they are either lying or they don't measure anything and just feel ... I bet most of those people are just really bad at programming and that's why AI gives them such a (subjectively) big performance boost so they have to write a Medium article about it to blow up the bubble even more
seinfeld4eva@reddit
why you so angry? some people find it boosts productivity. they're not stupid or terrible programmers.
nextnode@reddit
A lot of people are grumbling because they just want to have a cozy job and feel threatened.
nextnode@reddit
My experience is a great productivity boost for myself and the entire team. It has a lot to do with your setup the development environments you use. Anything close to what OP describes I would say something is seriously wrong in the attempted usage.
damnburglar@reddit
Yes but also you need to consider that they can build some pretty useful utilities etc that don’t need to be well-built, secure, or scalable (ie. scaffolders and other small CLI tools). There’s also this thing companies are doing where they expect you to sell them on the idea that you are great with ai and bring so much productivity to the team. I’m convinced that a lot of it is a new form of resuming gaming.
madmars@reddit
They are excellent for bash scripts and whatnot. The other use case is generating test data, which is perfect for unit tests and QA data. Idea generation is also great, particularly when feeling lazy and need something quick.
Oh god yes. I see this internally since it was mandated to use AI. People post their AI "wins" to show what they could do. It's nothing but exaggerated BS. It's like LinkedIn lunatics type stuff.
ShoePillow@reddit
I've tried it for shell scripts, and that also needed a decent amount of back and forth. But yeah, it got the job done for me.
InterestedBalboa@reddit
I have used it for test harnesses with success, they are disposable and as long as the outputs meet criteria I don’t care…..but that’s about it so far
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
I think there's something causing vastly different experiences. I use the same tools this guy does and while theyre not perfect, the experience has been quite pleasant.
Oftentimes it feels like I'm coding by leaving code review comments, which I find to be not too bad.
Recluse1729@reddit
Holy shit I feel like you were staring daggers at one of my coworkers as you typed this.
Perfect-Campaign9551@reddit
It only works well when it's an already solved problem that exists in it's training data
No_Structure7185@reddit
well, if your productivity was zero before because you dont know how to code at all.... then it does boost your productivity 😅
talldean@reddit
I ask AI for smaller things that I can very rapidly sort "good" vs "not good", when it's not good I might try again or just write it myself, and I generally go VSCode/Claude.
If you ask it for functions, it works. If you ask it for features, it's not great. If you ask it for full products, abandon all hope.
I already know how to code reasonably well, so if I can crank out a 10-30 line function with one line of english, I get to go faster. Maybe 10-50% faster, not 100-500%.
marx-was-right-@reddit
Theyre lying because they think they will get promoted for it.
spicymato@reddit
I've had mixed success.
A piece of specific advice: don't independently write the spec/plan/guidance docs. Use the AI to help you write them, and spend extra time on them. It's more likely to create better input language.
UntestedMethod@reddit
I've only dabbled with it on a couple basic personal projects. I found it did an ok job as long as I went one step at a time and didn't try to make it do too much at once. I was impressed with how it structured the code overall, but it did need some hands-on work at the end. I intentionally avoided asking it to fill in some of the details and preferred it to just give me something along the lines of what I wanted some I could use it as am example. Fwiw, I was working with python which I have experience with, but using an API and some modules I haven't worked with before. One of the first prompts I gave was pointing to the API documentation I wanted it to use.
I have more than a couple decades of experience so I know what I'm looking for in the code, but I would definitely not trust AI-generated code that a junior or newbie programmer comes up with.
Afa people doing 100% vibe coding with no hands on coding, that sounds very sketchy and I have no idea how people are comfortable with such mysterious results.
DadJokesAndGuitar@reddit
I think you’re right and the emperor is, indeed, naked
Perfect-Campaign9551@reddit
Now think to yourself - did you really save any time? AI is good but it's not ready to be an agent. It's just not
-fallenCup-@reddit
I use Gemini to build a PRD that describes what I want specifically for Claude code. Once I'm happy with that I have Claude tell me how it plans on fulfilling the prd, then feed that back to Gemini as a smoke test to ensure the AIs agree. I work the plan with Claude to ensure it's close to what I want then let it go and execute the plan.
I force it to do TDD, force it to develop UIs to governmental accessibility standards, and have it take screenshots using puppeteer of the web UI if there is one and have it fix problems that it sees.
I also have it use nix flakes so it can develop its own development environment and tools.
sharpcoder29@reddit
For me, agent mode with Claude 4 is a game changer. You just have to be experienced enough to know what to ask, and to limit the scope, but it's amazing. Easily 4x my output. But I'm a 20 YOE Architect
TimMensch@reddit
The only actual studies I've seen show a 35% performance penalty for using AI.
I really believe that those who talk about how awesome AI is are not actually programmers. Maybe they're paid as if they're programmers, but as I'm sure you're aware, not everyone in the industry actually has reasonable skill at programming.
It's why we have programming tests in interviews, after all.
Before AI, these developers would Google for code to copy off of Stackoverflow. It would take them forever to find the right code and tweak it to work in context. I've talked with developers like this, and they claimed that it was faster to Google for a for loop than to just write it.
By comparison, using AI is a lot faster. It's life changing for the copy-paste developer.
But it's a situation where a 0.1x developer is getting a 5x performance boost. Even after the boost they're still not as fast as someone who actually knows how to program at 1x, much less someone who's actually really good.
And because they don't really understand what they're doing, the architecture they end up creating causes a multiplicative 0.5x performance every month or so they're working on the project, until progress grinds to a near halt because of technical debt.
If you look into the details of those success stories, they're putting in tons of hours to create a fragile, insecure, barely working mock up of their app.
Short answer is: Don't feel bad because it's only because the AI advocates are awful developers that AI makes them more productive.
nivvis@reddit
I had to check that I wasn’t on some bizarro experienced devs circle jerk sub. And gatekeeping what programming is? Oof
Maybe I should play the counter framing and lend some contrast to your approach — lays the snark and contempt bare.
“some people can’t think past the few lines of code or file in front of them. They don’t understand how to prepare, how to delegate, how to push and pop into different levels of abstraction daily, hourly, and by the minute. they don’t understand their architecture principles well enough. they haven’t written 10k LoC only to throw it out and rebuild it again better tomorrow .. enough — to have such a rote, consuming understanding of the discipline — like brushing your teeth — that you would happily yield the mechanical minutiae to a machine. And then as they try, they are not adept or creative enough to advise one of the most capable of all inventions on how to do something as simple as color inbounds.
They don’t focus often enough on the higher level goals of building. Or maybe they just never had the vision to see the forest for the trees”
Now .. i personally wouldn’t say it with that much snark and contempt ..
Are we really claiming AI makes us slower in 2025? And in 2026? Will you yield any? One MIT study?
This advice is borderline dangerous to the careers of people in this sub.
I get there are a lot of feels. A lot of AI being forced onto our finest, artisanal neckbeard programmers (of which I am one — assuredly). Some days i miss just cracking open a puzzle and solving the deepest levels myself. I miss spending a weekend just building some random kernel driver just because I could.
But there’s no doubting that i am incredibly more productive. At my current job we have enabled systems that just might save our squirrelly startup. For my part, you can keep your programming. I’ve done all sides of it, and playing with compilers, poor interfaces, odd language or syntactic choices — if you’ve stared at it long enough it’s all one jumbled mess of still pretty low level interfaces (except for you Ruby .. you were perfect ❤️).
— Some qualifications and adjacent thoughts: - have “programmed” in ways many people on this sub would deem masochistic (silicon, hdl, assembly, c, and so on) - you couldn’t pay me to go back to c and reinvent the wheel for the 30th time on some embedded stack (programming?). Idc that I remembered ring buffers by heart — no thanks. - i used to take joy from learning principles like SOLID, YAGNI, XP — patterns like Gang of Four - i used to (and still do) take joy in teaching them - nowadays i take joy in “teaching” them to llms .. in being able to wake up hours later to see that i laid a careful enough plan, with requisite guardrails, spec, style, best practices that the bot was able to achieve nearly exactly what i wanted.
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
On the topic of ai this often does feel like a circle jerk sub tbh. I don't completely understand the strong emotional reaction to ai people have. Like people get really, really angry.
Like you I've been doing this a long time. Why don't more of us approach using this new tech with the same sense of wonder, creativity, play, and ingenuity that we bring to other tech? Why is this the one that deserves our narrow-minded ire? I don't get it
TimMensch@reddit
I am using AI. It's how I know its limitations.
And it's the claim that it will 5x or 10x productivity that I'm calling out. That claim absolutely deserves our ire and ridicule.
Except that it does apply to developers who are so bad at programming that they never really learned how to do anything other than copy-paste. Which is my point above.
nivvis@reddit
You can keep your myopic view, but that doesn't invalidate other folks' lived experience.
a) i’d put my personal speedup at \\~5–20x (depends on context and rigor required \[PoC vs long‑term system]). in some cases speed doesn’t matter. it’s made things *feasible* that weren’t before, like decomposing the shit monolith we inherited into better patterns. how do you even measure that? it’s qualitative and lost in your oversimplified framing.
b) i’ve been absolutely prolific in the last 6 months.
c) if i were one of those “don’t know how to program” devs, my results would be low quality and i’d still lag peers; neither is true\*. i was more productive than my peers before, and now… it's not even close. chalk it up to the same copium as "10x devs don’t exist." (spoiler: they do – and if you have to ask, you’re not one 🙃)
ironically, on this point, it's actually the best systems engineers that get the highest speedup (no surprise). IME the people who "can't code" (not my preferred term – super gatekeepey) actually hit a wall as they're not able to understand under the hood of what they're making.
d) this is because i’m a good *engineer* (creative, adaptive, rigorous). these systems bear fruit for the right takers – you just aren’t it.
you can put your head in the sand and claim it’s impossible; i hope you don’t. 🤷♂️ there’s vast creative space here… go smoke a j, go for a run, find some plasticity, and grow, my guy.
\*interesting caveat – i’ve used llms to maximize leverage, and i’m hitting the limit where i can produce code faster than i can grok & manage it. imo that's the engineering challenge & limit. tho that's .. several phases .. deeper into an ai-led coding maturity/adoptance model that you've managed to get.
TimMensch@reddit
You're devolving to insults. I am confident in my abilities and performance as a software engineer, but arguing about it is pointless.
I'm actively experimenting with AI. I don't believe your claims are accurate, either your claims of your own engineering and programming skill, or your claims of the effectiveness of the AI. I'm just not seeing the benefits.
So either I'm already performing at 10x your baseline, or something else about your claims doesn't match reality.
And we're done here.
notbatmanyet@reddit
Imagine that you are a carpenter. All your career you have manually hammered in nails. Then someone invents the nail gun.
You try ut and you like it. It makes a tedious part of your job a lot easier.
But one day, while screwing some hinges to a doorframe your boss approaches you and asks you while you are not using the nail gun. He won't listen to any claims that the tool is unsuitable to the job. So in the end you relent and just nail the hinges instead, knowing they won't last very long this way.
You keep this up, and maintain productivity by hiding your non-nailgun work from your boss. You hear some claim that it should 10x your productivity, but you wonder how it could. You did not spend 90% of the time hammering in nails after all.
Later your boss is angry that the team still haven't embraced the naillgun. So he mandates that you use the nailgun at least 90% of the time and sends spies to measure that you do so. Now you find yourself always trying to use a nail gun, regardless of the task. Screws are right out, everything gets nailed. Need to smoothen a surface? Wrapping sandpaper around the gun still counts as using it. Need to saw a plank in half? Mayne if you put the nails very close to each other in a line you can just snap.it off quickly...
I think nailguns would start to annoy you then
I think this is really the problem. LLMs are extremely useful for many things. But many try to push them into.everything else too.
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
Agreed. That's a story about bad mgmt more than the tools. I'm lucky that at my job mgmt is pretty clear headed on the topic. They celebrate any wins but do not force any particular way of working on us
TimMensch@reddit
Programming is a word that has a meaning. It absolutely means "to be able to write programs."
Someone who can only copy-paste and then tweak until it compiles is not programming. We used to have people like that in game development. We called them scripters. They would put together basic game behaviors in a scripting language, primarily through copy-paste and tweaking of code. The limit to their understanding of code was to change what conditionals triggered what conditions.
They understood and accepted that what they were doing was not programming. They were working alongside actual programmers, so the contrast was obvious.
Now we have entire companies that consist of scripters with delusions of grandeur, and they've often never even worked alongside a real programmer. I've seen people claim that programming skill is a myth, and that no one is any better than anyone else. Tons of people claim that Leetcode is completely divorced from the reality of software engineering.
So yes, I will claim that there are developers who don't even qualify as programmers. This isn't even a new idea:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
And...I've written entire published games in assembly language, so I've been there. I don't use C any more either, or reinvent the wheel unnecessarily. Libraries exist for a reason.
I just challenge the concept that AI is making actual programmers even 50% more productive, much less larger multiples. It can be a useful tool. That's it.
nivvis@reddit
I'm not arguing they don't exist, I'm arguing that you're equivocating anyone who gets a speedup from llms to "people who don't know how to program."
That is both wrong and extremely patronizing.
TimMensch@reddit
No, I'm really not.
LLMs are a tool. They can be useful. They can potentially increase your productivity, but not by nearly as much as the AI fanatics claim.
I'd estimate the overall productivity boost to be on par with that of a good IDE vs no IDE. 10-20% plus or minus.
But my example above was of developers who claim 5x or greater speed improvements. I absolutely maintain that if an LLM can make a developer 5x faster, then they had crap for skill to begin with.
I thought what I said above was clear from context, but apparently not, so I've added an edit.
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
Have you actually used the latest models extensively? I'm not some ai hype train person, but personally my experience is that they are way more like awful than you are describing here.
Like it's so far off that I just find it hard to believe you've really given the tools a chance
TimMensch@reddit
Yes, I have.
And they can be useful for certain narrow use cases. Mostly for creating isolated functions that do very simple things and that don't rely on other context.
But I'm also generally working on harder problems, and OMG do LLMs get complex solutions wrong when the problem you're solving isn't one that's been solved hundreds of times already.
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
That's fair. I find them a little more useful than that but we're not far off.
Above, however, you made it sound like anyone who liked them was a drooling neanderthal. It's that kind of reaction that I don't understand.
TimMensch@reddit
It's the ones who claim it's a 5x or more productivity improvement who I'm accusing of being low-skill developers who can barely program at all. Not everyone who uses AI. It's a tool that's sometimes useful. By all means, use it when it's useful. Just don't claim it's doubling your productivity if it's really in the single digit percentage improvement.
Realistically, AI can help sometimes, and other times when you try to use it, it's a waste of time to even try. If you eventually learn when it will work, then you can use it to get a performance boost in just those areas, but frankly those areas are a minority of what we spend our time on as developers.
Or they should be. It's our job as developers to minimize the work we need to do as developers. If something is boring and repetitive, there's likely a better way to design the code so that the bulk of the repetitive parts are DRY-ed out to the point where you're writing a lot less code. That is a power optimization. Having AI write a bunch of boring, repetitive code is often the Wrong Answer, and will result in a large factor of additional code that needs to be maintained.
I get it. AI is a shiny new toy that's fun to use when it works. It provides a nice dopamine hit for very little effort when it creates code for you. But it's not a silver bullet that's going to completely replace programmers, whereas advocates are very much promoting it as one.
madchuckle@reddit
I am using latest models and it is helpful when used as a smarter auto-complete or very tightly defined small-scope code generation. Anything else and it produces unmaintainable, unsecure, poorly architected slop. I am convinced for some time that anyone saying otherwise are really poor software engineers, or not even can be considered as a developer in the first place. That is the hill I am ready to die on as everyday I am encountering more and more data points supporting that (as a 20 years of experience software engineer working in big tech, bay area).
TheophileEscargot@reddit
Can you link to these studies?
There was one study showing it slowed development time by 24%:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089
But other studies claimed benefits, including a 21% and 56% speed up:
https://arxiv.org/html/2410.12944v1
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06590
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15033
TimMensch@reddit
I think it was an MIT study but I don't have a link.
immbrr@reddit
In my experience, you get rapidly diminishing returns the more you have to prompt an AI to fix stuff after the initial couple of back-and-forths. I find decent success in having it do a first pass, then me going through it and promoting on very specific (relatively small) sections of it to do very specific cleanup things. Still saves me a lot of time so I don't have to do all the basic boilerplate things (and usually a little bit of the other parts), but without needing to fix total AI slop because it started "fixing" code and breaking it more.
I've had decent luck on total vibecoding on a side project, but that's only because it's a super simple architecture and it's a basic website.
nivvis@reddit
IMO you’re just building the muscle memory .. or maybe still figuring out what muscles to train.
Do you have a comprehensive style guide? Linting, formatting, testing? Have you worked through the feature clearly in your head? Or rubber ducked with a person/llm?
I like to have crisp specs before i come into a run. I leave ambiguities right sized for the model im working with (implies you know where your spec is weak). Give clear expectations “test suite must pass.”
You have to remember this really is a different way of working — ie you have to actively learn it. If you’re not careful, and you’re seeing this a bit already, you’ll stay near the fulcrum of whether it’s productive at all.
That said, it’s very similar to delegating work, also a llearned skill. You just have to take the time to wring out ambiguity before you start. How should the feature work? What about the architecture? Best way to test? Is it best done incrementally, in phases? If you’ve done your homework here then you’ll hit paydirt. Its not much different than frontloading arch to keep your junior devs safe, happy and productive 😅
ahspaghett69@reddit (OP)
Literally by the time I do all this I could have written it three times over manually. I just don't get it. It's swapping one thing for another.
And here's the thing - if it fails, how do I even know what I did wrong? There's no way to know. Half the time changing the prompt or changing the instructions works, half the time it doesn't. You say "have clear instructions" but what's the point of delegating work to AI if I have to instruct it exactly what to do?
germansnowman@reddit
Add to that the danger of letting your skills atrophy.
nivvis@reddit
If it’s taking longer then either you’re doing it wrong; or your change is fairly trivial; or you don’t have 3-4 agents running async across your codebase.
You don’t have to rebuild documents everytime. I keep a service guide (how we use x language, how we run ci, code organization etc). And if i need to build a new guide here, guess what I have a prompt for that too. I’m telling you, it’s a different way of thinking.
For sure. That is a challenge many engineering leaders already face. There aren’t enough hours in the day to review all PRs, so to some degree the code becomes more of a black box as you advance.
The solution is to preempt what’s built so that it’s built to your spec / in your vision — minimizing how black this box is. How do you pattern? How do you plumb? It’s easy for me to answer, but, kind of like TDD, it can require experience which is often difficult for earlier career folks. Just to say YMMV.
Then I also review my AIs code here and there. I’m not the “set it and forget it” type, though I have been doing some of that as my setup has become more dialed.
cirk_86@reddit
Why would I take the time to write
for i in array; do printf $i; doneWhen I could write a 30 word prompt describing what I want?
You are a senior engineer writing bash. Make sure to use best practices ... Write a script that loops over an array. For each item in the array print the index to stdout.
/s
This is obviously contrived, but I don't find it that far off on larger examples. Why were trying to replace formal grammars with imprecise language is beyond me.
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
I wonder if it comes more naturally to those of us who spend a lot of time doing what you mention in your final sentence.
Much of the time I am doing tech lead work so my less inexperienced devs can have "shovel ready" work to dig into.
Both the delegation and the eventual review and acceptance of what's produced feel pretty similar to me between junior and ai
germansnowman@reddit
All I use Claude for nowadays is to analyze a large, convoluted, overengineered legacy code base and tell me how a given feature is implemented and how I might implement a new feature within the given constraints. If I ask it to create code, it is only a few lines. I manually copy & paste it so I catch errors early and force myself to understand it. I never let it just manipulate my code, that has almost always gone wrong.
paneq@reddit
Here is a presentation where I show how I use Claude including some prompts https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UdzHhVyc7tC83ZuMXIiOjt2W7URt0hTMSuQ9mNZlGfE/edit
The general premise is "tell what to do and show other files solving similar problem so it knows the patterns used in your codebase".
autophage@reddit
I've found that the best way to "use" AI is to couple it to git commits.
Cut a new branch. Request a change from AI, let it do its thing. Take its suggestions.
Commit with a message like "AI did this".
Fix what your AI tooling broke.
Commit with a message like "Fixed initial errors".
Do a diff with your mainline branch, treating it as a PR review. Are there sufficient tests? Are there extraneous include directives? Are there variable names that don't fit your standards? Fix those issues (either on your own or via AI, whatever) and then commit again.
The nice thing is that you can then use the timing of the commits to figure out how much time such tools might have saved you.
Party-Lingonberry592@reddit
I've experienced both scenarios of where it worked really well and also where it replaced 20 lines of code with 200 (where it included a bug that increased time complexity quadratically). It's hard to tell what's going wrong when those situations occur, but I doubt it's your prompting. My best experience so far is with Co-Pilot, the worst with Cursor, although if I tell it to do something it shouldn't, then the results aren't usually good. I believe the best approach (if you're not doing this already) is to have the design in mind when prompting it. Rather than letting it choose the structure of your application, instruct it to make the changes at critical points. By doing this, I get consistently decent results. I'd also try to understand how Claude is configured to understand your code to follow the "rules". I've never worked with Claude or attempted large-scale projects with AI, but I do know you can get it to work pretty well with bite-sized chunks.
ryhaltswhiskey@reddit
You're not really missing anything, but that's a lot worse than the experience I had doing something similar with CC. You gain some productivity, but it's not a magic bullet. You have to make sure it doesn't go out of its parameters. And remind it to check its instructions from time to time. But I tell you what, if you want some AWS infra set up it's really good. It's good at doing things that have clear answers.
liquidpele@reddit
You understand it just fine, it's the people using the prompt BS that don't which is why they use it.
FuzzyZocks@reddit
It works best when you act as a a lead. Look at research direction for better idea of current limitations. Not the sales guy.
As context window grows accuracy drops quickly. You need to manage what the current files in reference are and work on specific features not an entire project. Build this to save get and delete. Foreign keys here, indexes here, connection details like x. Then builds nice. Maybe some follow-ups for fixes but when it fixes itself sometimes it loses the business objective.
I used for fullstack project and I’m a backend dev mostly but did 1 year as fullstack. I was able to remember guidelines and ask for more and build out a react, db, backend, terraform to aws w docker etc after a lot of back and forth. I honestly think it was faster vs full manual bc it helped teach me some things about frontend and i used my architecture and design experience to guide the data model. As without me it could not get the data model right due to not understanding join patterns (many to many etc). Security it kinda skipped but i did some research and then used the patterns to fix myself.
Overall the truth is it’s a great junior engineer with good guidance, and hallucinates quickly if letting on its own fully.
madchuckle@reddit
I am using the latest models, and it is helpful when used as a smarter auto-complete or very tightly defined small-scope code generation. Anything else and it produces unmaintainable, unsecure, poorly architected slop. I am convinced for some time that anyone saying otherwise are really poor software engineers, or not even can be considered as a developer in the first place. That is the hill I am ready to die on as every day I am encountering more and more data points supporting that.
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
So you are entirely convinced that anyone who disagrees with you is just bad?
Ok. Yeah, that's definitely a reasonable response lol
AlwaysFixingStuff@reddit
I think I’ve found use in using it for basic tasks while I am doing more meaningful work on the side. In short it allows me to multi-task more efficiently. Bear in mind, these are menial tasks that simply take time - Crud endpoints, adding a chart to the front end, etc.
I’ve also found that it does much better on an established codebase in which it has patterns and structures that it can follow rather than allowing it to begin with no context aside from a prompt.
Shadowparot@reddit
It definitely felt like this for me at the start. To be honest setting up projects from scratch with AI has never worked well for me. I think this trips up some devs who see it made a mess of a new project and assume that’s the tool.
However, working on an existing code base seems to work better. It can use the code base as context for code style and how things should be done.
Keep it focussed on few files at once. Mention those files in the prompt.
Get it to make a plan first and write this to a .md file with a checklist. Check the plan is sensible and make any changes then ask it to read the file again and implement the plan, ticking things off as it goes.
I don’t do this every time but if the change is complex I find it helpful
Also in your guidelines.md Tell it to: Ask the user if in doubt Run tests after changes and they must pass for success Check the relevant .md files regularly Check for lint errors on every changed file
Find a claude.md file for your language and modify for your project. Lots on reddit
It’s not an out of the box experience but if you get it setup for your code base and learn what it’s good at you will be better and faster than you were before.
Also, I have found Claude code has gotten stupider lately so I switched to warp and Junie
Ok-Regular-1004@reddit
The sour-grapes attitude in this thread and industry right now is so downright embarrassing.
The bad news is that you are bad at prompting.
The good news is you can improve.
The skills needed to use LLMs effectively are not the same as the skills you use while programming.
A lot of experienced devs can't handle being a beginner again, so they throw their hands on the air and declare it's all pointless.
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
I do think this is part of it.
It takes humility to start over and learn as a novice.
ahspaghett69@reddit (OP)
I have heard this before, and I am open to accept that it is true. I have not, however, ever heard any actual solution to getting better. Every article about it I've ever read is full of nonsense like "be descriptive", "make sure you ask claude to PLAN first!!! THEN execute!!!".
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
Well, the whole thing is pretty new, so in many ways we're all kinda figuring it out right now.
At some level you just have to do it a lot and learn by trial and error
Ok-Regular-1004@reddit
It's a skill like any other. You get better by doing it. You will get better not by reading articles but by practicing and learning from your mistakes.
OHotDawnThisIsMyJawn@reddit
FWIW Claude has been terrible the last month or so. Due to issue that Anthropic has acknowledged and probably some they haven’t.
damnburglar@reddit
It was doing crazy good for me the other day and I started to get worried. Then it spent two hours not correctly implementing bullet physics in a small game I’m making as an Easter egg on my site, so my faith is somewhat restored.
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
I had it go completely mental the other day. Like it went from being frankly quite impressive to behaving more like a ten year old that doesn't speak English. Weird
originalchronoguy@reddit
Here is my workflow. Modified for Reddit (as I dont want to share everything):
This takes some practice and trial.
I usually keep my TODO to 60 lines. Anything like 2-3 lines is not enough info.
And in the TODO, there is always a bunch of [] checklists, it needs to checkout
Here is my recommendation In root:
/AGENTS.md
or
/CLAUDE.md
or
/.copilot/copilot-instructions.md
One of those will be your "entry point or constructor"
In that, set the rules of how you want your agents to run. What they need to check.
You can create sub agents in /.claude
But I have a folder with my rules that I add to .gitingore.
Call it /rules/ or /playbook/
Then in your main AGENT file, use it as a launching.
Write something like this:
You are the source of truth. If there is any ..... verbiage on how they must follow the runbook.
Then list out all the rules and where it should go. The Agents entry point should be like a index TOC or launchpad.
So have an outline like this:
And in those files like security, list out everything like
1) NO commit keys to git
2) Use two-way TLS. If no client side cert exist, halt all deployments
3) Ensure Vault integration is specified in /.env , for instructions, refer to /rules/VAULT-INTEGRATION.md
4) Ensure all API specs with SSN, EMAIL, Names and all PII uses field level encryption, following /rules/SECURITY-DB-RULES.md
For APIS, I have it follow the RFC. E.G. HTTP methods, verbs and nouns for resource names. I I have a few Swagger Spec I supply as reference. So it always follow the spec.
----
Next, I always run a COMPLIANCE agent that runs through all the rules using a "cheaper" model like Qwen which is 2 million tokens a day to run. Along with a 3rd one, CodeLLAMA as via Ollama as backup.
If an AGENT creates a route like GET /getEmployees, the compliance engine will STOP Claude. Claude/Qwen/Codex are good at following modern REST so it will never do /getEmployees or /createEmployees.
ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL@reddit
Thanks for sharing
termd@reddit
Quite a lot of us think ai coding fucking sucks but it gets a little old shitting on it in every post
Literally none of the 14 people I work with think it's useful for anything other than generating trash to up our test code coverage but we dont really want to use it to make the actual tests we care about.
Leeteh@reddit
Yeah you're not the only one. It's gaslighting, I wrote about it here.
https://scotterickson.info/blog/2025-05-24-Accountability-and-Gaslighting
Fwiw, I got a pretty good groove today with my CLI tool, check out this pr
https://github.com/sderickson/saflib/commit/7c49c335f9e48926b04e26ee6f7106de870f3cba
This is the tool I'm using/building. Short of it is it takes time and a bunch of work to get the agents to do routine work for your specific stack reliably.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/saflib-workflows
One-Super-For-All@reddit
The trick is to make it plan and discuss FIRST. I have a prompt to force it to plan and write up a plan.md. I then look over it, correct or ask questions, and then execute stage by stage.
Works 10x better than "freestyling"
Empty_Geologist9645@reddit
Why would you use a lot of words to produce same or les words. Template generators do it as fast. The case are: where there’s something very new but if it’s new aI doesn’t know about it; it’s very old and you don’t care about it, e.g. shell scripts. So yes it helps with stuff you don’t care about like shell, it works once and I’m good.
In my recent “study”. I was fighting ChatGPT and Gemini to help me setup boot+micrometer+otel+camel+otel-sdk tracing. They can’t do it. Phantom dependencies and classes that don’t exist. The end up either defaulting use an agent or bs that doesn’t work.
David_AnkiDroid@reddit
Briefly:
/docs, not the prompt window2.is ambiguous in Markdown (on reddit, it can either print '1' or '2')--amendfor the current commit, so you can checkpoint and have the agent understand the checkpointsa_brain@reddit
Trust your instincts. I’m somewhat of a hater for ethical reasons, but I think I’ve put in a good faith effort to try and get AI, mostly Claude code, but also codex, to try and do stuff for me, and my experience matches yours.
I also recently learned that a lot of my coworkers like to gamble, and that makes a lot of sense to me. AI is the nerd slot machine. Gamblers all have theories on when the slots are hot or which slots to play and when. AI coders are the same except their theories are all about how to prompt and how much context to give it. All the prompting tips are the same nonsense that can’t actually be measured for efficacy.
simfgames@reddit
The raw power of LLMs is capable of enhancing productivity greatly, but for it to be accessible to most developers, we need the entire ecosystem to catch up first. Tools are the biggest missing piece, but we also need a shared language to discuss this stuff, and some long-standing paradigms in software engineering need to evolve in response to LLM strengths & weaknesses.
Until then it's the wild west, and you pretty much need to forge your own way through the bs and figure it out yourself. Depending on the kind of work you do, there could be a significant time investment required before you see any gains.
Sheldor5@reddit
how much of your life savings have you spent on AI stocks? XD