I have been reading a lot that 90% of their code is AI generated, companies are pushing developers to use AI as it makes them fast. But I am a little cautious of believing them. Is it true? Also sorry I didn’t find a css career subreddit so I am asking here.
We don’t write code anymore. It’s all AI generated.
The job is figuring out the design, agreeing with other teams on that design and contracts between your components, and then telling AI to do all the work. Even if you have bugs or maintenance, you just prompt AI to fix it. You can also have AI write all your tests.
You wanted an honest answer, that’s it.
Others will be cranky about it and downvote me.
How do you deal with the lack of understanding of the codebase? The company thinks they pay programmers to write code, but in my experience they actually are paying for someone to understand the whole thing. When something goes wrong in production do you just ask AI to identify the problem?
In my company, the C level is pushing hard for AI adoption so everyone is expected to use AI to write code.
Basically, yes. I am no longer programmer but more like software architect or manager. Architecting the design and reviewing AI plan and code.
Well, I’ve used AI professionally and personally. Professionally, I already know how the code works because I worked on this codebase prior to AI. However, there are always things I forget and areas I don’t know well. I’ve found AI really helps me understand the codebase because I can ask it how some piece works and it will answer very quickly without me spending a couple hours tracing code paths.
Personally, I’ve written apps without understanding the code at all. I don’t even open an IDE and look at the code since I don’t really need to. Instead, I look at the app I’m building and tell the AI what bugs I find or what features I want to add. For some aspects, it helps to have an engineering background when the AI asks your implementation preferences and asks you to decide between a few options that involve different trade offs. But, these are high-level decisions.
Professionally, our system is more complex than the apps I build personally and I also need to be really careful about not breaking backwards compatibility for any changes we make. In personal app development, I don’t have as many concerns like this.
I do suspect someday our professional systems will fully automate code changes and manage complex changes across systems on their own with concern for backwards compatibility.
Enterprise Architect here.
This is the answer. All the way.
At my job, employees haven’t written code since the asp classic days and it was garbage back then. This meant almost all new code is written by contractors, which is often garbage. And slow, expensive garbage at that.
Now, AI can at least make better code than the contractors at a fraction of the price.
It also tightens the feedback loop between getting half-assed requirements and getting the deliverables back to those who requested them so they can say how it’s not what they asked for. That process used to take months, now it takes like a day between iterations.
I honestly don’t know where people are working where they say they have tight control of first party deliverables and clear requirements with a cogent SDLC. All companies I’ve worked for have been about 1-2k employees. Are these people working in 10k large organizations where people can afford to be an expert in only one thing and camp on it their whole career?
Also, remember those debugger skills because we’ll all need it.
Yeap. As a software engineer, this is 100% my experience.
Yeah, it looks like it’s largely this, with a few exceptions