>Every developer I know uses AI for coding now.
And for blogging too, it seems.
What AI coding costs you
61–70 of 206 posts
Re: What AI coding costs you
#62While I agree with a lot of what this post says, to play devil's advocate for a moment, It's natural that skills we no longer need should be phased out. We should take this as an opportunity to figure out what new skills we need now.
If you're working on a personal project or trying to learn something new, by all means write the code yourself. That's still the best way to do it. But your life should not necessarily revolve around work, and sometimes there is nothing wrong wih caring more about the end product than the process.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#63> Every developer I know uses AI for coding now.
Currently I am working on a code base that is rapidly evolving for customer fit and is hoped to be around for a while. Going over recent decisions about what abstractions to focus on and what to cut it really seems like LLM tools would have been a waste for any aspect of this work. This is not a situation where some existing process needs to be encoded, and every choice about naming and structure ends up making a big difference as changes trigger refactors.
And this piece focuses on the early adopter point of view. Sure there were problems at first, but then whatsit tool thing version whatever came out and now roses are growing out of the rocks. For a large fraction of what is done with coding that makes sense, but there should always be attention to the rough parts and the gap that forms where capabilities fall off. Even a small amount of modesty can go a long way, but the conversation keeps starting off from every developer, all development, the change is now or else, and I for one am not buying that, especially not with actual money which is what these services will be charging soon in order to pay their trillion dollar debt service.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#64[dead]
Models don't learn. They retrain them periodically, but junior engineers learn much faster and constantly improve. If you stop learning, you will only be as good as the model. I've been coding (software engineering, I guess) for close to 15 years. The models skill set is a comfortable L1 (intern), pushing L2 (junior). They are getting better, but at a snail pace compared to a human learning the same thing.
This was my biggest frustration with LLM based coding but Agent Skills have largely solved it.
While there’s a lot of room to improve them it’s a huge game changer for effectively coding harnesses.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#65So basically the same cognitive debt that accrues to engineers the moment they become managers.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#66Writing code by hand and managing the mental model of its execution and architecture is one of the few remaining joys of my day job, apart from delivering a good product people want and use and being helpful. Even the small things, the tedious chores of refactoring or scaffolding that initial bit of CRUD boilerplate are steps that matter to me. The callouses matter. The tedium matters. These moments of pain and drudg…
That’s why I laugh when people are like “oh, AI writes all the tests, it’s so much easier.” If your code is hard to test, you need to change the abstraction or the interface. Tests are the first reuse of your code, so if it’s a pain to use in tests, it’s going to be terrible to use in general.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#67This is a wonderfully balanced and accurate take. I have been looking for the right medium of using AI to assist me. Cannot agree more on the three patterns to implement and there to avoid.
If the three good patterns are adhered to, these AI tools can help us become more knowledgeable, productive.
We get to retain our cognitive abilities and the desire to pursue code development as a means to solving hard problems.
Adopting the anti-patterns, on the other hand, could lead to over-reliance on AI, anxiety when the tools go down (this happens! ), the atrophy of ability to debug and the yearning for immediate gratification and quick fixes.
Most insidiously, when code inevitably fails in production on cases the developer should have reasoned about and covered, they have no option but to toss it back to the AI tool, thereby, creating a vicious cycle of anxiety, helplessness and cognitive decay.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#68> Developers need the dopamine hit of creation. That’s not a perk, it’s what keeps good engineers engaged, learning, retained, and prevents burnout.
Are developers some kind of special creature? or must they simply learn to deal with the complexity of juggling multiple projects, like every other desk job in 2026.
Re: What AI coding costs you
#69I started my coding apprenticeship back in early 80s with a senior programmer who taught me to code in LSI-11 processor codes. I memorized the whole table of octal processor opcodes and learned how to compose them with data to write programs on PDP-11. I was able to understand what each exact 16-bit word in my program is doing. It was a great skill. But then the same guy taught me FORTRAN 83, and I suddenly understoo…
One significant difference is that all programming languages, whether machine code or python, have always been a precise language for describing the desired computation or algorithm. Working with an AI agent means specifying what you want the program to do in English, which is not precise. Unless you write English pseudocode.
(Yes, I know the compiler does wild stuff behind the curtain, but unless you're using -Ofast, the assembly is black-box-equivalent to a naive compilation)
Re: What AI coding costs you
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
uh...okay. The legend of Faust is the classic work where a person sells his soul to the devil for power/knowledge/pleasure. Goethe has Faust make a wager with the Mephistopheles: show me the good life (pleasure, power, knowledge, whatever) it will never be enough to make me stop striving, to make me want to linger. If you can do that my soul is yours. To me it reads a _lot_ like our contract with AI.
I don't have a contract with AI.
It was meant metaphorically. It gives you something, but it asks for something in return.