No longer writing code, are we really here?

Posted by nvtrev@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 26 comments

So sorry for another AI post, just want some perspective. I have almost 6 YOE in web development, been with my current company for 5 years. I work in a gigantic monorepo full of garbage legacy code. I use AI sometimes, but I don't find it to be super helpful.

I just went through a couple technical interviews at a company and they've honestly been really great, they were challenging but reasonable, and I really liked the interviewers. One of the senior engineers I interviewed with mentioned he no longer writes code, and uses Claude for everything.

It struck me that I have no idea how to gauge claims like this anymore. He clearly knew the systems well, and was a very knowledgeable programmer. But I still write almost all my code by hand. It's hard for me to tell if this company is leaning too far into it, or if I am an old man who is stuck in his ways. Truly, I despise AI as I think it brings out the worst in everything and kills my love for the craft, but that's a topic for another day.

So, is this really where we're at? Are we in a place where in the right codebases, engineers aren't writing code anymore? Is this a red flag?

[-]

Early_Rooster7579@reddit

I haven’t manually written code in about 3 months.

therealslimshady1234@reddit

Its not the flex you think it is. FAANG is in the worst shape it has ever been.

m3t4lf0x@reddit

Writing boilerplate by hand isn’t a flex either

elliottcable@reddit

I mean, there’s a midpoint between “I haven’t written a line of code in three months” and “I haven’t written a line of boilerplate in three months”, though …

Its not a flex, just sharing my experience. I know its more or less the same at most FAANGs and leading startups

Best_Recover3367@reddit

I haven't written a single line of code manually since early last year. This is just getting more and more common for my friends and colleagues who are late bloomers into AI or at least Claude. So I think this is just where things are heading.

TheRealJesus2@reddit

Yeah it’s probably true. And yes we are here. I don’t write code anymore (over a decade in industry). I read more code than ever. Different skills. My code writing has def atrophied but I’m better than ever at efficient review.

Good engineering is even more important now than ever. If you know what code you need and where it’s trivially easy to tell ai to do so and then review it efficiently. This is harder in a messy codebase of course because of your own cognitive overhead but also the agent search tools are gonna perform much worse.

If your skills are not there you can’t get quite that level of benefit. Or if you’re just doing something new and complicated also. If I know what I want I can 10x code writing. If I don’t it’s more like 2x. In either case I care about all the edges and the environment along with maintenance, knowledge base, testing, CI, etc more than the code itself.

Use ai to code. But don’t start with writing code, start with using ai to learn and plan and then execute that plan after you’ve checked all your unknowns and assumptions. It helps you own your code in the end and also helps ai to write the correct code more frequently because you’re directing it with more knowledge.

stavenhylia@reddit

In most places code is just the medium for what you're really doing, which is solving problems.
I have started feeling that intuition and "taste" for what works or doesn't is more important than memorizing and being able to type out the code, as long as you can understand the code in front of you.

Impressive-Skin9850@reddit

Precisely. Good developers have aligned with business objectives and priorities for years. Right scoping, always advising. It’s almost never about the code, it’s about the business problem the code is solving.

Avoid. Whenever you have people talking like Anthropic’s marketing department while not being paid for it you know you are in the company of some serious clowns

HQMorganstern@reddit

Being grumpy about it won't change reality. Claude Code and Codex have been at a level where manually writing code is a thing you do for fun or once in a while when the prompt will take more time than the code.

Sucks that the job is becoming this ass, but it has become this ass, and it's not moving back, barring extreme economic downturn.

We have Claude Enterprise and the quality of my colleagues’ code has not changed much, they just push slop faster than before. You can state that the only thing AI really did was lower the standards of quality

This whole thing will collapse when the model providers stop subsidizing their product and everyone will have to pay the full price of their slop.

engineered_academic@reddit

No-code has been through its ups and downs and this iteration of no code looks really impressive in tech demos.

greensodacan@reddit

Ask questions about his workflow in those cases.

I write maybe 5-10% of my code by hand still, BUT with the massive asterisk that I plan ahead much, much more now. By the time I tell the AI to implement the plan, I know what design patterns it'll use, what the API boundaries of the change will be, what edge cases we're watching out for, that it knows the conventions for that specific codebase, where tests will live, what static analysis checks it will use, etc. I also have a rough idea of the size of the change, because I don't want to open a PR that's so large no one will read it.

And that's before I review.

No engineer worth their salt is smirking off into space claiming code is a solved problem. That person is selling something.

DollarsInCents@reddit

Majority of successful engineers always coded less the more senior they became. AI just accelerated the transition. We're all architects and staff engineers now and the agents are our teams of developers.

On the bright side it's more time to think deeply about systems and maybe more bandwidth to guide AI to create something truly innovative.

iloverollerblading@reddit

Yes. I've coded every single character for 10 years then about 3 months ago I pretty much stopped coding and delegate everything to Claude. Our job is changing it is crazy. And I could not go back, the efficiency is not comparable.

Another guy who tacitly traded quality for speed with AI and thinks he somehow reinvented the wheel. Sad!

No. I'm delegating the technical work. When your AI ecosystem is correctly setup with robust standards, it is followed by the agent.

Ok clown 😛

David_AnkiDroid@reddit

Code: yes. Comments and architecture: no.

It's not always more efficient, but it's possible with the frontier models and a good codebase/language.

BlackPresident@reddit

I don’t manually write code for simple things, I use ai to help solve problems and refactor small chunks of code ro be more efficient or easier to read, I use ai to help me with code review after I’ve done a manual code review and before I submit a PR I’ll ask Claude to give me a code review sometimes I manually make changes or just agree to code suggestions, AI is a useful tool but I can see how it’s easy for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing to just blindly let AI code everything for them. At the end of the day (here’s my secret) I actually just like coding so I just like doing it anyway because it’s fun, so I don’t care if it takes longer than using AI it’s not like my day is jam packed with things to do anyway we work in a team and the team gets things done as a unit so if I go quickly I end up sitting around waiting.

Plastic_Monitor_5786@reddit

I absolutely write code still and so does everyone at my company (video games).

Idea-Aggressive@reddit

For non Frontend related work (design engineering), it’s completely doable to not have to write a single line of code. As long you know what you are doing.

You have a code base written by humans that is trash, LLM can definitely do a better job

throwaway09234023322@reddit

I don't write code anymore. It is a complete waste of time. Your time should be spent architecting and verifying/reviewing imo.

Akrylicus@reddit

In my current role I don't code that much, but when I do then yeah, mostly Claude Code. I will sometimes have to fix something myself or refactor a bit.

I see no point writing the same stuff myself for the Nth time. I only dive deeper when I don't understand the output or do something new.

Vamosity-Cosmic@reddit

nah. as many studies show right now, experts don't use AI because at the upper-echelon of engineering, you're pushing boundaries of known things. and thats what AI struggles at. so if everyone is using AI, that means they're not doing anything new. and honestly thats fine, so long as they're fine with staying there forever

as for that senior, i highly doubt he meant he lets claude architect it for him. seniors dont write a lot of code in general so it makes sense he's whipping claude