this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
465 points (96.2% liked)

Technology

86075 readers
2891 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
465
Software Engineers Say They're Losing the Ability to Code Now That AI Does It for Them (futurism.com)
submitted 1 month ago by throws_lemy@reddthat.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
152 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] shoo@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Things I've realized while working with AI (Claude code):

  • It's fantastic for very small macros and medium length scripts. Think dev ops stuff, pre-commit hooks, transforming data. Keep it small enough to manually review and something you can run without destroying anything important. This can massively boost your codebase QoL. [Double bonus for not wasting tokens to solve the same problem over and over]
  • It's decent-to-good at debugging but not consistent with fixes. It can find some utf encoding edge case that might have taken you 1hr+ but suggest the dumbest bandaid fix you've ever seen. Also very good at spinning up unit test suites for basic edge cases.
  • Due to obvious training bias, it's pretty good with common libraries and cloud platform infrastructure. It could probably help with writing a complex cron call, debugging regex or fixing an IaC config. On the flip side it won't bother to use the latest package version or know your niche/new library.
  • It does better with greenfield because exploring your codebase introduces a ton of bias. It might try to fit in an ugly hack when a refactor to simplify everything is way easier.
  • It's absolutely garbage with UI, just throws the most disorganized HTML together that isn't reactive or reusable. OK enough for ugly internal stuff but God help anyone relying on it for that.
  • This is setting up to be the biggest rug pull in history. People that buy into it heavily just to save a couple bucks on engineer payroll are going to be fucked when they start ratcheting up the token price.

All in all it can be useful when used with care but will never be a magic bullet.

[–] Ledivin@lemmy.world -1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Man, I disagree with all of this. The frontier models are actually good, and basically everyone in my F500 company has been using it. The codebases i work on are super-legacy java, where it does great despite us having like 75 different patterns for each task, and a massive front-end web repo where it thrives because we've been extremely strict in typing and patterns leading up to this. It even does pretty well across repo boundaries, despite having significantly lower context for those situations.

I genuinely will never understand the people saying they suck. Are the worth the price? I have no idea, I've never used them for personal project. But they are at least as good as a dev with 3-5 years of experience, at this point. Our career is boned.

[–] shoo@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

I don't doubt it's possible to get better consistency but the juice is really not worth the squeeze for me. You end up churning through huge expensive models, orchestrating sub agents, writing out boilerplate hand-holding instructions ("please don't break this, stop trying to commit to main, please lint ffs...").

I don't use it for Java but that would make sense with rigid enterprise patterns and VeryVerboseNamesThatAreEasierForAModelThanAHumanFactoryClazz {...

I don't think our career is boned, moreso that all juniors trying to get in are boned. Everyone who knows what going on transition to a more hands-off architect role.

But like I said, our tokens are heavily subsidized right now. When they pull the rug, code monkey jobs will start to get listed again (with lower salaries of course).

load more comments (4 replies)