Peer pressure regarding AI

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LeDYoM@reddit

I wouldnt pay for AI for personal use. I do not know if I will ever use AI for personal projects. For work, ok, they pay the bill. But as you said, personal projects should be for you to learn, care and a hobby.

This is like having the hobby of maintaining and curating old cars and contracting someone to do this. What is the point of your hobby then?

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obviously_suspicious@reddit

I agree, but it seems for many using LLMs and reviewing code is a hobby in itself.

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ExperiencedDevs-ModTeam@reddit

Rule 9: No Low Effort Posts, Excessive Venting, or Bragging.

Using this subreddit to crowd source answers to something that isn't really contributing to the spirit of this subreddit is forbidden at moderator's discretion. This includes posts that are mostly focused around venting or bragging; both of these types of posts are difficult to moderate and don't contribute much to the subreddit.

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metaphorm@reddit

we produce software faster and cheaper, with the the goal of selling more software. it's a business not an art project.

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Astral902@reddit

Faster and cheaper but with more bugs, harder to extend and maintain and more security issues. If the tradeoff is worth it then sure

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metaphorm@reddit

my company started an Agentic Coding initiative 4 months ago. the project defined goals as "ship 2x PRs with no more than 10% increase in escaped bugs". we exceeded those goals.

it required us to write a very detailed and tight coding harness for Claude Code to do it and it required us to reinforce our QA and testing efforts by a substantial margin. it worked.

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bendmorris@reddit

PR count is an absolutely meaningless metric. Congratulations on doubling it though.

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metaphorm@reddit

it's a unit of work. it was meaningful for us in this context because we had an established baseline and an existing culture of speccing and scoping tickets, so doubling was a meaningful relative increase.

like all units of work, it doesn't fully capture all of the work done and has flaws. it's not meaningless though. it represents actual code going out to the production system.

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bendmorris@reddit

It's an arbitrary way to divide up work which can easily be gamed by turning the same work into multiple smaller PRs. And setting a goal to double it is basically asking developers to start doing that.

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metaphorm@reddit

buddy, step off it. i'm reporting back on things that my org did and how it went for us. that's the reality. your criticisms in the abstract might apply to some abstract other company but that's not what happened with us. if you're just here to be cantankerous, please spare me.

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bendmorris@reddit

I think I'm making a valid point here, and you seem to be the one getting worked up. Engineers are incentivized to meet the goals management sets for them - of course they are. And this one is easily accomplished by modifying behavior without doing any more work. Therefore, your anecdote about doubling PR count is not meaningful to anyone else, any more than doubling line count would be.

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Spare_Dependent6893@reddit

and this generated code also went to remote ai servers, which is not that good for security concern. Considering also that AI knows the code and will knows how to hack it! it is a concern I had with some of my client companies which forbifd us to use AI and why I try to find solutions and create the subreddit r/codingProtection

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therealhappypanda@reddit

We also are accumulating cognitive debt faster. For some industries this might be fine, for many that have high accuracy, reliability, and uptime requirements it will lead to lost revenue from customers feeling the pain. Over time it will lead to reduced velocity in the same way that technical debt does

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metaphorm@reddit

it's a fair critique and something we're concerned about too. new engineering challenges arise as working methods change. we'll have to adapt and see what kind of unwanted side effects emerge from this working method. we're maintaining a reasonably high quality bar thanks to the use of code review and QA testing, and also, genuinely, the faster rate of producing code also means we can address tech debt faster too.

but that doesn't mean we'll always get it right. tech debt is a real problem and has been a problem for all of software development from the very beginning. so it's not a new problem. maybe it's a worse one now due to acceleration? we'll find out.

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Muhznit@reddit

And what's the plan for when the AI companies jack up prices or that you need juniors to replace the seniors?

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metaphorm@reddit

we train our juniors in house. we currently have two juniors who were hired on after completing internships with us. they're learning fast.

token pricing is a meaningful concern. it's budgeted in our COGS but we're keeping an eye on it and will change our working methods if budgetary constraints start to show up. that's not unique to LLMs though, all businesses have costs for their inputs of production.

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AvailableFalconn@reddit

The Jimmy Beast approach to work

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Strutching_Claws@reddit

As a bit of a lurker here and full transparency I'm not a dev, but for the past 15-20 years I've worked with IT, platform engineers, software engineers and everyone in-between.

I'm finding this fascinating to watch from the sidelines and as someone who is fortunate enough to watch from a relatively neutral view point I have a few observations.

Why do we still have authors if AI can research and write an entire book within minutes? Because the bottleneck for a publishing house producing best sellers isn't the speed as which letters can be written on a page.

The same IMO is true re coding, the speed of code is rarely the true bottle neck to a business becoming profitable. This was obvious to me before AI but now it's exposed to a degree that can't be ignored, it was never the speed of writing code it was - Clarity around product intent - Achieving alignment between key stakeholders - Understanding architecture and his it could be future proofed. - Security - Reliability - Maintenance - Governance - Decision making - Prioritisation - Cross team coordination - Adoption

When you are talking about a handful of people then lots of the above can be trivial, once you start talking about any meaningful size company these things are always the real bottle necks.

This is why almost no org can point to the value that AI is giving them, because it's not really speeding up the journey from 0 to value, but they need to justify the AI spend, so in the absence of that what you see is the obvious which is "we will just cut jobs or reduce hiring" because that gives an obvious £ metric to attribute to AI.

I have spoken to many friends at many different orgs from Banks, to FAANGS to gambling companies, all of them are going through this exact experience.

IMO if just a fraction of the AI spent was spend on bringing in a handful of proven organisational coaches with the remit to look at things like org structure, governance, strategy, performance management etc.... then the ROI would have been 10x more than what we are seeing from the AI spend.

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Pandas1104@reddit

Yeah, feel free to explain this to executives they just do not get it, like at all. I might as well speak Yiddish because it would have the same effect. Disclaimer:I am a product manager at a software company

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Working-Truck-8528@reddit

I agree 100%, and I work as a dev. The fact that your post has so few upvotes only means to me that this won't change.

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Hot_Money4924@reddit

This is a tool. It has the ability to institutionalize your guidelines, your style, your decisions, it comes ready to synthesize more tribal Internet knowledge than you could learn in a lifetime, and it has the ability to research any topic necessary to fill in the gaps. All it needs is your guidance.

There are only a few ways that I see this playing out:

You learn to customize and use this tool as effectively as possible, and use it to build high quality things beyond your own time-limited capabilities
You resist and you get left behind by those who do 1
You exist in a cohort of people trying and failing at 1, just lean into the slop, use the tool poorly for everything, it's like you bought a power drill but never charged the battery and your team takes turns twisting the drill by hand. Probably would have been better off without it.

I used to be an AI/LLM skeptic. I used GPT and Claude, I tried Copilot, I even accelerated delivery of a very small embedded C project with it. "Neat. Cool. Kind useful, often not, it will never be able to handle our massive and complex brownfield C++ project." Every few months I would try to use AI to build a personal project at home; it would start off promising and always wind up a failed mess before really getting anywhere. I was convinced we were going to need a paradigm change for AI to be useful for coding, and that LLMs were fundamentally incapable for doing any better.

My opinion changed when I decided to buy a 5x Claude Code license for a month for myself. I hadn't realized until that point just how important the harness is, I thought it was all in the model. Suddenly I could finish projects, and with the right MCP servers and context management I could handle bigger tasks and tasks on complext C++ code bases.

But the code quality was still kind of shit. It wouldn't pass our PR review standards, and I realized that we expert humans would simply stop looking at a firehose of AI slop. I didn't want that -- we still need to understand the code, we still need to be in charge of the design, I was ready to give up on it again.

Then I got into skills and custom workflows. I figured AI could at least help us review code if it knew our style, so I made a skill that distilled and captured the essence of our coding guidelines and PR review checklist. I tested it against AI-generated code and adjusted it until it was flagging every little thing, right down to the nature and quality of code comments. I shared it with my team and they loved it, instant hit.

Then I thought why not use the same skill to create code, so it looks more like what we want to begin with. It's just a matter of restating some of the rules and guidance, and removing the checklist portions, and thus was born our coding skill. Sometimes this skill would make decisions I didn't like, using an open source library instead of our in-house alternative, or using a pattern we don't favor, so I would update the skill, and it got better. More accurate. No more slop. The code looked like something I would write myself, and I was proud of it.

I was really into Claude's plan mode but that still required me to be a power user to get the consistency and results I want. I learned to anticipate the model's response to certain words and phrases, and I developed and intuition for the scope of planning and thinking it would do on its own, so I knew preemptively where I would need to add additional context and direction, but not my teammates. That's when I got inspired by workflows like superpowers and GSD. A chain of skills that make it so everyone gets a consistent experience surfacing task requirements, brainstorming different features or approaches, turning that into a multi-phase plan, breaking the plan down into subtasks and identifying task dependency relationships, then sequencing implementation among multiple subagents, then invoking the code review skill to verify quality, running unit tests, and committing. I didn't like the way bitbucket and Claude write PR descriptions, so I make my own skill for that too and added it into my workflow.

I don't know if you can see at all where I'm going with this but your programming skills and your programmer brain should map very well to writing skills and building your own agentic workflow. If you just take what comes out of the box (or worse if you're still toying around with IDE code suggestion plugins) then you're acting like a user and not a developer, and you're missing out on the fun and power of the new way to get shit done.

I think you should be using it at home, and also be doing the kinds of things I am doing to produce code that you are satisfied with. If you don't get ahead of the curve on this then some other guy is going to eat your lunch and you'll wake up one day to find that your voice doesn't matter anymore at the table. I don't know about you but I'm very opinionated and I don't want to be forced by managers to follow someone else's inferior workflow, or to lose control of this entire situation and find myself spending the rest of my career mopping up the slop pouring out of the terminals of the least skilled people on my team.

Basically, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In fact, step it up a notch and lead 'em.

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SansSariph@reddit

Basically, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In fact, step it up a notch and lead 'em.

This is also where I landed. If you hate where the culture is going, then become the expert others on the team want to learn from and set the tone for expectations of quality, communication, accountability.

Otherwise you're just gonna be stuck reacting to someone else who doesn't share your values.

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Hot_Money4924@reddit

I can't believe we're being downvoted for this perspective. It's either emotionally driven AI hate or a bunch of junior devs lurking around who haven't yet learned to empower themselves.

This is the very essence of being a senior dev and a leader. Either you sit back passively and grumble about things you don't like or you step up and make the policy and procedures yourself, and inspire your teammates to go with you.

Like it or not AI is here to stay, and if you do nothing then your corporate leadership will find the dumbest way possible to force you to use it. They will hire consultants, make edicts, and buy shitty tools from outside vendors. Right now is the biggest opportunity to get ahead of it all and become your company's expert, so you get to influence these decisions and create a better future for your team.

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MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

Oh, I'm not saying I don't use it, I use it at work A LOT. I have my own specialized MCPs, rules, skills, project wide docs, shit load of references, have my own harnesses with specialized workers... Etc. I simply refuse to do this on my free time with my own money.

I just don't participate in the slop fest that's going on. I am not generating slides and slides of useless content. I don't use it to write paragraphs based on 5 bullet points. I don't use it just to use it. And a good 60% of what I need to do when coding do not need 500GW and 6000L of water.

My fear tho, is that more and more are taking decisions based on it. Right now tokens are cheap, tomorrow, they're gonna be hella' expensive. And all this decision making capability that we've somehow decided to give up to a tool, is gonna backslash at some point. A drill is a drill, it does not tell how how you should put the screw in what part of the wood. AI agents do that, they decide where to put the screw. They hallucinate the very position that will make the difference in structure rigidity. And we're all going into that, and I feel like it's a massive trap.

When I see here and there that people are "checking the output, it's just a tool, blablabla", no you're not, and if you do, you're doing it less and less. The brain works like this, if something worked 10 times in a row, why checking the 11th?

Prompts are getting shorter, results matters more than maintenability, and for big projects, it's an issue. We're about 30 engineers working on a 14yo codebase. Everything is extremely complex. And the outputs are getting shittier and shittier.

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MocknozzieRiver@reddit

You're hitting on something that's been bugging me and that I noticed today.

I came across a video on robotic surgery and it was revolutionary and amazing, but it was treated wholly as a tool. People were impressed with the surgeons who expertly wielded this tool.

AI is not being treated like a tool, and I'd probably feel less hostile towards it and more likely to use it if we did.

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MasSunarto@reddit

Brother, I don't know. I usually tell people to go home early to spend time with their loved ones. As far as I can tell, when it's not during office hour, nobody talks about work to me. My bossman takes the same approach about it.

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MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

This is why I had no engineers in my friends group before moving where I am now :( I loved it, having actual stuff to talk about

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South-Year4369@reddit

Here's a different perspective: I'm pretty far along in my career; for most of it I've always had side-projects on the go. Usually multiple. I just love programming and creating stuff.

Now with a family, demanding job, etc., I found I just didn't have the time or energy to do personal development, as much as I still wanted to create stuff. The cost of context-switching has gone up a fair bit with age, and having only maybe 30 mins or an hour here-and-there to work on something turned it into an unsatisfying waste of time.

AI tooling has helped me get back to a place where I have multiple personal projects on the go, and I look forward to getting home at night to do some more work on them. I can make real progress even with sporadic free time. I'm loving it.

PS I just upgraded my Claude subscription to $200/mth.

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MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

That's actually a pretty cool usecase

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danny4kk@reddit

This resonates so hard. We have infinite AI budget and told to use it on everything. I mean everything. They even put on a company wide talk about how AI can help your wellbeing yesterday 39 minutes in I left as they didn't say 'how' at any point.

I've team members who's PRs are AI slop. I get walls of text from some people that are useless. Asked to review docs this week that were AI generated that were full of garbage. Oh and a developer PR some unit tests that were AI generated which mocked everything including what it was trying to test. Yet everyone says they review all output from AI. Had a manager try prove something wasn't so hard to dev so he got AI to do it, which was full of major issues. Another staff engineer who I know is clever than he let on recently was unable to think for himself to solve a problem for days. I know if he read and thought for himself he would have easily caught the issues. 5 mins I find it but then spend 40 or so minutes trying to explain it to him, but he constantly was throwing me AI messages "AI says x" my word if I wanted to use AI I don't need you then do I. For first time in my career I almost rage left a call helping him as he just wasn't listening and after every sentence or so was throwing it into AI.

As for the subscriptions I have 1 dev who pays over a grand a month in personal subscriptions.

Don't get me wrong I use it and it has great usages but my word I'm getting fatigued of seeing it everywhere.

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MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

Lol, this sounds exactly like my company! We had the same kind of meeting at noon

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SwimmerQuick1500@reddit

Every PR description is AI slop, they create "slides" about "how to use AI efficiently for [you name it]". Always low effort as fuck. When you ask questions about the content, most of the time they haven't even really read it.

This is so annoying. Everyone at my job does it too. Guy at my job used AI to make an overly verbose technical design document. My Manager then reviewed it with AI.

I'm shocked no one has stopped and realized the insanity of it. Just communicating through AI layers LOL

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

I find it extremely hard to read AI written tickets and PRs.

I just want it to be written like it’s from a human, not a professor.

Tell me what broke, where, and how. That’s all I need.

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bonniewhytho@reddit

This! The last couple of tickets I’ve gotten assigned to me need at least half an hour of the senior dev’s time because they are overly wordy, convoluted shit that an AI wrote based on a meeting that an AI listened to and summarized. It’s information overload. Worse, actually. Untrustworthy information overload

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1_4_1_5_9_2_6_5@reddit

Yessss this, our people do this too buy even worse because it's not based on a meeting. They come up with some basic prompt, tell the AI to make it a professional spec.

So now we get specs that are massive, extremely technical, and 80% focused on "how to architect this" or fine technical details even fown to function names. Meanwhile their original intent is completely lost, and we don't know if anything in the spec is right... we just know a lot of it is wrong. But the person who delivered the spec never read it and would not have understood a word of it anyway, so they don't care.

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borktron@reddit

I've spent my career consulting with SMEs, and dealing with non-technical people, often as a solo dev/consultant. One of my mantras for decades to these folks has been: "Don't bring me a feature to implement. More than 50% of the time, I'll end up having to figure out what problem you're solving, and then show you how to solve it better. Instead, come to me early, and tell me the problem you have. We'll have a conversation, and find the right solution, with less work for everyone".

I hadn't even considered that things are going to get, like, exponentially worse on that axis. Oof.

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Maert@reddit

I'm in the same boat (freelancer dev that works with big company clients with a big CRM system they use). I've been using the same mantra as well - tell me what you actually want to do.

I've had now situations where people come to me asking me to troubleshoot whatever Claude told them to do... So it went completely in the wrong direction and made a huge leap in that direction.

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

I hate that the only solution I’ve found is to have Claude import the ticket, and make Claude walk me through the ticket in plain speak. Where I ask questions about the ticket, basically reassembling what the ticket should have been in the first place.

It’s like I’m using an interpreter with a foreign language.

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aeroverra@reddit

Pat + Claude cli is an amazing thing.

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SeerUD@reddit

What's Pat?

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seven_seacat@reddit

oh I've had to do this way too many times.

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super_powered@reddit

Every time I start reading through anything and can tell it’s AI written it’s like I mentally check out and just skim (if I bother getting to the bottom at all)

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Blueson@reddit

It's easy to do because 90% of the text is fluff saying nothing anyways.

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

I do the same. I just note the notion ID, tell it not to use the mcp because that mcp server is busted (all hail curl), and then host a Q and A about the ticket with Claude.

I hate every single second of this.

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Ysilla@reddit

And documentation, which is even worse imho (pretty sure the long term effects of that one will be devastating, actual knowledge is getting drowned in nonsense).

I just saw a 3 pages long doc that was entirely wrong today. It clearly started off a wrong assumption (based off a different implementation on another platform), and just went in depth into stuff that made no sense from there. I just left a comment pointing to the whole 3 pages indicating it was 100% wrong, and could be replaced by a single small sentence, it was nowhere near as complicated as the doc made it seem.

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schmudde@reddit

I make my team edit whatever the LLM writes. If it's verbose or if it elides the main point of the document or the PR, I send it back before reading the whole thing.

If the LLM writes something useful, so be it. I'm fine reading that. But you gotta know your audience. Internally, it's either me or other devs.

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Void-kun@reddit

I had a colleague make a meeting agenda with AI, not review it and then go on annual leave expecting that meeting to be carried out.

Within the first 30 seconds I'd pointed out 4 incorrect assumptions and the AI had written our engineering manager was leading the meeting despite him being completely unaware and it intact being someone else who was supposed to lead.

Called out that person who was off saying "did you even bother to review this before giving it to us?" In our public group chat with our entire team.

They've not said anything since, but I suspect it won't happen again.

I had to speak to another team lead about this, as I'm leading our AI initiative I wanted to know how to handle the staff misusing AI but also ignoring advice.

Their response was "you don't need to be here to make friends with everyone, just put your foot down and call it out if they don't respond to gentle guidance".

Sometimes you just have to call out the stupidity when you see it. But this whole 'no blame culture' won't work when people are doing this.

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Friendly-Pair-9267@reddit

My boss used AI to fluff up a bunch of bullet points to form a performance review with headers and paragraphs. I told him that next time he should feel free to just send me the bullet points.

There's actually a lot of people at my company, like him, where English is their second language. It's so obvious when they switch from writing things themselves to asking Claude to do it.

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LeDYoM@reddit

Of course. English is my third language. I you ever read something from me, for example, written in perfect and natural english, you can be sure is AI. My problem is that I have managers with english as their mother language.

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flagbearer223@reddit

I'm shocked no one has stopped and realized the insanity of it.

A large part of it is that they do realize the insanity of it, but their leaders don't, and it's an easy way to make your leaders happy. Same shit happening at my place - it'd be easier for me to just give in and use the slop machine to be a "team player" rather than trying to actually make stuff that's good

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rocketbunny77@reddit

Something I overheard the higher ups talking about:

"Using copilot for emails is great. There's no going back. I just prompt it to write the email for me but I add a line at the end to say it must sound like me, not like AI."

Ok. At that point just write the fuckin email man.

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geon@reddit

I’ve tried to get chatgpt to sound more like me, but even feeding it my blogposts isn’t helping. It sounds like chatgpt no matter what.

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MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

Haha, yeah. But it tells a lot about a big part of their job tho. They could've just sent bullet point lists for so long.

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chaitanyathengdi@reddit

You sure they aren't really aliens communicating via AI?

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therealhappypanda@reddit

The best is slack replies. Just really love it when I get a "good point--on line 387 in MegaService it explicitly calls HelperUtil, I'll refactor it to do xyz" causally in the middle of a DM

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F1B3R0PT1C@reddit

We just set up a whole chain of these. Product uses AI to generate requirements doc. Team lead generates technical design doc. Developer generates code. QA generates tests. Product generates release notes… what could possibly go wrong.

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another_dudeman@reddit

I feel you, damn. I'm seeing the same shit. This is absurd. The only plus side seems to be I don't have to hand code terraform anymore lmfao.

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Ok_Individual_5050@reddit

I wish that were me but we have some custom stuff around TF left behind by a contractor and I CANNOT get Claude to work on it :(

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another_dudeman@reddit

Oh yeah, Claude still doesn't get it right. I have to review it line by line and ask why it did stupid things.

I'm sure it's just a skill issue with me, I'm such a stupid bag of flesh. If only I had the best ever .md files. /s

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

I will give a solid +1 to Claude for finally being able to authorize me for whatever the fuck I need to do on Google cloud, or AWS.

Of course I have to read the commands to make sure it’s in the right environment and whatnot…but those cloud consoles are their own circle of hell.

It’s true that Claude might fuck it up, but with how opaque those UI are, there’s a solid chance I will too. So I will peer review those commands all day 😅

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MjolnirMark4@reddit

The fun part about AWS is that the three ways to access functionality (console, CLI, and CDK) only mostly overlap.

So, there are lots of cases where it is easy to do something one way, but almost impossible another way.

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Wide-Pop6050@reddit

That’s a great use case tbh

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another_dudeman@reddit

for real, it's the best

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

I feel like what we are seeing is the divergence between people who like building things, and people who like programming.

I like building things (but not with the reckless abandon of a viber), but I am actually the opposite of this.

At work I am more inclined to do manual work, serious verification because my reputation is important, the systems matter and impact real people.

My side projects? I am less strict, not more. I default towards sloppiness because all that matters is that it works and is maintainable.

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max123246@reddit

I find it more fun to write code by hand so I only use AI to generate code at work. For hobby coding, I only use it as a search engine.

At work I feel like there's 99 things that need to get done and I have time for 2 of them. So I have to attempt to use AI to ship faster, which hasn't worked that well to be honest

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

I feel like a lot of people really underestimate how much of a unique skill using AI to ship fast is.

Unfortunately there’s not a real guidebook to it, and the ones that exist are largely written by vibecoders or people who have fully drunk the kool aid.

But making AI work involves real thought in terms of scaffolding that works for you, and works for the project.

I’ve found that even the nature of documentation changes - AI is good at inferring how a function works, what gets lost is the user intent. Both the AI forgets as sessions expire and memory gets summarized, and the human can’t relate that intent to the code.

So I’ve been pushing a lot more for the user intent to be documented in the code and docstrings - how the module remains isolated, design patterns, etc.

But that’s just one microcosm. It really is a paradigm shift, when you have to go in that direction for one reason or another.

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NowImAllSet@reddit

I'm not sure about the second part, since I typically enjoy the architecture and "clean" project work. I'm making concessions and dealing with legacy code enough at work, so it's nice at home to greenfield something and have control over all the bits and pieces.

I agree with the first part, though. And will add on that I think we're also seeing people who tied their ego and value to the technical skills (programming). They found something they were good at, and let that become their identity. AI has automated it, and so it becomes not only a threat to their career but also a threat to their identity and ego.

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

Maybe that’s it. In real life, I am an ADHD tornado. I do enjoy programming, but it has taken a lot of discipline to make myself into an employable engineer.

But that discipline, the technical skills you refer to aren’t my identity. The making cool stuff and solving interesting problems part is my identity.

I do really solid work. I write unit tests, solve problems, keep documentation up to date, design intricate systems. But the non-building parts (docs, testing, etc) has always been a struggle.

For me(even before AI), side projects free me from that dynamic. I can just build build build. Do the thing that I fell in love with.

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max123246@reddit

How do you handle building consensus with other people on a design? I'm having that issue right now where I've thought it through thoroughly but need to convince the team that this is what we should build. And I've really struggled with communicating the ideas and why I find it has to be this way.

At first I thought maybe my design is shit but when I am able to sit 1:1 with someone for an hour or two, they end up agreeing or leaning towards the design I proposed. So clearly it's my ability to quickly and clearly communicate the design decision and the alternatives I ruled out that's the issue

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

Honestly, I tend to work at young startups and tend to be the most experienced on the team, so most of the time people will just agree with me. I’m given a lot of latitude.

If I were not in that position, I would probably start by finding some overarching principles that are hard to disagree with “the goal is to fast, with minimal infrastructure. We know that we want this to have distributed tasks, so queuing is baked in”, then for each design decision phrase it in relation to those goals. Once you have agreement on the overarching principles, you’re half way to agreement on the specific implementation details.

But also, trust will grow with time. As things you design work as intended, or issues that were in conflict eventually prove you were correct, you’ll see a lot more flexibility.

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OG_Wafster@reddit

Another nice thing about doing a personal project on the side is that when you don't like the approach that first comes to mind, you can step back and mull for a few days off and on until you come up with a much more elegant approach. No time pressure.

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cd_to_homedir@reddit

I wouldn't say it's so much about identity as it is about passion. For many people who entered this career before AI, the technical part of the work was the part that brought them joy. The problem solvers why were never really good programmers are now having the time of their life because they are finally no longer required to do the dirty low lever work which they hate, whereas people who actually liked programming their own solutions are experiencing utter boredom.

You framing it as an identity crisis makes it sound like those people are wrong for loving what they used to do. They're not; they were simply passionate about a thing, and now that thing has been taken away from then. I feel like in the years to come these engineers will not be replaced so much as they will simply leave this career by their own will due to lack of interest.

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theburntdev@reddit

You hit the nail on the head at least for me. My identity was tied to the technical skills, the disciplines and code coverage.

I’ve recently been letting go of that ego and reframe it as an opportunity to focus more on architecture and a clean project.

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ZorbaTHut@reddit

Yeah, I vibecoded up a BBQ temperature monitor. The thing I'm doing for fun is barbecuing. I'm not writing the code for fun, I'm writing the code to make a tool to help me get better at barbecuing. Why not write the code as fast as possible so I can get back to my smoker?

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SeerUD@reddit

I was just saying a similar thing to my wife yesterday. If I want to solve a problem, and it's not something I need to learn anything for, and I wouldn't spend the time to do it otherwise, then actually "vibe coding" it would be a way to make something that would never exist, exist. I think if you're an experienced dev, it wouldn't be truly vibe coding anyway. It depends how much you hand off to the AI and how little you look into what it's doing though.

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Bright_Aside_6827@reddit

How can sloppiness be maintainable

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overzealous_dentist@reddit

some tech debt has really low interest rates

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Bright_Aside_6827@reddit

then I wouldn't call it sloppy

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haskell_rules@reddit

You don't share development on personal projects. When things get sloppy at work, the juniors copy the sloppy and it becomes unmaintainable. On personal projects, you know where you just wanted to get it done versus where you need clean architecture to achieve your vision.

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nacholicious@reddit

Don't copy that sloppy!

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rocketbunny77@reddit

❤️

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1000Ditto@reddit

"I can finally fix the [freaking][crap] and get [crap] done right"

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midairmatthew@reddit

💯

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demosthenesss@reddit

The whole industry has embraced human generated sloppiness for many years at this point. AI is just faster at creating it than humans.

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tenthousandants44@reddit

sloppiness != slop

slopiness still has intent and meaning

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Bright_Aside_6827@reddit

Calling it technical debt is embracement ?

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originalchronoguy@reddit

Like the poster you are answering. I've been maintaining my own stuff for 20 years now. I have stuff running in production with live customers paying for close to two decades. I know my own stuff. I know my orchestration, my CICD.

So it is doable. Only problem is what happens if I die and my kid needs to take it over.

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

It is a delicate dance, with low repercussions for failure.

As an example: If I’m trying to control LED lights on my wall, I know there is a kind of maximum complexity that this project is going to have.

I can lay down a solid framework/foundation (a system for addressing the coordinates, changing colors, whatever).

Then, with a reasonable core, I can just “do whatever”. If I went to render a png to my LED lights, it doesn’t really matter to me what the script looks like that is reading in the png and sending out the signals. Instead of obsessing about it all day I will 100% just have Claude yolo spam code at it.

I’m not worried about maintaining png2pretty_lights script in the future.

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Evinceo@reddit

*getting things, not building, getting.

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

No? Not really sure what you’re on about.

I fell in love with software at an early age, because I could create something out of nothing.

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Dense_Gate_5193@reddit

people writing slop with AI is a people problem. they don’t understand that everything they write using AI they are also responsible for. they are responsible for reviewing any output before it reaches external review.

there’s a huge rift between people who are programmers who also love to build but are bored by the tedium of writing everything out (like myself) and so i use AI extensively. i also reread, correct, double check, write tests, test myself, optimize performance, update documentation, add more tests, etc… and my work product quality has remained constant but my velocity is insane.

i have severe ADHD so checking on my automations throughout the day feels like spinning plates but it works for me. i also know how to organize my work and when NOT to do things .

20yoe staff

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Erehybog@reddit

I'm more in the middle, I like building but a bit of programming problem solving is fun too.

That's why I felt the time when we just used AI as a search tool or boilerplate generator was the golden age.

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djnattyp@reddit

Reverse Centaur

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ahspaghett69@reddit

many people don't have the willingness or passion to learn new things and AI looks like magic to them

I also think a lot of people have a kind of weird version of imposter syndrome where they don't trust their own work but they implicitly trust AI, even when it is proven to be dramatically worse in every way

Finally, some people (and this is most common in management but I have seen it in engineers) have extreme confirmation bias; "if i get chatgpt to write an email and it looks good to me, it MUST be good, because I am so smart and good at my job"

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KirthiRoberts@reddit

One thing AI is changing rapidly is how professionals are evaluated. Technical skill alone is becoming less differentiating. Communication, strategic thinking, adaptability, and business impact are becoming far more important.

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satoryvape@reddit

As a senior mobile engineer with 14 yoe I feel obsolete in current job market. Intermediate engineer + vibecoding tools like Codex, Cursor, etc are hot in this market as employers love to pay lesser salaries. Among seniors who were laid off we have hunger games and 46% are eager to ask twice less but only to get invited to interview as 100 people for 1 job competition. I am starting to regret that I spent so many years in this field just to be replaced by AI that made career transition almost impossible too

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MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

My theory is that you'll be fine again once the token cost will go up. If it's a tool like everyone says, better have a great artisan than an apprentice to do the job.

It already started BTW, the tokens price going up

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satoryvape@reddit

They'll start forcing to use Chinese LLM or local LLM

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ultraDross@reddit

I think local LLMs are the way we will go. But they will not be as "good", unless there is a massive breakthrough. They'll simply become another tool to use, rather than something that will replace us.

So I agree with the person that said we should keep our skills sharp. Don't let them atrophy.

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Void-kun@reddit

I see it like riding a bike, even if those skills dull, they won't go away and after a couple of weeks you'd shift back to pre-AI with a better intellisense tool 😅

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GerwazyMiod@reddit

I feel the same. I was stressed about my job already, as we had a few series of layoffs that I survived. But now with LLMs I feel that axe is inevitable, and I love my trade, I specialized in it for years...

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Void-kun@reddit

I've not experienced peer pressure, but I'm one of the engineers with multiple personal AI subscriptions working on several personal projects and contributing to other open source ones.

I do it because I enjoy it, always have.

It does give me an edge in my career though, I've got about 18 months extra AI experience compared to 99% of my company which has put me in a position to lead and support others.

That edge is what you're missing out on, but not every Dev needs personal projects, if you don't enjoy it as a hobby, it will just burn you out, and nobody wants that to happen.

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hyrumwhite@reddit

We produce 10x the software for 1.5x the features

I feel this. Sometimes I’m looking at coworkers’ code going, “pretty sure that could be a couple lines instead of three utilities”

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NUTTA_BUSTAH@reddit

Who could have known that you can use sort to sort terminal output, without having to embed a Python project with CI/CD workflows?

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etherwhisper@reddit

Isn’t making the machine do what you want it to do the job of a software engineer?

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okayifimust@reddit

Personal projects are supposed to be to do something fun or sharpen our skills, right?

You should be a grown ass dev, and understand that you can build your own projects in whatever way you like, for whatever purpose you chose, or no purpose at all.

Why would you want to improve your productivity regarding that?

This grown ass dev has site projects with goals and purposes. I build for functionality, and being more productive is a great thing.

I'm not sure if "for fun" and productivity mesh well, but efficiency is an important aspect of learning.

And paying 200$/m to do so?!

Too much for me, but to each their own.

And the pressure is building.

If that is true you need better friends.

people wants to start to do that on their personal time. They don't do web research anymore, and just take what's out of Claude/ChatGPT as truths.

Why do you care?

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MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

people wants to start to do that on their personal time. They don't do web research anymore, and just take what's out of Claude/ChatGPT as truths. Why do you care?

Because it takes me 10x the times to explain why it's wrong. Last time, Claude went like "yes, of course, tension drops when there is more intensity and more resistance" to a friend. V=R*I is quite different from V=I/R, and can be quite harmful.

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okayifimust@reddit

If it is their personal projects, why do you have to explain?
Even at work, do we really explain "why the AI slop is wrong" to a wannabe-engineer who didn't write the code, doesn't understand the code and won't fix the code?

I'm not mocking you - I wouldn't. Where I am at, we use AI sparingly, we are open about what is and isn't AI, and we read, understand and test what it does before showing it to other people.

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Big-Pirate2371@reddit

I’m a Staff Engineer. Everything feels fake.

The team I lead just uses Claude for everything. Everything is overly verbose because of Claude, PRs are reviewed by Claude, nobody knows what the code is actually doing. Design documents, quarterly goals, all AI driven and trying to make sense of any of these things is leading to more cognitive overhead because the producers of the content have no idea what it actually says or does.

And don’t get me started on how as a person with OCD, AI tools are very hard for me to use because they can often put me into an anxiety loop “wait just one more thing”. They are forcing me to use something that has actual negative effects on my mental health but they would never understand because “just ship it and let Claude cook”.

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Dirt-Merchant-1452@reddit

I work at that CRM company and recently the company pushed everyone to use Claude Code for everything, including non tech roles and gives us unlimited token budgets. What used to be a 3 pager design doc now becomes 20 pages. Slack messages become super verbose and full of emojis. PRs got longer and more often than not, entirely wrong implementation and creates tech debt that impedes the next work item right away. This whole push for token maxxing is crazy to me but you know what, yesterday I asked CC to insert a line break to the markdown file instead of editing the file myself. Fuck this shit. I am currently learning Zig after work just to keep my brain functioning

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selucram@reddit

I am so fucking mad that I have to consume that slop infested bullshit excuse of a REST API you guys made and broke. I don't even want to know how bad Airbnb looks if that is the stuff all the ex-staff is generating out in the open.

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MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

I asked CC to insert a line break to the markdown file instead of editing the file myself.

Yes, 900 times yes. Happened to me too

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chaitanyathengdi@reddit

The bubble is close to bursting...

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Direct-Fee4474@reddit

principal here, 25-years in and i can't tell if fast-fashion nihilism software is going to make me want to retire even earlier or if it's going to buy me like.. fifteen yachts. i read a lot of code. i oscillate between disgust and elation. everything is garbage. non-infinite context windows ensure that "well i'll just put 15 guard statements at the beginning of this function" llm spew will turn into a mathematically-impossible-to-maintain nightmare within months. i see the output from so many people who talk about "well it's the harness" or "well if you know what you're doing, then it's not a problem", but their stuff's just as doomed. i haven't seen a single non-trivial codebase that has been touched by an llm that doesn't look like a terminal patient.

[-]

MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

I read some comment a week ago about 100x software development bs. "If AI makes you able to create software 100x faster and you used it for 3 month, can you show me the 25 years of value you've created lately?"

[-]

wwiillll@reddit

"wait just one more thing" hits me hard. We were encouraged to use for review. Every single time prompted it would change its mind. It drives me insane.

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

I end most days feeling like I’m in an AI psychosis.

I’m working from a ticket written by AI, using AI to iterate on prompts and harnesses for AI that are used inside the product. AI monitors the log output of me testing the different AI and makes recommendations on how best to adjust our control of the AI.

When I push the code it will be reviewed by AI, and if there are bugs it will be spotted by the AI monitoring our logs. If I’m especially unlucky the AI will open a PR to fix the bug, at which point I will assert my dominance as the apex predator of this planet and figure out how the AI is wrong, and why it misdiagnosed the bug that AI probably made.

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acidfreakingonkitty@reddit

This is a Philip K Dick novel

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RandomPantsAppear@reddit

I had to lookup who that was but you’re absolutely right.

Ironically, googles AI answered my question of who the fuck is Phillip k dick.

[-]

rocketbunny77@reddit

The negative health effects are real.

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Comprehensive-Pin667@reddit

I'm viased because my employer also gives us unlimited usage for personal use, but I think it's fun to do side projects with it. I can quickly validate my stupid ideas, the last one being: Can I create a DOS compatible operating system entirely in typescript if I create some tooling for it? Looks promising so far. Very good use of company issued tokens.

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Fruloops@reddit

I'm so glad my company doesn't force AI down our throats, it's actually refreshing. For all its faults, at least here they took the right approach.

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supaloaf2K@reddit

You’re not crazy. A lot of people are treating AI usage like a productivity religion now.

Using AI to remove boring work is one thing. Using it so much that you stop thinking, researching, or building skills yourself is another. The second part is what feels off in your post.

The weirdest shift is seeing people optimize hobbies like they’re corporate deliverables. Personal projects used to be where you slowed down and actually learned something. Now some people are trying to “maximize output” there too.

Also, the “AI everything” culture creates tons of noise: - AI PR descriptions nobody reads - AI slides nobody understands - AI summaries of AI summaries - 10x more code, marginally better products

You probably don’t hate tech. You probably just miss craftsmanship.

And honestly, having electrician/network technician skills right now is not a downgrade at all. Those are real-world, tangible skills with actual demand. A lot of people sitting behind AI-generated Jira tickets secretly wish they had something concrete like that.

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NowImAllSet@reddit

Hey, the subreddit rules explicitly ask that rants and career advice not be posted here.

Anyways, using tools like Claude is part of the skills for a software engineer now, whether you want to admit it or not. Using it in your personal projects is a good way to learn those skills. If you hate AI, then yeah tech isn't the best field for you. It's being folded into everything, and clearly not going away.

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Muhznit@reddit

Hey, the subreddit rules explicitly ask that rants and career advice not be posted here.

Anyways, using tools like Claude is part of the skills for a software engineer now

Deference to authority/written rules without critical thought as to when they should be disregarded is how we got into this mess.

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NowImAllSet@reddit

You're implying I provided no critical thought, but clearly that's not true. This post and topic is a dime-per-dozen these days, and OP could have read all about the opinions on AI usage, productivity and its impact (or lack thereof) on the traditional skills associated with software engineering.

The post is yet another sensationalist AI rant that climbs the ranks because it casts a broad net of appeal and opinions. It's good for the Reddit engagement algorithm, but does absolutely nothing to foster a unique discussion from experienced engineers.

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fexonig@reddit

i think if you want a job where you work at a desk, you gotta get used to ai tooling tbh

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weakestfish@reddit

But why

75% of the output is absolutely mind numbing

And I say this as someone who writes a lot of code (carefully) using AI

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fexonig@reddit

if 75% of the output is slop then you’re using it wrong. your prompting is bad or you’re giving it tasks it’s unsuited for.

ai is like an intern but way better because it’s so fast

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FlightOfGrey@reddit

Who wants a fast intern? I want a senior developer writing code.

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fexonig@reddit

companies wouldn’t hire interns if they didn’t want interns.

yea it would be better if you had a senior dev, but you don’t. you have an intern. use it or don’t

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NowImAllSet@reddit

I wish I could learn what's behind the stark differences in opinion with AI tooling. On my end, I'd say 80%+ of the output is high quality and correct. And I don't even work in a field that should be heavily represented by the training data. I'm in a super niche area of embedded development using Rust. By most accounts I should be having the worst time?

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totallyrandom__@reddit

You are doing well, ignore the pressure, don't talk about personal projects. The most reasonable way to measure an event is by looking at its outcome, not its output or its intentions. The arrival of LLM coding has yet to demonstrate that has brought better productivity with better quality and efficiency. LLM is very energy hungry, generates unmaintainable code (a liability), and it is unsustainable.

Companies and "ai-native" developers don't have really a plan if the thing they are betting their entire career and investment on happens to be a bad decision.

LLM-coding at work, let them live the consequences of their actions. Brain-coding at home, keep your skills fresh by struggling with things, that's your backup plan 👍

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TheSexySovereignSeal@reddit

Its also heavily subsidized right now. Ai in reality is not this cheap. The cloud costs to run these models do not math out for current prices being charged.

Once the real price hits the market, it'll be the same issue as when cloud first came out. Itll be too expensive to back out.

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Early_Rooster7579@reddit

Token cost has dropped dramatically year over year, anthropic just announced they’re already turning a profit. I’m not sure the “real price” isn’t already here

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MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

While Google just reduced the token quotas for their paid plans, and now bills per compute instead of per token.

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LemonDisasters@reddit

Oh I'm sure a private company couldn't & wouldn't fudge numbers or say or do anything to avoid being totally fisted by their own anal-fisting petard

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Ysilla@reddit

Personal projects are something I stopped doing 10-15 years ago, but no way I'd spend that amount of money on these even when I did. These were all about learning and making fun stuff, AI (when used well) is about efficiency, very different goals.

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chhuang@reddit

I'm kinda sick of AI generated slides, it serves no purpose. I would prefer they skip the presentation and just send the notes that they feed to AI so we just use that note to summarize with AI ourselves.

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fsk@reddit

The main reason I'm not buying an AI subscription for a side project is I have no reason to believe my side projects will ever make $200/month.

Find out if your employer is using "tokens used" as a performance review metric. If they are, make sure you burn as many tokens as possible on pointless tasks.

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MrDontCare12@reddit (OP)

Don't worry, my set of AI tools, harnesses, MCPs and skills are eating tokens like never before. I'm top 5%, maxing out Claude and Codex's quotas almost every day 😎 I sometimes even use token based billing for super heavy tasks, costing about a hundred of $ a day

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Lunchboxsushi@reddit

I get the AI hate when it's being used in ways it shouldn't be. Today I had an engineer ask if it's okay to use Claude to go through a few thousand emails to check for duplicates...

Burger King using it in their headphones to ensure staff is saying key words like 'thank you' & 'you're welcome' is janky as fuck.

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tenthousandants44@reddit

Why would you use a token generator to check for duplicates?

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Lunchboxsushi@reddit

It's like a 3 line function to output an array of duplicates, people are going crazy.

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walter_404@reddit

I have also seen this same pattern. Teams shit 10x more code and the product barely moved forward. Anyway, the KPI thing is wild though, what are they even measuring? like number of prompts sent?

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fued@reddit

I am so glad AI has bad formatting so i can quickly point out/ignore irrelevant AI content and only go over stuff that someone at least put the effort of formatting into as they will likely clean up issues as they go along

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rocketbunny77@reddit

I see em dash in PR description, I stop reading it and just look at the code.

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SrDevMX@reddit

to me the main point of your post is all the AI gen code blindly being released!

hacks, ransomware, security holes, and bugs are flying under the radar

forget the $200 at home

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reddit_time_waster@reddit

I don't do personal projects. $200 saved

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CaptainTheta@reddit

You don't need the $200 claude sub for side projects, the $20 a month OpenaAI sub gets you a really solid chunk of Codex usage per week.

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StandardSignal3382@reddit

I once joined a photography group at work (at the time I worked at a large investment bank), I swear everyone one of these @$$hats had one of those super expensive white canon L lenses. My point is just because you have the disposable income does not mean I do. Tell your coworkers that you don’t come over to their house and knock the crack pipe out of their mouths

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originalchronoguy@reddit

Personal projects are supposed to be to do something fun or sharpen our skills, right? Why would you want to improve your productivity regarding that? And paying 200$/m to do so?!

Let me answer this as someone who pays $200. It is the same reason I spend $100 on integromat, $60 for Adobe Creative Cloud, $80 for XYZ, $1200 for AWS.

I use it for my side-hustles which makes money so the ROI is there. I may use Photoshop twice a month but when I need it, I have it.

But Claude at $200 is definitely a subsidized value. I thought I would do better paying ad-hoc; using something like OpenRouter. I tried Qwen and blew $60 in 20 minutes on per API cost. I switched to something else; it's still $40. And OpenRouter is supposed to be cheap. With Claude, you do a lot of stuff, your session maxxes out and you wait 4 hours to resume. But you can do that 24/7 30 days a month for a flat fee. So I am definitely using more than $200 worth of tokens per month. At my day job, I would spend my entire month's allotment in 3 days for simple stuff.

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notnoteworthyatall@reddit

not sure why this is getting downvoted. I pay $100 for AI tooling I can use the level up some plugins & NPM packages that I maintain. Yes they output slop a lot. But they're also great for quick fixes like, "update this README to include X."

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originalchronoguy@reddit

anti-AI people. Anyways, Claude saved me $800 and my friend $600 a month in Azure and AWS hosting fees by doing a systematic audit of our infra and ghost resources. The kind you spin up for a test demo, poc but forget to turn off. Backups running for years on a service you turned off 3 years ago. Snapshots of databases from 8 years ago.

So the subscription is already returning a ROI if it found $600-800 a month in savings. I was like "hell yeah"

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notnoteworthyatall@reddit

I'm anti-AI but that doesn't mean I'm not going to take advantage of the subsidies that exist and use $1,000 in tokens for $100 whenever I can :)

[-]

marssaxman@reddit

I use it for my side-hustles which makes money

This sounds like such an exhausting way to live.

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originalchronoguy@reddit

Why? It is paying for my two kid's colleges. Takes maybe 2 hours out of my week. Help me buy a multiplex.

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sean9999@reddit

I feel you

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dead-first@reddit

The cold truth about this is salaries are only going down from this point forward. There is no rockstar developers anymore... No need to pay someone 350k or even 100k to do this shit.

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moreVCAs@reddit

i’m sorry but i ain’t paying for this shit like ever. or at least i’m going to hold out as long as i possibly can. my work is still interesting enough that I can easily find entertaining side projects that are directly work related (i.e. that i can easily justify the claude spend for experimentation). anything outside of that may as well do it by hand. ask me in 6mo. maybe i’ll be singing a different tune.

[-]

carloswm85@reddit

How old are you, and how long have you been in the industry? That’s important information, because the closer you are to retirement, the more justified your rejection of this new technological approach may be, and the more I would suggest sticking to the methods you already know for solving problems and providing solutions.

Not everything in life is AI or being on the cutting edge of every new technology. Most of the time, doing what you already know — and doing it well — is enough. Customers don’t care how you do it or what tools you use; they care about you providing a solution to their problem and making their lives easier.

All this AI rush is mostly a developer problem, and maybe even a marketing bait used by solution sellers. AI should be used only where necessary.