Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#1

Post by JFerreol_J » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 12:13 PM UTC

I’ve been chatting with a few dev friends and colleagues about Cursor, copilot etc

and what surprised me was that their biggest feeling about this was neither excitement nor concern, but sadness.

Sadness in the sense that they are afraid the “fun” parts of their job (thinking, building, solving) might slowly be taken away. That they’ll become bored reviewers.

It got me wondering if other devs feel this way?

Are we really on a path where engineering turns into a supervisory job? or is it just temporary until it shifts into something radically different?

Curious to hear from dev folks here !

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#2

Post by tomsayervin » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 12:25 PM UTC

Reading someone else code is the worst thing, so I tend to agree

This being said it does get some uninteresting things done very fast so I’m not entirely sad

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#3

Post by amichail » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 12:26 PM UTC

I think indie devs love it since they can focus on manually coding the fun parts and leave the AI to code the boring parts.

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#4

Post by JFerreol_J » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

amichail wrote: post #3

I think indie devs love it since they can focus on manually coding the fun parts and leave the AI to code the boring parts.

Agreed on this, but do you think this split that we human are happy with can last forever?

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#5

Post by JFerreol_J » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 12:30 PM UTC

tomsayervin wrote: post #2

Reading someone else code is the worst thing, so I tend to agree This being said it does get some uninteresting things done very fast so I’m not entirely sad

Agreed it's not black or white. Do you feel 100% more productive than before though?

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#6

Post by notorious_pgb » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 12:32 PM UTC

tl;dr: Yes; at least some of us are. I deeply am.

I wouldn't normally post a link to my blog in the comments of another thread -- I'm really not trying to shamelessly plug here -- it's just _incredibly_ relevant, and I've already poured my heart and soul into writing out exactly what I think here, so I think it's germane:

https://prettygoodblog.com/p/the-big-secret-that-big-ai-does...

> I cannot write the necessary philosophical screed this deserves, but: there are things which make us human and in our individual humanity unique; these things are art and skill of any kind; and it so greatly behooves one to strive to master art in any and all its forms.

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#7

Post by ahdanggit » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 12:35 PM UTC

I'm tired of getting thrown AI slop, but I think its a people problem not an AI problem.

"Hey, I made this doc, can you just make sure it looks OK, maybe add a couple things to it?" - Only to find out its completely useless AI slop and barely any details are correct and everything essential is absent.

Same situation with:

- "Hey, can you take a look at this script to see if it's ok"?

- "Hey, do you know why this code isn't working?"

- "Hey, I created that diagram..."

slop, slop, slop. Low effort people will put in low effort with these tools. I bet there's lots of people I work with that use AI and I don't know because they're high effort people.

And in all cases I've fixed the problems and helped them but I've realized two things and stop doing that recently:

When these folks use AI to generate artifacts, they take even less accountability "I dunno, that's just what the AI did..."

The also have no interest in learning. They get AI to do the thing they don't want to learn, then when that fails just try to get someone else to do it for them.

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#8

Post by physicsguy » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 12:38 PM UTC

I find it a mix of really frustrating (mostly it not doing what I want it to do, making random changes alongside perfectly good changes of the type I want) and amazing when it works. With that said, I think it works best in an unconstrained environment, and when you start adding constraints (don't do it via this method, don't use this library or import any new dependencies) you find much less good results. This inevitably means it works better at the start of projects rather than coming on to something that's been around for a while and has it's own patterns.

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#9

Post by wryoak » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 12:42 PM UTC

tomsayervin wrote: post #2

Reading someone else code is the worst thing, so I tend to agree This being said it does get some uninteresting things done very fast so I’m not entirely sad

Recently I considered trying to find a position for myself just reviewing code part time because I find that the funnest part. I find writing (significant amounts of) code quite tedious.

Hearing people say that code review/reading is the boring part makes me think maybe I should actually pursue this

Re: Ask HN: Are developers sad about AI writing more of their code?

#10

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 1:34 PM UTC

It looks like LLMs will automate a lot of what I enjoy doing myself and increase the amount of work of the sort I dislike (such as reviewing code I didn't recently write).

So my worst-case scenario with LLMs in terms of my job is that they will make my job hard to tolerate. If that actually happens, I'll leave the field entirely as there would be no room for the likes of myself in it anymore.