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this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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I can see this partly being true in that it'll be part of a dev's toolkit. The devs at my previous job loved using it to do busy work coding.
"busy work coding" is that what you do when you try to look like you're working (like a real dev)?
Real world development isn't creating exciting apps all the time, it's writing the same exact boring convention based code sticking to an established pattern.
It can be really boring and unchallenging to create your millionth respiratory, or you can prompt your ide to create a new repo and with one sentence it will create stub out 10 minutes worth of tedious prep work. It makes programming fun again.
In one prompt, it can look at my finished code and stub out half decent documentation that otherwise wouldn't have been completed at. It does hallucinate sometimes, or it completely misunderstands the code, so you have to correct a few sentences, but the brain drain of coming to with the sentence structure to write useful documentation is completely lifted, and the code is now well documented.
AI programming is more than just vibe coding, and it's way more useful than everyone here insists it's not.
Feels like you should have automated it if you do it over and over.
We're using it for closing security flaws identified by another tool. It's boring, unchallenging work that is nonetheless still important. It's also repetitive and uncreative enough that I'm comfortable having a machine do it.
There's still human review but when it's stuff like "your error messages should escape variables" or "write a longer function name" having a tool that can do most of the grunt work is valuable.
I agree that it will continue to be a useful tool. I've gotten a similar productivity boost using AI auto-complete as I did from regular auto-complete. It's also pretty good at identifiying potential uses with code, again, a similar productivity boost as a good linter. The chatbot does make a good sounding board, especially when you don't remember the name of the concept you are trying to implement or need to pro-con two solutions and you can't find articles about it.
But all these claims of 10x improvements in development speed are horse shit. Yeah, you might be able to shit out a 5-10,000 LOC tutorial app in an hour or two with prompt engineering, but try implementing a feature in a 100,000 LOC codebase and it promptly shits the bed: hallucinating internal frameworks, microservices, ignoring internal practices, writing straight up non-functional code, etc. I'd you spend enough time prompting it, you can eventually massage the solution you need out of it; problem is, it took longer to do that than writing the damn thing yourself.
Oh god the hate in this sub. It is definitely another tool for a dev to use. Like autocomplete or a lot of other stuff a good IDE does to help you. If you don't want to use it, fine. Perhaps you're such a pro that you don't need anything but a text editor. If you're not, and you're ignoring it for whatever petty reasons, you'll probably fall behind all the devs who learned how to use it to get more productive (or, in developer terms, lazier)
Agreed. Like it or not, old school auto complete was the same thing, just not as advanced. That being said, comment op probably didn't click the link.