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Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
11–20 of 125 posts
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#12Feels AI-written as well and a recycling of 1000 versions of this point.
Yes, it reads like every goddamn LinkedIn post these days.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#13I haven’t touched LLM coding beyond using TabNine originally and that has since been disabled. My LSP is good enough and I haven’t fallen behind on delivering code before deadlines. Not sure what the constant hype is about. And look I wrote all that in 1 paragraph without bullet points detailing anything over and over.
People using google translate to speak a language. Except the language contains more complexity, meaning, and compression that the writer can't describe without using more words/tokens than it would be to actually write with the same precision. They could instead use better tools to achieve equal results with higher confidence.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#14People bragging that they "dont touch code" and only "argue" with agents are reinventing the slowest possible IDE.
Obviously the agents are great at producing large chunks of code, but they often make minor and sometimes trivial mistakes which need amending.
Typing something like "in src/auth/session/token_manager.ts the refreshTokenExpiry variable should be refresh_token_expiry. update every reference and make sure nothing else changes" and waiting for the LLM to do its thing takes longer than opening the file and doing the rename yourself.
If you are describing microscopic edits in natural language you are not avoiding coding. You are coding through an extremely verbose, lossy interface with higher latency and lower precision.
EDIT: flagged?
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#15But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code? Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?
I wonder if people thought something similar when moving from writing low level machine code by hand to high-level languages. No one looks at the actual machine instructions anymore! Will our ability to understand low level instructions atrophy?
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#16I think the main issue with this approach is that your solution space eventually narrows. You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one. I’ve noticed this recently as all my side project work is being done by hand. If I do ask an LLM another question about something small it will offer solutions but doesn’t offer the solution I think…
I agree this is a problem too, but I suspect mostly for novel(ish) software problems. For me, LLMs have expanded the solution space, because, while I used to be decent with SQL in Postgres, now I'm operating on a whole new level—the LLM's ability to make sense of Postgres' full suite of options, and the performance implications of the queries, is far beyond what I could have accomplished.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#17I’ve been on and off and on the bandwagon on this.
My current verdict. When used properly, and if you actually read the code, pushback when needed and don’t get approval fatigue, and also practice hand coding here and there, you can definitely get immense productivity boosts while not compromising on quality. The issue is blindly accepting AI code, architecture, “are you sure this is prod ready?” “Ok ship it” is not going to end well. Too many times I caught the top SOTA models, 1M context, effort on max, suggest or do terrible things and say it with confidence.
TLDR if you read the code (and understand the architecture), and know when to push back. This can work amazingly well.
Otherwise you will gradually build a Rube Goldberg machine.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#18After a time the codebase feel foreign…
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#19I think the main issue with this approach is that your solution space eventually narrows. You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one. I’ve noticed this recently as all my side project work is being done by hand. If I do ask an LLM another question about something small it will offer solutions but doesn’t offer the solution I think…
> Slowly your brain just gets trained to mid thinking like an LLM
I am doing a lot of the code reviews on my team and I can see that LLMs have a hard time with OOP (or are perhaps specifically guided to avoid) and writes a lot of `private static` utility functions. A lot of duplicated small utilities that can end up becoming a maintenance nightmare should the behavior need to be normalized/fixed. String key formatting, for example. JSON serialization behavior, another very common one. At a higher level, it needs very active guidance to search for existing code and re-use interface contracts via DI consistently (we have instructions and skills for this, but hit or miss on usage and adherence)
It generates very repetitive code and doesn't have the wits to refactor is in a way that is reusable, even in simple cases (basic JSON serialization).
It really dislikes to create object and type hierarchies on its own (e.g. move the repetitive serialization to a base class) and prefers to write one-offs. Works, but not very elegant; lots of duplication and touch points for regressions.
It also has a tendency to write more "verbose" solutions where sometimes simpler ones will work.
Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore
#20I just can't get behind this perspective, perhaps because I am a 'bad prompter', simply due to the lack of capability from current models. I end up rejecting them, asking them to implement again, they spew out tons of crap code instead of a 10 line fix, and on, and on.
Note that I'm not saying the agents are useless. They certainly write a lot of code and sometimes it is good. But I don't think you can get away without touching code yourself simply because at some level it is often the most concise way to get your idea across. I find it best to implement a core set of changes by-hand, and then ask the system to e.g. replicate them to other dependencies. I genuinely don't understand how anyone can work on a system with any complexity, and get the results they actually want, without touching code.