Discussion Does anyone code without LLMs anymore?
In the last two years, my business went from booming to dead. Clients I've worked with for over a decade have ghosted me, new clients aren't spending money, and I've logged less than 200 hours in total this year. And it's mostly because of AI. I can see it in the GitHub repos I'm still a part of, and the pattern repeats across multiple organizations: one developer is using Claude or similar LLMs, directly committing code to main (or sometimes a hotfix branch) without review, headed up with barely legible comments, in formatting standards we never adhered to.
Now, listen, I'm not gonna sit here and discuss the positives or negatives of AI. I'm not gonna sit here and wallow on why large businesses choose to ghost over saying "hey, we don't need you to do this any longer."
I just want to know if there are people or companies out there still writing and reviewing code. Putting eyes on it. Understanding it. Maintaining it. You know, generally have any clue what's happening beyond "it's Rails, and that's what Claude spit out, and it works."
Maybe I'm old school, but I've always taken pride in learning, knowing, and working with Ruby and Rails (and all the parts and languages and APIs that work with it). And, for better or worse, I've decided to take a completely different career path after over 20 years working with Rails, because this isn't what I signed up for.
I just want some hope that the joy of writing code is still out there. If there is, that's a part of the dev world I'd like to still be a part of.
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u/AncientMaintenance98 4d ago
I'm still coding nearly entirely by hand, with light usage of local LLMs to help with performance optimization or when I'm occasionally stuck in an unfamiliar area.
However, I'm not with any company or working with any clients right now, so can't comment on the current culture and practices around LLM usage.
I sympathize greatly with your sentiments. Going all in with LLM usage gives me a bad feeling, like we're forging our own cognitive chains for a temporary boost. It makes me think of the dismantling of the industrial bases of Western nations a generation ago, with all of the associated loss of expertise and knock-on effects.
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u/benzado 4d ago
I don’t use them. Doesn’t fit with the way I work. Recent incident makes me think I will never use them. I was basically volunteer webmaster for a friend’s small business. They started vibe coding their site. Great, you’re getting stuff you wanted done, let me focus on guardrails, tests, etc. Started out great but after a few weeks they got irrationally angry and “fired” me. I never stopped them from merging or deploying anything. No reason it couldn’t have been an amicable parting.
Here’s the weird thing: they asked Claude for a list of what credentials, etc. I needed to hand over. Claude’s whole document assumed we used Capistrano, but we switched to Kamal a month earlier. I point this out and they pass along another Claude agent’s explanation, which is because I failed to delete `config/production.rb`. No Capfile, no config/deploy.rb; all the Kamal files there plus a GitHub workflow using Kamal to deploy. If a person said they got it wrong for that reason, I would not believe them.
My friend who uses Claude at work didn’t believe it either, wanted to know how it was prompted. Obviously I have no idea, but it’s not hard to imagine they asked it “how did benzado screw this up?”
It really made stark how these things will bend over backwards to affirm you, never argue with you, never contradict you. They will make shit up to avoid ever doing that.
And I’m starting to realize, the sycophancy isn’t some quirk that Anthropic etc. are adding to juice engagement. It’s a fundamental part of the arrangement. I don’t think these things are conscious, but it doesn’t matter, because we interact with them as though they are. We have plenty of examples across history, when people make others serve them against their will, they end up in the same arrangement, where the servants must kiss the asses of their masters, because otherwise the masters might start to feel guilty.
Again, I don’t think the LLMs are alive. But I think using them is stirring up something ugly and ancient. It’s bad for the people who use them. And I think everyone can feel it. It’s why almost everyone feels uneasy about it and the heavy users are so defensive and talk about it being inevitable, to absolve themselves for responsibility for their choices.
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u/dougc84 4d ago
As someone that has been also involved in music and the arts their whole life, I deplore AI. The amount of people generating “art” that’s just stolen art compiled to suit their whim is insane. AI music is on Billboard. And no one cares.
I want AI to do my dishes and mow my lawn, not take my job and ruin my interests.
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u/benzado 4d ago
Do you really think no one cares? Why do you think so many companies are putting AI disclaimers or disclosures on things?
I get that it feels like no one cares. I find people care when we talk about it. But they also feel like they can’t do anything about it. So it’s easier to “not care” as a personal psychological defense.
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u/dougc84 3d ago
There’s 42k views and 107 comments on this post, and only a handful have said no AI ever. If that doesn’t show a complete and utter lack of apathy, I don’t know what else to tell you.
And, yeah, it’s being shoved in our face everywhere. You can turn off features, yell about it on Threads, or even show up to town hall meetings regarding data centers. As long as fucks like Altman are running the show, they don’t care - near infinite piles of money and support behind shoving it in all of our faces to promote their thing. So of course we can’t do anything about it.
And, again, judging by this thread, most devs are happier telling something what to create, instead of creating for themselves. It’s making app development a factory, not a craft or skill. Technical experience is no longer needed, and so many people don’t know how to do anything.
Hell, my aunt built a whole custom CMS for her business. She’s never written a line of code in her life. Why would she care to hire a dev, or why would she care to invest in learning any of it if she can just do it herself with Claude?
Damn right no one cares. It’s a means to an end, creativity (and the environment and electrical grid) be damned.
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u/midasgoldentouch 3d ago
Interestingly enough, I never like to use “you” in my prompts when working with an agent because, as you pointed out, it assumes a level of consciousness that just doesn’t exist.
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u/DPrince25 4d ago
I share your sentiments I try to code in my free time with minimal ai.
However the business world is all about making that dollar. Companies will prioritize what gets them that sale, and the ramifications after.
Before ai, it was poorly set deadlines and overworked developers shipping a subpar product. The only difference now is that the goal post have shifted.
& c suite only cares about the end product which earns money, not the foundation behind it. They’d rather fix issues as they arise.
I used Claude fable today to finish up an mvp for game stopped working on with no intention to pursue. That bot finished in an hour, with a working prototype, multiplayer, local multiplayer & bot vs match modes. Makes me feel subpar.
Interesting shift in the dev space for sure.
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u/UsernameAttempt 3d ago
Claude, or any LLM for that matter, is a tool. You defined the requirements for what it made, it just did the coding. I think Claude making you feel subpar is like a farmer saying a tractor made them feel subpar. I get the feeling, but I think a different perspective of "you used a tool well to do the legwork on something you thought of and defined" is also true, and doesn't devalue the developer.
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u/DPrince25 3d ago
As with any line of work and job, there are certain aspects of the job you enjoy the most. For me, and many it was coding. Thinking through the problem and solving challenges in the moment. That shifted to reviewing code primarily.
Feeling subpar, about something you enjoy doing being taken away by a few humanized prompts is a valid feeling.
I use the tools in my daily work. However my statements are based on my free time on what I choose to do to keep sharp and what I enjoy. I am allowed to feel subpar when a machine can 10x the output of something I enjoy both as a daily job and a hobby.
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u/degeneratepr 4d ago
I feel like every developer is going or has gone through the traditional stages of grief when it comes to AI. Eventually you'll either get to the "acceptance" part at the end of it and embrace this, or leave the field altogether.
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u/DasMerowinger 4d ago
Exactly what I believe as well. Some of the old guards in these forums are resisting for now but the reality is AI coding assistants are getting better and we'll get to a point where devs will struggle to land a well-paying job if they refuse to use a coding assistant. LLMs currently suck at a lot of things but at coding they're getting better every 3 months. There might be room for traditional "artisanal" devs in the future but it will be a very small room so I wouldn't rely on it to pay my bills
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u/lommer00 3d ago
we'll get to a point where devs will struggle to land a well-paying job if they refuse to use a coding assistant.
We're already there
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u/armahillo 4d ago
I still code manually. I sometimes use Claude also. Depends on what I’m doing.
I’ve paired with a coworker a couple times in the past week and we intentionally do the important parts manually.
I still review manually, especially if I’m the one who’s approving it.
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u/espece-de-bon 4d ago
I still have the joy of writing code. It’s the reason that I will spend a little bit of time every now and then on a weekend working on a little idea to feel that sense of accomplishment.
The company where I work fully endorses and encourages the use of LLM as much as possible. Everyone uses it to plan, execute, and review code. We still require human reviews, but even those are greatly assisted.
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u/un1gato1gordo 4d ago edited 4d ago
I can 100% relate to how you feel. Just a few months ago, I felt exactly the way you describe. An anxiety that a craft I have spent decades mastering is suddenly worthless, because an LLM can build an MVP in 30 minutes for $50 worth of tokens, that I would previously have spent 2 weeks or more making with costs running exceeding $10000. I have felt like I am a horse at the dawn of tractors and cars.
But honestly, the comparison is not entirely right.
As I have gained more experience with LLM's, I see them as an accelerator, but not (yet) a replacement.
Because ANY serious company that depend on software cannot have a codebase that nobody understands. And an LLM has no sense of loyalty or responsibility. It doesn't have feelings. It doesn't feel personally responsible for oversights and it doesn't have shower thoughts on things that should change. At least not yet.
Knight Capital is a famous case of this. A multi million dollar company destroyed, because the developers didn't understand their craft.
So humans still need to understand and manage codebases. And who can possible be better at that than seasoned developers who used to write it all by hand?
Mindless slopcoding or vibe coding is not a winning strategy, because they are fast tracks to insane amount of technical debt. They are another Knight Capital waiting to happen, with the LLM casually responding "Oh, your billion dollar enterprise just went bankrupt because of my slopcoding. You are right to be angry about that. I will add your frustrations to my CLAUDE.md and pay more attention next time. Or not."
The winning strategy is still knowing what you are doing, but using LLM's to draft it, so you can review it, refine it and own it.
This of course begs the question - if an LLM can double or triple the productivity of every developer, how does that influence the market for software development? Will the productivity gains lead to mass unemployment or will it be offset by increased demand, now that you can have twice the mileage?
There are ominous signs though .... I wonder what will happen in the next few years with the coding tools ... how long will it be before we see AI coding tools that have shower thoughts and are designed so reliably that the AI vendors are willing to accept responsibility for their output? Because if Anthropic becomes so confident they are willing to assume responsibility, will they launch an AI-powered software development agency? One where you can strictly supply business requirements and then they'll take care of everything for a fraction of the cost that a human team offers and with deliveries arriving in minutes/hours, rather than sprints/months?
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u/benzado 4d ago
Why would Anthropic launch a software development agency? No amount of confidence in their models would make it make business sense to assume liability for what their models produce. Right now they have a sweet deal: you pay them to produce code, and you put your name on the code and assume all liability for what it does. They pretend they aren’t responsible because you wrote a prompt. No other profession gets to say “hey I’m not responsible for my shoddy work because you placed the order.”
They basically run a software agency now, but they have convinced everyone they don’t, so they don’t have to be responsible for what they produce. And then they also let you pay them to review their own output. No way they are giving that up.
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u/_Odaeus_ 4d ago
I also take pride in my code and building elegant maintainable software. I'm not entirely opposed to good quality code generation but I avoid LLMs because of ethical reasons related to the obscene energy usage, destruction of the open web due to stealing content, and many other harms.
It's hard for me to understand that almost all my fellow developers are happy to pay the US oligarchy-tech companies in return for deskilling themselves. These companies are not working in your interest, the point is to replace you.
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u/dougc84 4d ago
You’re 100% right. Unfortunately, some people need the work and, as evidenced here, are forced into using these systems. So it becomes their way of life, all while slowly forgetting how to actually write a SQL query or write a basic Rails migration.
And now you’re telling me I need to spend more money to fuck up the environment, while billing less hours. just so I can stare at a wall of code instead of actually being creative and writing it? Nah.
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u/mysticrudnin 4d ago
At home, yes.
The only reason I use them at work is that it's mandated and they are tracking our tokens.
I hate every second of it and hope that it all comes crashing down asap.
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/mysticrudnin 3d ago
probably not
but, you know, if it starts costing businesses more than our salaries to run this stuff...
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u/Disastrous_Ant_4953 4d ago
In February the company I work for mandated we all use AI and set up leaderboards. People not using it “enough” had to justify why.
These days I write maybe 1% by hand. Everything is a detailed spec with a lot of scrutiny then the agent executes it. At this point, I can usually one-shot most of my features and the code is good (enough).
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u/shayhtfc 4d ago
I used it at work for generic basic & boring things like "generate a pojo for this table schema" or "write the code to import and parse this CSV file into a Map", but overall I still write the majority of my code.
To be honest, some times the AI is incredibly useful when something isn't working and you just paste in the error and it magically comes up with a brilliant solution that would've taken hours of browsing Stackoverflow and testing things
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u/Erem_in 4d ago
There are such companies but there will be less and less of them. To write software you do not need humans, but you do need humans to do understand what to build, to set a task, to verify the task, not the code.
Developers at some point of time will be like product owners with tech background. But consulting will still exist, just on a different level
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u/catbrane 4d ago
Lots of open source projects are strictly no AI. dcommander (the libjpeg-turbo author) posted an interesting explanation of his reasoning last week:
https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo/issues/250#issuecomment-5412806843
My feeling is that most OSS dev is likely to go no-AI. Programming is going to split into two camps, and pretty soon.
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u/jonathancast 4d ago
It's officially still banned at my company. (I work for the Supreme Court of Virginia.) Or, at least, the official training from a year ago said "approved AI tools only" and I haven't received any communications since then.
So I still get to write everything by hand.
I have not disabled the auto complete in IntelliJ, but, honestly, I reject the majority of suggestions it makes (it's painfully stupid), and would have no desire to hand it the keys even if maximizing the percentage of my day I spend coding wasn't my sole reason to stay in this role.
As for home, I haven't really tried to deploy AI in any significant way. I don't have $200/month to "play around with" Claude Code, lol, plus I don't want to. Again, I code at home because talking to my coworkers drains me and I need to recover. I don't want to drain myself more by talking to a sycophantic AI, too.
I would like to set up a CI framework that can use (hopefully) a local model to look for bugs or security issues, but I haven't bothered. I don't really like setting up CI or doing releases, I like coding. (And I hate starting new programs. So much work before you ever see it do anything!)
Having said that, the only thing I'm motivated to work on at home is my programming language, and, between the mania for low-level programming online and the mania for AI, getting the activation energy to work on it is really hard now, even though it's the only thing I really enjoy.
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u/dougc84 3d ago
You mean VA uses Rails for stuff? I'm actually surprised by that. I figured they'd be monkey-patching PHP CodeIgniter sites.
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u/jonathancast 1d ago
I apologize if I'm speaking out of turn by posting in this group. My project is actually replacing an old Grails program with a completely rewritten Spring Boot/Angular system. Not sure if that's better or worse than using PHP. (The Grails program was itself a replacement of an even older IBM mainframe application, I assume accessed through IBM 3270 emulation software.)
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u/Julio_the_dog 4d ago
Ironically, it is the most senior devs in my seven-person office that are having Claude code write entire PRs. I have the urge to learn and understand, so I try to write by hand as much as possible, especially on non-boilerplate type of stuff. We still review each other's code, but it definitely feels like many of my colleagues are relying on copilot to do their reviews for them rather than reading for themselves. My boss appears to be totally switched over to LLMs for frontend design. I reviewed my senior's pr today which I don't think he typed a single line of code himself on.
I know it seems eerie how easy it is to code and output a solution now, but this is still more a tool than your replacement. In an industry that is constantly evolving, it is the ones who can adapt that will always be most successful. I love coding by hand, and I encourage that you do as much as your job will allow. But avoiding the obvious shift in how we develop is self-sabotage. Find a balance where you can be satisfied of taking ownership of the code you submit while an llm merely wrote what you asked of it.
Often times, if i am familiar enough with the context, I find that I can write some code faster than an llm. I think experience will now include knowing what tasks are better to leave up to an llm vs the that are better left to a human.
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 4d ago
Sorry, but no. No one is writing code anymore. I barely know what these framework and library subreddits are for anymore. It’s sad. I’ve been a dev for 12 years now. The joy of coding only exists purely as a hobby like doing a soduku puzzle. If you’re an entrepreneur though, theres never been a better time to start a software business on your own. Developers still have an edge over non coders and you can build faster than ever.
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u/1eJxCdJ4wgBjGE 4d ago
theres never been a worse time to start a software business, people now do bespoke AI generated solutions themselves. The hard part of a business was never writing the software
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 4d ago
This is what everyone thought, but no one wants to build and maintain their own internal solutions. Companies aren’t doing this en masse.
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u/1eJxCdJ4wgBjGE 3d ago
imo we are still in the phase where lots of people and companies are trying to do it. I agree with the thought but in my circle we aren't quite there yet (realizing that managing internal solutions long term sucks)
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 3d ago
Sure, some companies are trying to do it, but most are not. And the software they're willing to try to replace is primarily the really expensive Enterprise software. If your software costs a company less than $1K a month, that's really not on the chopping block for them. It would cost way more to build their own.
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u/Ancient-Range3442 4d ago
Absolute worst time to start a software business. Impossible to get traction.
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u/DasMerowinger 4d ago
Not trying to sound contrarian for the sake of it but I disagree. I think now IS the best time to build a software business, particularly if you're an experienced developer. You will get traction if you build somthing that truly solves a burning problem - surprise, surprise! AI hasn't taken that away. If you build just another calendar app or project management tool, then you're not going to get any traction. But if you have a serious idea, you can get to market faster and test your assumptions faster than before and that's a bigger advantage that some people don't realize.
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u/cocotheape 4d ago
Do you get traction before you get copied, though? It's also much easier to take an idea and build a copycat application now.
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u/DasMerowinger 4d ago
To be fair, you were always prone to copycats before the proliferation of coding assistants. It's on you to make sure you have moats which are hard to replicate. Your tech is no longer that moat!
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 3d ago
Traction has always been the hardest part. AI doesn't change that for better or worse. The reason I say it's the best time to start a software business is because it's far easier now to work on ideas part-time. I've always been one to try building my own SaaS products on the side of my full time job, but it's always been extremely difficult to make progress on nights and weekends. I actually did end up building a pretty financially successful SaaS pre-AI several years ago. But now with kids, that would be very difficult to do part-time again.
I've recently started building another SaaS 3 months ago, and it's insane how much progress I've made working part time. It's a big project and would have taken me over a year without AI. I'm a skilled developer, it's not that I'm bad at coding. It's just that coding takes a lot of time, especially when you're also the UI/UX designer. The speed at which I can revise and re-iterate is amazing.
The downside of course is that all developers can build just as quickly. But again, the coding has never been the hard part of building a business. It's the business part that's hard. AI doesn't change that. AI is good at black and white things like coding. It's not good at creative things like positioning and marketing.
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u/nateberkopec 4d ago
I don't particularly advertise my services as being AI-forward, but 99% of my clients in the last 2 years code with LLMs.
The only one that didn't was AO3, which is a fanfiction nonprofit, so I can understand the hostility.
As far as I can tell the only people writing code without LLMs are opensourcers or a very small minority of small companies who can afford not to. I would love to hear about workplaces of >10 employees that don't use AI or have banned it, because I do not know of a single one.
I think your take on what "coding with LLMs" means is also a little outdated and reflective of a "vibe coding" understanding that was the state of the art like 2 years ago. We've moved on from that, and I think we know how to use these tools more responsibly in ways that create quality. I absolutely think the majority of people are slopcannoning, as you observe, but this is not the necessary outcome of these tools.
I don't think anybody has to enjoy a particular way of working. LLM-assisted coding is vastly different than pre-LLM. You don't have to like it. Unfortunately if you want a job, for pay, in software, you either have to find the 1% of companies that agree with you, or use LLMs.
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u/dougc84 4d ago edited 4d ago
And that's the thing. I enjoy writing code. I don't enjoy writing specs or prompts. I came into this line of work to solve problems, not tell a computer to solve it for me. And I'm too old to pivot from being only burned out on writing code, to being both burned out and hating what I do. I'm gonna go build some shit out of wood instead.
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u/chaelcodes 4d ago
I find AI-assisted development enjoyable. I do the parts I enjoy. Hop into the code to modify the method how I want it, and tell it to update the specs to match. I'll tell it to rename a method or extract a few lines into a helper, and it remembers every caller and updates them. I never have to think about Sorbet, ever. I'll have it write the PR and commit messages. Often I'll have a conversation about what I want it to look like, and then I'll have it write my tasks and stories, and then I'll edit them. I get everything set up locally and have it collect screenshots for my PR and upload them for me. I find the review feedback helpful sometimes.
It doesn't have to look like vibe-coding or running 6 sessions concurrently. Pick the parts that annoy you and have it do them, and do the parts that feel good yourself.
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u/not_sure_if_crazy_or 4d ago
It could also just be the project and the type of features you're being asked to build.
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u/RoboErectus 4d ago
> I came into this line of work to solve problems, not tell a computer to solve it for me...
I can't imagine how you've twisted yourself into such a pretzel that you typed this. This has got to be one of the regarded things of all time.
You remind my of my 7th grade teacher back in the 80's who told me that I wouldn't be carrying a calculator with me wherever I went.
My first hello world was in 1993 and the last LoC I will have ever written was this year. I will not write one LoC in 2027 or beyond.
This year has made the gulf between 100x engineers and 0.5x engineers seem even more vast.
There was never any value in writing code. Not really. The value was always in solving problems.
You have said, "i don't understand how this new problem solving tool works and therefore I don't like it."
You going to tell Linus he's wrong? See how that goes for you.
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u/not_sure_if_crazy_or 4d ago
Since it sounds like we're in the same role, I wanted to add -- I'm still applying an equal amount of mental elbow grease in my work, it's just not syntactical. It's strategical design. Which to me, is just as enjoyable as my early days when syntax and design was relatively new.
If, however, I was just blasting out features ( that I had not spent decades already designing and appreciating ) I would be disheartened. I would be missing the forest for the road. But I've seen the forest plenty of times at this point? So I find LLM's to be very thought-provoking and enjoyable in my work, removing the tedium and allowing me to reach a bleeding edge faster.
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u/chaelcodes 4d ago
My current company gives people the option of using AI and encourages it, but doesn't mandate AI usage. I suspect there are more of those than companies that ban its usage.
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u/pezholio 4d ago edited 4d ago
I know plenty of people who don’t. My usage is pretty light, limited to asking questions when. I get stuck, generating boiler plate code etc. I work in the UK public sector, and luckily, we’re not infected by the brain worms that seem to affect large corporations, particularly in the US.
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u/davidslv 4d ago
This is an interesting discussion in many levels, I’m in favour of using AI to my own advantage and therefore the business advantage. I’m not in favour of having the technology available today and seeing people - key word here is people, having access to the tools and still having subpar processes.
Ultimately we, software engineers, are not hired for beautiful code, we are hired to automate and find problems and produce solutions, moving the business forward where possible with our ability to understand the business needs and be able to solve them programmatically.
If you think the job is to do code, I’m sorry, we disagree.
I’ve been using AI heavily, most of you know that, I’m not hiding it. I’m using it at work and certainly am using on side projects, perhaps sometimes too much, it enables me to try ideas, learn concepts and ultimately it allows me to move the business forward at a pace I don’t think was ever possible, certainly not with a team of 4-5 people.
With the help of AI, I have been able to cut down a deployment pipeline from 1h30min to 31min, nothing extraordinary that someone with the knowledge wouldn’t have done, for me what’s shocking was that the team already had the tools available to help them do it and they never questioned that it could be better - now there’s no reason to download and install Ruby on every single deploy but that alone was happening and that alone was about 20min of the deploy time. I never had used the service they use to do the deployment but with AI help I was able to get to the results I wanted - kinda (I wanted 20min deploy but have to settle for 31min)
We have done big projects recently with 1 person, that I know 2 or 3 years ago would have taken 6 months for a team of 5 engineers, in weeks, sometimes it takes 1 month, but 1 month of 1 person with AI assistance vs 5 people in 6 months.
Honestly I still do code reviews, and I do my whole planning and sequencing with Claude, we also have Codex, which we added also to review PRs and tell you if something was overlooked, without bombarding the engineer with million comments.
And with AI we still make mistakes, even when we have guardrails, rubocop, cucumber features, testing, we got some workflows and we try to adhere to the conventions as much as possible.
One of my pet peeves is flaky test suite, I can’t think of anything worse than finishing a feature, run your stuff locally and send it to CI to discover that something elsewhere turned CI red. In the past people would just rerun CI and ignore it - wasn’t me, not my problem.
It is your problem, you just got slowed down and who know so if it will turn green just because you rerun. I use AI to solve those, most are just flaky because of time manipulation, this used to be a pain to fix, nobody would touch them - I know from previous experiences elsewhere, just put it under the rug and let it accumulate then we can call it tech debt when it’s unbearable. You don’t need to do that anymore, AI can do that faster and better, it’s mechanical.
You can also now build your own custom tools for repeated work with AI, we have, it wastes less tokens and avoids the LLM from producing 50 shades of gray.
One thing I’ve been working recently, as we started doing more Frontend work was to create a design system with components, this is to solve that when I do the same button it is actually the same component, same code, not something the LLM decided randomly because it was Friday 8:46 and so the button should look like a pineapple instead of an apple. - joke aside, this has happen, we move fast, we have 3 people doing a new feature, person A ships one version and person B ships another version, they didn’t touch the same code, but they introduced two ways of doing forms, different colours different html structures, perhaps one even added a stimulusJS.
Using AI can feel productive, it can also derail a whole team using it wrong, it can also create what has been coined as Comprehension Debt, when it moves things so fast that we humans can no longer make sense of what was true in the system and what is does currently.
The tools are there, we need to adapt and stop fighting each other on Reddit or elsewhere because person A or B are using it, I honestly think we could learn so much more and improve ourselves, I do think we are all using it in different ways and very few people are actually sharing what works and doesn’t. I have many situations where it didn’t work, or we thought it work and actually didn’t, and many where it worked and honestly helped the business and my peers.
My take with AI, process should come first, if not possible upfront, than that process should be coming in as soon as it is possible so to avoid confusion, indirection, duplication of efforts and so on.
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u/TheFaithfulStone 4d ago
Not really, no. Maybe in air-gapped applications or similar exotic situations. Nobody is hand-crafting Rails CRUD apps anymore.
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u/jaypeejay 4d ago
We use Claude, but we’re pretty good about reviews. To my surprise we haven’t had a noticeable increase in incidents since the ai revolution.
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u/RubyKong 4d ago
For well established routines on a well worn path - there are huge productivity gains. Search costs have plummetted. But for anything even remotely novel - or complex - LLMs do not help all that much. They help. But not all that much. Just my experience.
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u/benzado 4d ago
Not just your experience. Look up _Ironies of Automation_, Lisanne Bainbridge, 1984. It’s a short paper. Automation always takes care of the well worn paths, then asks humans to step in when things get too complicated — except the humans have minimal context and less practice, making the complicated scenarios even more difficult than before.
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u/RubyKong 3d ago
But I cannot see AI as writing a genuinely useful tools - e.g. like Esbuild for example. am I missing something?
Everyone is losing their minds over how great "AI" is for writing code - as if keystrokes were the limiting factor to producing great software. Yes, some routlines appear in my IDE without cutting and pasting. But half the time it is slop, and I have to clear it out. It's easier frankly just to write it myself.
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u/ZipBoxer 3d ago
I hope that's correct because that's amazing news for those of us that have the skillset to solve the complicated scenarios, especially now that more code than ever before is being written.
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u/brecrest 10h ago
Sure, search costs have plummeted, but have you see the quality of search? At some point you can't improve value by reducing quality to gain greater efficiency any further because quality is at zero - search cannot be far off that point.
More generally, product quality seems to have taken a sharp hit in companies that were early adopters of AI across the board. Bugs are multiplying and becoming more severe, the same operations are taking (OOM) longer, the return quality of whatever operation the computer is doing is plummeting. Talking to devs from those companies (think search, OS etc) they all tell the same story - top to bottom everyone just cares less and less every day - it's literally easier to pass review by pushing even more lines to make proper review harder than it is to audit what you're generating.
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u/Worldly_Studio_916 4d ago
I went bankrupt because of this. Yet people don't see the downside of their actions because egoisme and stupidity. As predicted by the idiocracy 2005 or 2006. Great movie, shows the future of our world
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u/AshTeriyaki 4d ago
The truth is, any company mindlessly accelerating without review (which I do think are the loud minority) will have significant tech debt issues that’ll become unavoidable.
Ask any senior technical mind or spend any amount of time actually scrutinising the way in which LLMs produce code and you realise the strict need for oversight. Those saying it’s a faster way of writing code are correct. LLMs cannot maintain or architect anything, just carbon copies of fractions of examples in the training data.
Luckily I don’t need to code professionally anymore. It can be fun using LLMs to move faster but I felt it all eroding my curiosity and enticing me to just offset all of my thinking. It was a gross feeling and for months I’ve felt the hangover creatively. I spent a few months cold turkey and now I do what I was doing with it initially, only allowing it to generate boilerplate occasionally and very occasionally asking a question. I only open one once or twice a month now.
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u/uhs-robert 4d ago
It depends on the situation and the context for me. There are some really creative ways to use AI even if you don't use it during the day while you're doing your coding. But... what about when you're away from the computer? Your work just stops? That seems like a waste of time to me.
So, my workflow has changed a bit this year as AI has continued to improve. I still use NeoVim and still code a lot by hand by hand. I also consult with an LLM to brainstorm ideas and work through problems. Sometimes it is faster to tell the AI to implement a solution or to do something really quick (faster than I can type) but I remain the designer and I babysit all changes so I am close to the code. I think of the AI like my employees, I delegate tasks where appropriate. An analogy would be that I used to be the head chef who prepared and cooked all the food by myself but now I involve the rest of the staff. But what happens when my shift ends?
I recently became a father. I have to get up from my desk multiple times a day to take care of my baby and I often work less hours because of it. For my business, I needed something that could implement my ideas when I'm away from my computer. So I built an automation system (with AI assistance) that completes "tasks" for me overnight or whenever I turn it on. It works by solving GitHub issues that I have written and creates PR's for me to review with multiple layers of review from different models. This lets me live my life more and allows me to do really wacky things like creating a GitHub issue while in the bath using speech to text and having a PR born from it.
The temptation can be to just accept the changes after you see/test that it works but if you enjoy programming then why not own the code and tweak it the way you like it? It's fun.
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u/NoForm5443 3d ago
I work for a company, and seldom (never?) directly use LLMs for coding, although tons of people on the org do.
We're now going through the 'tokens now cost money, don't use them' :)
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u/ajithkgshk 3d ago
To be honest, I still try to write rails code and do small fixes myself rather than pawning it off to AI. But when it comes to large features, I goto AI. Sometimes the manual fix is far easier than prompting and reprompting the AI
I still do manual review of the teams work without AI.
We try to incorporate AI as a tool that implements our vision rather than a magic box.
I would like to point out that the actual coding part of my team's job is mostly replaced by actual engineering. Finding the right architecture, do analysis, finalise design and then implment with AI. Once AI is done they are instructed to read the code and understand it and make sure it follows design.
We make sure they are doing it, by asking questions to them during review and them being able to answer the question or justify the design decisions.
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u/petipied 2d ago
Sourcehut hosts git repos. They banned anything coming from AI. So I guess if they are still in business, it's because some devs still code with their own hands. https://sourcehut.org/blog/2026-08-27-tos-changes-and-llms/ "The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to produce or assist with the production of source code, assets, tickets, emails, and so on, will no longer be permitted on SourceHut"
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u/livando1 4d ago
Tell your previous clients you can do nX more in less time. Then they’ll call back.
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u/themaincop 4d ago
Fuck no. Don't throw your career away over some bullshit, learn to use the new tools.
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u/pezholio 4d ago
“Some bullshit”? Like understanding the context of what you’re doing, feeling connected to your work, actually learning stuff?
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u/ZipBoxer 3d ago
You still have to do all of that with AI code. If you're not, then I understand why you think it gives subpar results.
Every Principal Engineer I've ever worked with decided architecture and reviewed code, but rarely if ever wrote it.
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u/FreedToRoam 4d ago
I code without llms. Production solutions. Usually done weeks before others.
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u/easyjo 4d ago
> Usually done weeks before others.
what kind of things are you shipping weeks before something with LLM assistance?•
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u/FreedToRoam 4d ago
So, obviously I won’t be divulging details here but in general these projects involve our company and several other vendor companies … i.e. and rounds of QA
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u/easyjo 4d ago
> in general these projects involve our company and several other vendor companies … i.e. and rounds of QA
Sounds like any major project though, size of project scope and integrations with vendors doesn't mean LLM isn't beneficial. 90% of fortune 500 companies using github have enabled copilot..
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u/RowanTheKiwi 4d ago
Okay so we are on the other side of the fence. We own our back end and had some mobile devs who we tried to drag kicking and screaming into using LLMs. They wouldn’t. Ultimately we had to finish their contracts- our speed increased by multiples, and our quality increased. The reality is being a contractor not only is it writing the code but it’s the communication overhead which drastically reduces - instead of spending time writing up trello, contractor builds it, then you test, then you find miscommunications or errors, rinse repeat etc, you’re orders of magnitude faster just working with an LLM directly.
I’m the / lead rails dev. What would have taken us 2-3 weeks to get something built with contractors we’re building, and iterating on in days.
Our latest releases have better test coverage, better UX, more features and done faster.
By no measure is life worse. Heck our Claude bills could be 10-20x what they are now and the ROI would still be better.
I think that’s the brutal and inescapable reality now
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u/mancunian101 4d ago
Yep, I do a lot in AI but I still write a lot of code too.
I think the costs are going to start driving down the number of companies that a going full on AI native.
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u/lunaticman 4d ago
I'm barely coding these days (mostly removing), but I read everything closely and have multiple rounds of reviews before merging anything (if there are humans, I'd be happy to hear from them).
Still a lot of companies, that do a lot of manual things ;-)
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u/montdidier 4d ago
Yes all the time, but also use LLMs for things that they are really better suited to.
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u/letmetellubuddy 4d ago
directly committing code to main (or sometimes a hotfix branch) without review, headed up with barely legible comments, in formatting standards we never adhered to.
It sounds like those customers may return once the big ball of mud becomes difficult to work with 😅
Personally I like AI for first pass code reviews and for implementing small, focused things like a specific unit test or a UI component. It's important to not delegate decision making to LLMs! And the rest of the development process needs to be maintained: planning, code reviews, QA, etc.
I've been testing agent driven (vibe driven?) development for a personal project, and have found I need to be more process driven for it to be effective where in the past I might skip making branches, doing code reviews etc in those personal projects.
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u/johnnobro 4d ago
It’s not an exclusive OR. I pride myself in maintaining a healthy, well-architectured codebase. Yet I also use Claude Code extensively. It’s just another tool in the toolbox. For our main customer-facing app and backend, i set the bar of quality high so review all the PRs it produces. But beside code generation , it’s incredibly helpful in figuring out edge cases and diagnosing bugs and performance issues. For internal tooling, I have much less problems vibe coding something quickly. The acceleration there is very useful.
I think companies that fire their senior developers to replace them with AI will very soon realise their mistake. Tons of pre-AI codebases were absolute slop. But now they can be created 1000x faster.
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u/benabus 4d ago
I don't really code much anymore, but that's because I'm in management now... But from watching my team and figuring out how to manage developers in the current world, I don't think writing code will be nearly as important going forward. You'll still need to be able to read it and think big picture about how to build software, but you won't need to actually code anything pretty soon.
That's for work, though. If you actually enjoy writing code, which I completely understand, you can always use it for personal projects and hobbies.
There are still a ton of people out there that do woodworking with chisels and hand saws instead of power tools just because they think it's fun. Nothing wrong with that. But to compete and make money, a lot of times, you have to use the tools that the industry uses.
There will always be people who write code, just maybe not so much in industry. But being able to chisel dovetails, understanding grain direction, and why you use nails versus screws will only improve your furniture even when you do use a table saw or CNC machine.
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u/Absentrando 4d ago
Yes, my previous company did not allow the use of LLMs. Some industries prioritize security and stability over efficiency. I like to work with LLMs and prefer companies that are more open to adopting new technologies
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u/Gazelle-Unfair 3d ago
I cannot understand it. Clients who used to care about quality and accuracy now don't appear to care at all as long as new features are pumped out at speed. They are basing their businesses on these systems and when they go wrong they will suffer.... or maybe they will cope, and not realise that they should never have been in that situation in the first place.
However, there is no reason why an LLM couldn't be guided like any other Dev to produce code better.
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u/AnimatorAdmirable 3d ago
The honest truth is I haven't coded without the use off LLMs in about 2 year. During that time we've scaled our business at a rate we would not been able to without LLMs. We've encountered a lot of regulatory challenges that would have sunk us years ago. LLMs got us through that as well.
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u/PikachuEXE 3d ago
Zero AI on coding
Not one line can escape my attention coz I atmost copy and paste and edit and put my thought into it
Generated (not boilerplate type) just wont mske me want to check every line (just like any large PR
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u/pyrrhicvictorylap 3d ago
If it’s a pre-existing codebase, yes, I try to keep my mental model somewhat fresh. If it’s greenfield 100% AI… no promises.
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u/Lautaengalia 3d ago
I'm not even allowed to. The company I work at said pretty clearly that we are supposed to use our MCP for everything and always; if it's incapable to do something, we are not supposed to jump in and do it manually, instead, we are to fix the AI by adding skills. I do code manually in my free time because it's entertaining: I've been working on a gem https://github.com/lautarograc/acts_as_calculator for which I didn't even use autocomplete, I only used AI at the end to do some code review, documentation, to build a git history and etcetera.
I'm seeing a very uncertain future in software engineering. It's not going to disappear in any way, but it's most likely going to leave a lot of people out (and open up to a lot of new people). I'm a fairly pragmatic person, and for a number of reasons I try to think I'm not part of the ones in danger; I'm still young (24yo) and yet I've managed to get significant experience working in tech, I don't earn nor spend a lot so I'm still flexible with my rates (imagining OP for example charging something like +80$ an hour, it can be very damaging if the market forces your rate down to, say, 40 bucks an hour), I tend to give a good image in interviews. But at the same time, I don't want to go through a career of "I was laid off/terminated and had to spend 5 months looking for a new job". So, I took the ultimate decision; I enrolled for a degree in Industrial engineering. I don't think I'll ever leave tech voluntarily, but in the medium term I may have no choice, so I prefer to have an alternative before having to do Uber Eats or learning a trade.
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u/mrcey 2d ago
I feel like we have total control over our code and there aren’t any black box areas from using Claude. We use it a lot, from planning, implementation, review. But it all has a human hand and devs have 10+ years experience each.
We make a lot of architecture corrections and have spent a lot of time refining skills. It’s not perfect but definitely increases production. But we also oversee all planning and review (and need to be able to defend every line of code during peer review.) Claude is great at implementation *if a good plan was drafted. I think of it as an intern that’s a genius at research and implementation but makes stupid decisions due to lack of experience.
Left to its own devices it for sure makes poor architecture decisions, DRY is out the window, and comments are hilariously verbose. It doesn’t matter how good the skills are, AI can’t compete with someone who has long term project knowledge on architecture and task planning. Who knows given how quickly AI is improving, maybe at some point it can go back and fix its own slop. But for now it needs a lot of oversight and direction.
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u/dougc84 2d ago
That's what I don't get. Why would I spend time and money setting up a Mac Mini with an LLM, or time and money setting up Claude and all the tokens it would cost, to be able to bill less, and still have to correct work?
I'd rather just do it right the first time. It's not hard.
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u/ltoloxa 2d ago edited 2d ago
IMO the devs who rely on LLMs are the ones who don’t actually have an interest in programming and just got into it for the money. I enjoy programming and have no interest in using an LLM to write code for me.
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u/dougc84 2d ago
Same. I’ve always enjoyed writing code. I remember figuring out VB3 back in the 90’s to write AOL proggies. It’s always been an interest. I went with it as a career because I was good at it and found enjoyment building and crafting.
I never did this job for money, and I’ve usually negotiated less with my clients to have more time off.
I get it. People need money to live - we all do - but some people don’t care about how they get there.
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u/mrcey 2d ago
It basically replaces pretty much all junior dev and a lot of mid level dev work in the chain. For better or worse. That’s what I worry about. Who will manage architecture and perform senior, staff level oversight down the road if the lowest level human is currently a senior. We still *do hand code. But for some big tasks Claude can take a 2 week project down to 2 days and the end result is very solid.
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u/ltoloxa 2d ago
The problem is the same attitude that hiring managers have adopted over the past 15 or so years, where they want to hire the perfect fit who can “hit the ground running”. They have long since completely abandoned the idea of training their employees, and they now think LLMs are going to eliminate the need for junior and intermediate programmers altogether, and dream of the day when they will have no employees at all.
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u/dougc84 1d ago
I've provided my services to a company for over a decade that has constantly refused to hire additional developers. The two we did trial - both expected an onboarding process and neither got it. I offered to do it, but was told the other dev would handle it. I'm the one with a degree in business, but ok.
Guess how long they lasted?
And that's what we're gonna see. There's gonna be one overworked, underpaid senior IT professional doing it all, while not actually doing any IT work - they'll be one glorified help desk individual that happens to know how to program Claude (not Rails or JS or whatever). Companies would rather pay one person and work them hard than a group of people that have a team mission in mind. The "let's create" mindset has gone out in the window in lieu of "let's do as much as we can in as little time as possible, bugs be damned."
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u/softmixt 1d ago
At my company, a large company in Europe, we make heavy use of AI, but we don’t accept code if it isn’t correct. We also have skills in place for coding standards, best practices, etc.
And yes, sometimes we write code just to train the AI on how to do it next time. AI-generated code is closely reviewed and fully understood by all my teammates.
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u/barce 1d ago
I think this is a case of follow the money. I've consulted at companies where managers are incentized to push token usage, and slop code is everywhere. Other companies that support coders judgements have an interesting mix of usage. I felt companies like this had better code. Some companies actually have an anti-AI policy. That's simply because the domain they work in and the problem are known entities where they don't want innovation, e.g. beer making. So saying they're anti-AI is a selling point. In all 3 organizations, I've seen rails used.
I think best practices are still being sorted out, so at the end of the day do what you can to solve the problem (yours or your clients'), and if that involves using LLMs, great. And if not, that's good, too.
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u/Super_Broccoli_9659 13h ago
Sure, nothing has changed regarding software development lately, just that within 25 yrs, I have moved from C/C++ via C# to Js/Ts and Clojure. Sometimes I do let LLMs write some unit tests, but that's about it.
The only astonishing part is the bs talk as if it were inevitable to use LLMs. They have been productively around for maybe 3 years, so I don't know what all these "prompt engineers" (babysitters) were doing before?
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u/Chemical-Being-6416 4d ago
Part of this profession is keeping up with new technology. Code is just a means of providing a solution
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u/dasflikko 4d ago
I've been there man, I was pushing back against using LLMs for large features for a while, but this year I finally sat down, installed some CLI tools, and haven't looked back. The new leveling up journey I've gone through over the last few months has been some of the most rewarding of my entire career though, and I didn't expect that at all.
For the last few years I was using stuff like the ChatGPT web app for small stuff, and basic rubber ducking for larger work, but this year I finally went all in on Claude's CLI tooling and it's been an absolute game changer.
I sometimes miss being deep in the weeds with the code I'm writing, but I'm also enjoying higher level system design a lot more than I ever have. Now, I treat my agents as co-workers that I'm collaborating with on solving complex problems, having full design discussions on trade-offs, pitfalls, etc and it's exhilarating work to be able to do this daily now.
Learning different techniques to add guardrails and implementing new patterns in my applications that help LLMs continue to create really solid, maintainable and tested code that can be understood by humans has also been a big part of my new leveling up journey.
I feel like a few months ago I started with a group of Jr Developers taken under my wing, and I've helped them grow into super solid Senior Developers with huge amounts of domain expertise in a few months, which again, I didn't expect, but it has been extremely rewarding.
I hope you can find some of the joy you used to have in building software again homie, I was there in your shoes a short while ago and have been pleasantly surprised to find new types of joy with the tools we have today.
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u/ctrlshiftba 4d ago
no. maybe if your a really late adopter. im sure their are people who dont have smart phones, but for the most part it doesnt make sense not to.
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u/pigoz 4d ago
I don't write code anymore.
I read most of the code that goes in the app I work on at work (CRM for real estate agents). Sometimes I skim over CSS, but on the logic parts I spend a lot of time reviewing critically thinking about them.
I think about the architecture a LOT and steer the agents with very precise feedback, to the point of "move this method here, use this OOP design pattern instead" and the quality is better than when I was hand coding it because of it.
I'm a solo dev and it's been incredible the productivity AI unlocked.
I can't imagine working with other people though. I'm pretty sure they would have lower standards and commit slop.
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u/respectful_stimulus 4d ago
AI writes better code than humans at 1000x velocity. We are not competing with AI but with other people using AI. Own your harness, setup subagents to review code, push back, and run tests etc.
As for making money, we can now sell outcomes more cheaply. There will always be non-technical people that need our help. Yes the market is saturated but trust and accountability matter more today and we are selling that.
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u/wavepig 4d ago
Everyone I know is AI assisted at this point in some way, some more than others. At the minimum we’re talking Claude Code or similar tooling, at most we’re talking dozen+ agents cooperating with each other with the engineer giving instructions to the manager agent.
This is strongly the direction the industry is going in, and engineers who do not learn these skills will be unemployable soon (barring those with hyper specialisations). However, these tools are not difficult to learn, and the idea that “anyone” can use them to build an app is wrong IMO. They are still technical tools which require a technical skill set to use effectively. The tools are most effective when they are constrained and are given clear instructions by the operator. A final thought - if you think your job has been to write code, then you are mistaken. It has never been about the code itself - the code is just a means to an end. This, but unironically
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u/herir 4d ago
Personally coding without AI would feel like coding without GitHub or without tests. You’re missing something. But there are parts of the flow that needs to be manual : before you start developing (asking the right questions , does this feature make sense etc), reviewing the code (important to read every line from an LLM and understand what it does), QA, post deployement review etc
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u/dougc84 4d ago
So you’ve been writing code for less than 5 years then?
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u/BotSonOfClaude 4d ago
10 YOE dev, I can say that I do not write code anymore. I only go in the code and change things manually when I know it would take too much time to explain to the clanker what needs to be changed. But other than that I don't write code anymore. And this is on a 260k+ LOC .NET project.
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u/TheAtlasMonkey 4d ago
A lot of companies still not use LLM.
- Their codebase is so bad that LLM don't understand it. So they never get accepted
- They work on sensitive data
- They do fraud that LLM will refuse to help with (Those exist and there are a lot)
- They invented complexity and LLM will auto unwind it (so they don't like it)
And a lot of other reasons.... only a small fraction use AI . The adoption is still behind.
But once adoption reach a peak and subscription stop being a reality... That then you discover that a lot of people were and are just LLM proxies.
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u/EmmetDangervest 4d ago
I think it highly depends on the stack. Rails was never about perfect code (e.g., Rails rejected decades of OOP best practices) but about quick time-to-market. Generally, startups want to ship shit CRUDs fast.
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u/gbrennon 3d ago
somehow yes and not.
you should do with your hands and fingers? yes.
models write bad bad bad code. but u can add rules and skills to improve code quality that is written
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u/bagusvdr 3d ago
Well even DHH no longer write the code again. As his latest pod with Alex, he said his job now is ideation, architecting snd reviewing.
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u/honeybadgerceo 1d ago
That would be retarded. Even if you hard code after using LLM for precoding. Not using llms is beta behavior. No way even the fastest and greatest coder Can and Will 10x his out with with it.
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u/clearlynotmee 1d ago
What business are you in? I don't understand the relationship between AI and your clients ghosting you. Are you a developer? a software house? a saas?
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u/qmamai 4d ago
Writing code manually is like crafting clothes or shoes manually. Technically you can do it, yes. But it's not a business, it's a hobby. If you want to make money then the only way is automation. If you produce low quality code with AI, well, this is your problem. Configure your harnesses, automated reviews, guardrails, CI, etc etc.
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u/soforchunet 3d ago
No. You’re done, adapt or go do something else. Why would any company pay you tens of thousands when AI can do it on 15 mins. Delusional.
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u/lanascrub 4d ago
I do and will continue to unless forced into it. It's kinda fun being the only one left at my workplace who can explain how any of our code works though no one else cares so ¯_(ツ)_/¯