So...what does it cost you?
Goethe answered this in Faust. The answer is always: your soul.
What AI coding costs you
11–20 of 206 posts
Re: What AI coding costs you
#12It remains unclear to me why my ability to read and review code (the majority of my job for years now) will atrophy if I continue doing it while writing even less code than I was before. If my ability to write code somehow atrophies because I stop doing it, does that matter if I continue with the architecture and strategy around coding? The act of writing code by hand seems to be on a trajectory of irrelevance, so as…
> The act of writing code by hand seems to be on a trajectory of irrelevance
> so as long as I maintain my ability to reason about code (both by continuing to read it and instruct tools to write it), what’s the issue?
Re: What AI coding costs you
#13[deleted]
Re: What AI coding costs you
#14[dead]
The biggest problem is it’ll teach you bad habits. For example, Claude and gpt love to use fallbacks. They generate code that’ll get a positive result at any cost, even if it’s horrible in efficient. If you don’t have past knowledge you might just think that’s how it is. Now before someone says that junior devs make the same mistakes, yes, to some extent.
And they love to do this in spite of writing "NO FALLBACKS" etc. in your AGENTS.md.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#15Re: What AI coding costs you
#16It remains unclear to me why my ability to read and review code (the majority of my job for years now) will atrophy if I continue doing it while writing even less code than I was before. If my ability to write code somehow atrophies because I stop doing it, does that matter if I continue with the architecture and strategy around coding? The act of writing code by hand seems to be on a trajectory of irrelevance, so as…
"so as long as I maintain my ability to reason about code…what’s the issue?" It seems like that is the open question. The article suggests that people don't maintain this ability: "The AI group scored 17% lower on conceptual understanding, debugging, and code reading. The largest gap was in debugging, the exact skill you need to catch what AI gets wrong. One hour of passive AI-assisted work produced measurable skill…
Per your last paragraph, I also think we are in an awkward middle period where developers are embarrassed to admit how much code is vibes with very little review before they submit.
The embarrassment is understanding. It feels wrong, because in many ways it is wrong.
The only way I’ve had this feel any better is by using it on a non-critical internal tool. I can confidently say “I didn’t write any of this code because it’s a quality of life tool that only lives on developer manners and is not required at any point in our workflow.”
I also agree with the article that, unless computer science departments maintain some pretty strict discipline, this idea of a seniority collapse could be very real.
Will we need those senior engineers if AI keeps getting better? I don’t know. Maybe one day the AI systems are going to just be trusted to be able to untangle complex architectural problems.
If it wasn’t for leaded gasoline, rudimentary cancer treatment, and a good section of my modern video game catalog. I might be wishing I was born earlier.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#17I think it's important to be conscious of skill atrophy, but I don't see a problem with it if what you're offloading to AI isn't your area of focus. For instance, I don't necessarily want to always know what tricks the compiler is using to compile my program, even if they are pretty smart.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#18this article claims humans will review code. there will be a date where the ai code review will meet your SOC compliance policies for change management
Re: What AI coding costs you
#19Re: What AI coding costs you
#20It remains unclear to me why my ability to read and review code (the majority of my job for years now) will atrophy if I continue doing it while writing even less code than I was before. If my ability to write code somehow atrophies because I stop doing it, does that matter if I continue with the architecture and strategy around coding? The act of writing code by hand seems to be on a trajectory of irrelevance, so as…
Even before AI, I’ve witnessed at Google plenty of L6 and L7 software engineers atrophy. They stop writing code, start reviewing code, until they find that their code reviews catch fewer issues than a junior engineer’s reviews. They have become accustomed to thinking only at a high-level, and when met with low-level details they can’t tell good from bad any more. Their coding skills, both reading and writing, have atrophied.