Using AI to facilitate programming
Posted by AssumptionVast4395@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 24 comments
I know this is probably not the subreddit for this, but what do people mean when they say they use AI to facilitate their workflow? Is it to auto complete a line of code? To ask AI to write the code itself then debug and change it as needed? Or using AI to write one repetitive (formulaic) and easy to write portion of the code and writing the challenging part yourself?
edwbuck@reddit
If you want to learn programming, there are some resources
AI is closer to the last item than you might imagine. One aspect of learning is learning something without learning errors and mistakes. That's because it is far more difficult to unlearn a mistake than it is to learn it.
WirelessWavetable@reddit
Except AI can read thousands of lines of code very fast and tell you what you did wrong without you or someone manually reading all those lines. And it can give you feedback and criticism way faster than any teacher or self help course can.
edwbuck@reddit
Except AI can read thousands of lines of code very fast and not always tell you the correct information. Besides, you're trying to build your own skills when learning, how does something else build those? It will only give you the illusion that you know something. Your learning is, at best, second hand (hearsay).
It can give you feedback and criticism, but the underlying part that is the most important is that correct criticism is needed. Anyone can get criticism from a person that partially knows the material and makes occasional mistakes. Following that criticism can be a really bad idea.
WirelessWavetable@reddit
I'd really like to see your information on how you think AI is so incredibly incorrect. There's a 26-year senior Dev on this thread commenting he almost never writes code anymore. There's thousands of people developing apps and websites with AI and I don't see them posting on r/sideproject asking why their AI tools are always getting things wrong.
edwbuck@reddit
I'd like to see your information on why you think AI is so incredibly correct. Proof by authority is no proof at all.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/ais-research-blunder-how-a-mistake-sparked-a-chain-of-flawed-scientific-papers-can-artificial-intelligence-be-trusted-in-academia/articleshow/118821229.cms
https://www.cio.com/article/190888/5-famous-analytics-and-ai-disasters.html
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-04-13/attorneys-used-ai-cited-fake-legal-decisions-state-bar-alleges
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/ai-generated-code-contains-more-bugs-and-errors-than-human-output
https://www.augmentcode.com/guides/debugging-ai-generated-code-8-failure-patterns-and-fixes
WirelessWavetable@reddit
Did you just Google search AI failures? Only 2 of those links are about AI code. And many of those links don't even mention what version of the models they are talking about. Both of the coding links mention AI improves efficiency and the models are rapidly improving. One of the links even says that the majority of AI coding errors can be found within 3 minutes with tests while the human errors take significantly longer to find. Why don't ya find some actual users of AI coding tools and link their feedback about the tools? Nothing says AI is as incorrect as you make it seem.
Nezrann@reddit
Quick question, what do you currently do for work? Are you a software developer?
edwbuck@reddit
Yes. I'm a software developer, currently I do more consulting and assistance of software development teams, but I've done direct development for the majority of my career.
Nezrann@reddit
You have an interesting take - I'm a developer as well and after Opus 4.5 my tune changed pretty quick.
Agents handle a lot of my coding now.
I usually use some sort of spec to get the ball rolling, then I tweak from there. I don't think I've handwritten more than 5-10% of my code the last 3 months.
Fresh_Instruction178@reddit
All three, depending on context. For boilerplate or repetitive patterns, I let it write and tweak. For hard problems, I use it as a rubber duck that can suggest approaches I haven't considered. The key is knowing when to ignore its suggestions, it's confidently wrong about 30% of the time.
Financial-Grass6753@reddit
It depends on the person, actually. From "dangerous mode on, no backups, FULL YOLO AHEAD" to LLM-as-a-judge, subagents with tight feedback loops, good enough prompts and loads of Ops stuff like linting, testing pyramid and arch checks - anything can be.
flamingspew@reddit
Bots replying to bots
onlyemperor001@reddit
I use AI to debug and use a new tool I haven’t used before
Space-Robot@reddit
Yeah the term is vague because the use cases are so varied. One of the most common uses is just as an alternative to Googling stuff.
It's also a really good rubber duck.
It can write code for you. That's not the same thing as deciding what code to write. It just speeds up the tedious parts.
Often it can do some big complicated tedious stuff like comparing two giant specs and highlighting the differences, or transforming xml to json, etc. For those things you really need to verify and be very careful.
If you're new to programming AI is just another tool you need to learn to take advantage of, BUT you need to be sooo careful not to trust it too much, or lean on it too much. You must understand everything it does. You must never forget that it does not understand the concept of "truth" or "fact".
Wingedchestnut@reddit
This can all be done depending on the use-case. However one thing many people forget is that this is if the project works with modern technology that's cloud-native, there are a lot of systems and projects today that use older technology or secure on-prem technology where you have to keep adding the same glue to let it work.
That's why AI Agents are mainly hyped by startup people or the big cloud vendors, I'm not saying it's not the future however globally there are many enterprise projects for tech people who just maintain stuff and don't care about AI at all.
Spare_Dependent6893@reddit
more and more developers in companies I work with use AI to do everything from full frontend and backend code, to documentation, to unit and integration tests, to scripts, .... And PO starts to use it a lot to do stories.
mikeyj777@reddit
Most times, it's tech bros talking about agents reading their slack channels, emails, calendars, and making a list of things for them to do. Honestly, it's stuff they could do in 30 minutes, but it makes them sound cool to say that they've automated their workflow.
The_Other_David@reddit
Different people use AI to varying degrees, but as far as what it's CAPABLE OF, AI tools can just write almost any project you can think up. Claude Code, Opencode, other CLI tools, they'll read and edit your files, set up the project, set up automated testing, track down and correct bugs... This is what's being done at the professional level, even higher-level tools that orchestrate multiple tasks in parallel.
IcyStomach2374@reddit
My company gets the most powerful internal models though. Retail models don’t have the context window for big planning like this.
groogs@reddit
I'm a senior dev, 26 years professional experience.
I don't write any actual code anymore (literally: maybe 10s of lines this year). But I've shipped multiple apps and changes to existing systems to production.
I do fairly tightly control what it's doing, and my years of pro experience lets me focus on what parts I care about - which are mostly the boundaries between sections. I am very specific about how the UI calls the backend, or what the API looks like what the data models are. Sometimes I care about how interfaces are designed, and especially about how different layers of the backend are split (database vs services and domain models). But I often don't care about the actual code, just that it's architected with proper isolation, has unit and/or integration tests around it, etc.
To do this, you have to understand how to do it by hand, and you have to know theae are things you want. I've written and maintained enough code by hand that I can recognize the bad patterns.
AI, or a team of juniors, isn't necessarily going to naturally know to write tests and write code so it can be isolated for testing. It's not going to necessarily think about future changes to the API and how you handle backwards compatibility. It doesn't know all the directions you're headed and when your data model is going to box you in and cause pain later.
I treat AI like a team of junior developers who are super confident in everything they do but that have almost zero wisdom. Except instead of coming back with something in a week or two, they come back in a few minutes. If you are at a junior level, I'm not sure how you use this effectively to write the same quality code, as it's hard to push back against the incorrect confidence when you don't actually know yourself.
AssumptionVast4395@reddit (OP)
So you control how it is structured on a high level but not necessarily what it looks like. What are some best practices you would suggest going forward?
GeneralPITA@reddit
Any of your suggestions are valid examples. When Chat GPT first became popular, I would use it to write small fragments of code - I didn't feel it was capable of doing a good job with anything more technical than that, sort of a programming "spell-checker". Colleagues of mine jumped in using AI enhanced "co-pilots" to help find the correct variables or function names - more of an AI enhanced tool that sometimes predicted what you needed, and allowed you to select the code you needed.
The technology advanced quickly and now I'm using claude to write entire apps. It's surprisingly capable, but still requires a knowledgeable human to make sure the code will do what was requested (and only what was requested). Claude can modify code on your computer, when permitted, so that you could feasible run code you've never even looked at (a bad idea in my opinion).
If you're learning, it's likely a dangerous slope - It will write code for you, but you need to be able to recognize the correct solution. How do you recognize the right solution if you don't know how to read/write code?
The clearest analogy I've seen is the comparison with a calculator. If you want 10 divided by 2 you should expect 5, and if you get .2 you know there was an error -- you likely wouldn't accept what the calculator tells you without at least thinking a little bit about if the answer makes sense.
The calculator facilitates arithmetic, AI facilitates programming. Granted AI is significantly more complex than a calculator, and the hesitation to let computers steal developer jobs is prudent, but when used responsibly AI can multiple the output of a single developer.
ToiletTwinkie@reddit
As a hobbyist programmer, my workflow is to come up with the architecture and structure of the project first, then try to write it out function by function. I’ll paste individual functions into Claude to see if there’s a better or more efficient implementation, but I still have to test whether the “improved” output actually matches my expected behavior, so I’m not blindly trusting it. I’m also terrible at naming things, so LLMs help a lot there.
When I get stuck or keep running into the same error, I’ll paste it in and it’s usually able to identify the problem and suggest a fix.
The big thing to watch out for is over reliance. If you lean on it too hard, you won’t understand your own code. LLMs make it way too easy. Claude in particular will just dump out the entire rewritten file when all you wanted was a hint or an explanation of what’s going wrong.
maxpowerAU@reddit
All of those things