6 ms·

I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid

132 points by mikae1 1y ago

j45 1y ago
> "When I tried to fix the security issues, I quickly realized how this whole thing was a trap. Since I didn't wrote it, I didn't have a good bird's eye view of the code and what it did. I couldn't make changes quickly, which started to frustrated me. The easiest route was asking the LLM to do the fixes for me, so I did. More code was changed and added. It worked, but again I could not tell if it was good or not." Maintaining your own list of issues to look for and how to resolve them, or prevent them outright is almost mandatory, and also doubles as a handy field reference guide for what gaps exist in applying LLM's to your particular use when someone higher up asks.
- mockingloris 1y ago
  Very well said. Just because AI can churn out a usable code project as fast as it takes for my cup garri to soak(3 mins) doesn't mean it should be used that way. It takes mastery, just like with actual programming syntax. There are many ways to achieve a business objective. Choosing the right one for the specific use case and expected outcome takes iterations. AI HAS replaced whole niche markets and it's just the beginning. The best any dev can do in this context is sharpen their use of it. That becomes a superpower; well defined context and one's own good grasp of the tech stack being worked on. Context: I still lookup rust docs and even prompt for summaries and bullet point facts about rust idioms for better understanding of the code. I identify as a JS dev first but, currently learning rust as I work on a passion project. └── Dey well
  - j45 1y ago
    Agreed, I only think people get lazy with AI if they let the AI do the thinking for them, rather than using it as a thinking machine to push their level of thinking wherever they are. In a way, LLMs are a fuzzy semantic relation engine and you can almost get to the point of running many forecasts or scenarios of how to solve a problem, or it could be solved, long before daring to write a user story or spec for how to write it. The issue with industrial software development is it's incremental at best, and setting those vectors from the start of a project can benefit from a more accurate approach that reflects how projects often really start, instead of trying to 1-10 shot things, which can be fun, but not always sustainable. It can be very benefical I find to require AI to explain and teach you at al times so it's keeping the line of thought and "reasoning" aligned.
TheCleric 1y ago
I am so glad someone else has this same experience as me because everyone else seems all in and I feel like I’m staring at an emperor without clothes.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  What were you using? Did you use it for a real project? I ask because you're going to have a vastly different experience with Cursor than with Claude Code, for example.
  - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
    Didn’t take long for the “you’re using the wrong tool / holding the tool wrong” replies to appear.
    - verdverm 1y ago
      Knowing how to search prompt Google became a skill among programmers, so has prompt/context engineering
      - jimbokun 1y ago
        Nah, Google made search unreasonably good at finding what users are looking for regardless of how poor the query was. Calling searching in Google a “skill” is similar to calling getting sucked into social media a skill.
        verdverm 1y ago
        It's different for programming, and especially evident when you are looking to solve a problem with an error message
        jimbokun 1y ago
        You add “site: stack overflow.com”.
rikafurude21 1y ago
He freely admits that the LLM did his job way faster than he could, but then claims that he doesnt believe it could make him 10x more productive. He decides that he will not use his new "superpower" because the second prompt he sent revealed that the code had security issues, which the LLM presumably also fixed after finding them. The fact that the LLM didnt consider those issues when writing his code puts his mind at rest about the possibility of being replaced by the LLM. Did he consider that the LLM wouldve done it the right way after the first message if prompted correctly? Considering his "personal stance on ai" I think he was going into this experience expecting exactly the result he got to reinforce his beliefs. Unironically enough thats exactly the type of person who would get replaced, because as a developer if youre not using these tools youre staying behind
- mockingloris 1y ago
  Your last sentence exactly! With a bit of tonic.
- sieabahlpark 1y ago
  [dead]
- stavros 1y ago
  Eeeh, the LLM wouldn't have done it correctly, though. I use LLMs exclusively for programming these days, and you really need to tell them the architecture and how to implement the features, and then review the output, otherwise it'll be wrong. They are like an overeager junior, they know how to write the code but they don't know how to architect the systems or to avoid bugs. Just today I suspected something, asked the LLM to critique its own code, paying attention to X Y Z things, and it found a bunch of unused code and other brittleness. It fixed it, with my guidance, but yeah, you can't let your guard down. Of course, as you say, these are the tools of the trade now, and we'll have to adapt, but they aren't a silver bullet.
  - throwanem 1y ago
    > I use LLMs exclusively for programming these days Meaning you no longer write any code directly, or that you no longer use LLMs other than for coding tasks?
hazek112 1y ago
Haha I encountered this But maybe AI is just better than I ever was at front end and react Maybe I should do something else
cryptoz 1y ago
I really think people are approaching LLMs wrong when it comes to code. Just directing an agent to make you something you’re unfamiliar with is always going to end up with this. It’s much better to have a few hours chat with the LLM and learn some about the topic, multiple times over many days, and then start. And ask questions and read all the code and modify it yourself; and read the compile errors and try to fix then yourself; etc. Come back to the LLM when you’re stuck. Having the machine just build you something from a two sentence prompt is lazy and you’ll feel lazy and bad. Learn with it and improve with it. You’ll end up with more knowledge and a code base for a project that you do (at least somewhat) understand, and you’ll have a project that you wouldn’t have attempted otherwise.
- zackify 1y ago
  Completely agree
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- CjHuber 1y ago
  The problem is not in making something you're unfamiliar with. The problem is doing something that your familiar with, trying out an LLM to see if it can assist you, then you are kind of impressed for the first few prompts so you let it off the leash and suddently you find yourself in a convoluted codebase you would never write that way with so many weird often nonsensical things different to how you normally approach them (or any sane person would) so that you can basically throw it all in the trash. The only way this can be avoided is by diligently checking every single diff the LLM makes. but let's be honest, its just so damn inviting to let it off the leash for a moment. I think the LLM accounting benchmark is a good analogy. The first few prompts are like the first month in accounting. the books are correct before so the LLM has a good start. in the accounting benchmark then the miscalculations compound as do the terrible practices in the codebase.
robotbikes 1y ago
[flagged]
ants_everywhere 1y ago
Unfortunately the author is competing with 100% of other devs who are using AI and the vast majority of whom are not becoming lazy or stupid.
arrowsmith 1y ago
Congratulations, you tried AI and you immediately noticed all the same limitations that everyone else notices. No-one is claiming the technology's perfect. How many more times is someone going to write this same article?
- z3c0 1y ago
  How many more times is someone going to write this same comment?
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  As many times as “if you’re not using AI your developer career is over” articles come out as well.
  - verdverm 1y ago
    Would you hire someone who refuses to use search or stack overflow for professional coding?
    - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
      Do you ask people whether they use search or stack overflow during job interviews/assessments?
      - verdverm 1y ago
        Not directly, I tell them they can and watch how they do. It's a fairly good indicator for the questions they don't know the answers to (I make sure they cannot memorize their way through)
      - AstralStorm 1y ago
        These days, even the search will give you AI answers, either directly, via a slop site wasting your time or even on stack overflow...
    - Vektorceraptor 1y ago
kamens 1y ago
The hard way solves this for me / I still get to vibe as much as I want: https://kamens.com/blog/code-with-ai-the-hard-way https://kamens.com/blog/code-with-ai-the-hard-way
- jimbokun 1y ago
  This is the best compromise for coding with LLMs I’ve seen! On an old sitcom a teenager decides to cheat on an exam by writing all the answers on the soles of his shoes. But he accidentally learns the material through the act of writing it out. Similarly, the human will maintain a grasp of all the code and catch issues early, by the mechanical act of typing it all out.
  - kamens 1y ago
    You just reminded me about my math teacher letting us use programs on our TI-83 to cheat on the test if we could type the programs in ourselves. Definitely worked
xwowsersx 1y ago
I think one of the reasons "coding with AI" conversations can feel so unproductive, or at least vague, to me, is that people aren't talking about the same thing. For some, it means "vibe coding" ... tossing quick prompts into something like Cursor, banging out snippets, and hoping it runs. For others, it's using AI like a rubber duck: explaining problems, asking clarifying questions, maybe pasting in a few snippets. And then there's the more involved mode, where you're having a sustained back-and-forth with multiple iterations and refinements. Without recognizing those distinctions, the debate tends to talk past itself. For me, anything that feels like anything remotely resembling a "superpower" with AI starts with doing a lot of heavy lifting upfront. I spend significant time preparing the right context, feeding it to the model with care, and asking very targeted questions. I'll bounce ideas back and forth until we've landed on a clear approach. Then I'll tell the model exactly how I want the code structured, and use it to extend that pattern into new functionality. In that mode, I'm still the one initializing the design and owning the understanding...AI just accelerates the repetitive work. In the end, I think the most productive mindset is to treat your prompt as the main artifact of value, the same way source code is the real asset and a compiled binary is just a byproduct. A prompt that works reliably requires a high degree of rigor and precision -- the kind of thinking we should be doing anyway, even without AI. Measure twice, cut once. If you start lazy, yes...AI will only make you lazier. If you start with discipline and clarity, it can amplify you. Which I think are traits that you want to have when you're doing software development even if you're not using AI. Just my experience and my 2c.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  Have you quantified all of this work in a way that demonstrates you save time vs just writing the code yourself?
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    Just yesterday I gave gemini code a git worktree of the system I'm building at work. (Corp approved yadda yadda). Can't remember the prompt was "evaluate the codebase and suggest any improvements. specifically on the <nameofsystem> system" Then I tabbed out and did other stuff Came back a bit later, checked out its ramblings. It misunderstood the whole system completely and tried to add a recursive system that wasn't even close to what it was supposed to be. BUT it had detected an error message that just provided an index where parsing failed on some user input like "error at index (10)", which is completely useless for humans. But that's what the parser library gives us, so it's been there for a while. It suggested a function that grabs the input, modifies it with a marker at the index given by the error message and shows clearly which bit in the input was wrong. Could I have done this myself? Yes. Would I have bothered, no I have actual features to add at this point. Was it useful? Definitely. There was maybe 5 minutes of active work on my part and I got a nice improvement out of it. And this wasn't the only instance. Even the misunderstanding could've been avoided by me providing the agent better documentation on what everything does and where they are located.
cogman10 1y ago
A problem I'm seeing more and more in my code reviews is velocity being favored over correctness. I recently had a team member submit code done primarily by an LLM that was clearly wrong. Rather than verifying that the change was correct, they rapid fired a cr and left it up to the team to spot problems. They've since pushed multiple changes to fix the initial garbage of the LLM because they've adopted "move fast and break things". The appearance of progress without the substance.
- exasperaited 1y ago
  Move fast and fire them?
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    Even better: Fire yourself.
- anon7725 1y ago
  > The appearance of progress without the substance. This is highly rewarded in many (most?) corporate environments, so that’s not surprising. When’s the last time you heard “when will it be done?” When’s the last time you heard “can you demonstrate that it’s right|robust|reliable|fast enough|etc?”
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    I am very lucky to work somewhere where they at least ask both questions!
  - kenjackson 1y ago
    I think the latter question is implied. Because if you don’t care if it’s right then the answer is always “it’s done now”.
    - mrbombastic 1y ago
      Maybe it is implied but many places i have worked there were engineers with high velocity who made a mess for everyone else, and they were usually rewarded because people only saw the fast output and the bugs were dispersed amongst the masses
ronreiter 1y ago
AI will cause senior developers to become 10 times more effective. AI will cause junior developers to become 10 times less effective. And that's when taking into account the lost productivity of the senior developers who need to review their code. Unfortunately for the writer, he will probably get fired because of AI. But not because AI will replace him - because seniors will.
- ath3nd 1y ago
  > AI will cause senior developers to become 10 times more effective Bold statement! In the real world, senior developers were actually 19% less effective by using LLMs in the only study up to date. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... Very brave to have an edgy opinion based on vibes that is counter to the only actual study though. Claiming that things are XYZ just because it feels like it is all the rage nowadays, good for being with the times. > Unfortunately for the writer, he will probably get fired because of AI. But not because AI will replace him - because seniors will Here is another prediction for you. In the current real world LLMs create mountains of barely working slop on a clean project, and slowly pollute it with trash feature after feature. The LGTM senior developers will just keep merging and merging until the project becomes such a tangled mess that the LLM takes billion tokens to fix it or it outright can't, and these so called senior developers had their skills deteriorate to such an extent that they'd need to call the author of the article to save them from the mess they created with their fancy autocomplete.
shinycode 1y ago
A lot of people is using the tool in a wrong way. It’s massively powerful, there’s a lot of promisses but it’s not magic. The tool works on words and statistics. Better be really thoughtful and precise beforehand. No one notices that Cursor or Claude code is not asking questions to clarify. It’s just diving right in. We humans ask ourselves a lot of questions before diving in so when we do it’s really precise. When we use CC with a really great level of precision on a well defined context the probability of answering right goes up. That’s the new job we have with this tool.
- snickerdoodle12 1y ago
  "you're holding it wrong!"
fennec-posix 1y ago
I see LLMs as a force multiplier. It's not going to write entire projects for me, but it'll assist with "how do i do x with y" kind of problems. At the end of the day I still understand the codebase and know where its faults lie.
sampton 1y ago
In the past few months I have used AI to read more open source projects than I ever had. Tackled projects in Rust that I was too intermediated to start. AI doesn't make you lazy.
Jcampuzano2 1y ago
I find it interesting how many people complain that AI produces code that mostly works but overlooks something, or that it was able to generate something workable but wasn't perfect and didn't catch every single thing on it's first try. For fucks sake it probably got you to the same first draft you would have gotten to yourself in 10x less time. In fact there plenty of times where it probably writes a better first draft than you would have. Then you can iterate from there, review and scrutinize it just as much as you should be doing with your own code. Last I checked the majority of us don't one shot the code we write either. We write it once, then iterate on things we might have missed. As you get better you prompt instinctively to include those same edge cases you would have missed when you were less experienced. Everybody has this delusion that your productivity comes from the AI writing perfect code from step 1. No, do the same software process you normally should be doing, but get to the in between steps many times faster.
- fzeroracer 1y ago
  Missing the forest for the trees here. The benefit of writing your own first draft is the same reason why you take notes during classes or rephrase things in your head. You're building up a mental model of the codebase as you write it, so even if the first draft isn't great you know where the pieces are, what they should be doing and why they should be doing it. The cognitive benefits of writing notes is well known. If you're using an AI to produce code you're not building up any model at all. You have to treat it as an adversarial process and heavily scrutinize/review the code it outputs, but more importantly it's code you didn't write and map. You might've wrote an extensive prompt detailing what you want to happen, but you don't know if it did happen or not. You should start asking yourself how well you know the codebase and where the pieces are and what they do.
  - SonOfKyuss 1y ago
    It really depends on the scale of the code you are asking it to produce. The sweet spot for me with current models is about 100-200 lines of code. At that scale I can prompt it to create a function and review and understand it much faster than doing it by hand. Basically using it as super super autocomplete, which may very well be underutilizing it, but at that scale, I am definitely more productive but still feel ownership of the end result.
1024core 1y ago
I have been using LLMs for coding for the past few months. After initial hesitation and fighting the the LLMs, I slowly changed my mode from adversarial to "it's a useful tool". And now I find that I spend less time thinking about the low-level stuff (shared pointers, move semantics, etc. etc.) and more time thinking about the higher-level details. It's been a bit liberating, to be honest. I like it now. It is a tool, use it like a tool. Don't think of "super intelligence", blah blah. Just use it as a tool.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  > shared pointers, move semantics Do you expect LLMs to get those ones right?
  - sjoedev 1y ago
    My experience using LLMs is similar to my experience working with a team of junior developers. And LLMs are valuable in a similar way. There are many problems where the solution would take me a few hours to derive from scratch myself, but looking at a solution and deciding “this is correct” or “this is incorrect” takes a few minutes or seconds. So I don’t expect the junior or the LLM to produce a correct result every time, but it’s quick to verify the solution and provide feedback, thus I have saved time to think about more challenging problems where my experience and domain knowledge is more valuable.
    - AstralStorm 1y ago
      Oh, let's check how good you are at spotting security issues... Or plain old bugs. "It's easy to decide if a solution is correct or not." Yeah right. So you have metrics for it?
      - theshrike79 1y ago
        The metric is: I run the code and it works? I've read other people's code for 25 years for a living. I'm pretty good at it. So when I get a piece of code or an algorithm, I can read it check if it looks like something I'd allow in a pull review. We also have this thing called "unit tests", which are pretty good at detecting erroneus code. Some people even write them first and then adjust their code to match.
Havoc 1y ago
I’d definitely be wary of vibe coding anything that is internet facing. But at same time there has to be some middle ground here too - bit of productivity gains without any significant tangible downside. Even if that middle ground is just glorified auto complete
mockingloris 1y ago
AI can churn out usable code faster than it takes for my cup garri to soak(2-3 mins) doesn't mean it should be used that way. Software and technology takes mastery; imagine the string manipulation syntax for different programming languages. There are many ways to achieve a business objective. Choosing the right language/coding style for the specific use case and expected outcome takes iterations and planning. AI still in infancy yet it has replaced and disrupted whole niche markets and it's just the beginning. The best any dev can do in this context is sharpen their use of it and that becomes a superpower; well defined context and one's own good grasp of the tech stack being worked on. Context: I still lookup rust docs and even prompt for summaries and bullet point facts about rust idioms/concepts that I am yet to internalize. JS is what I primarily write code in but, currently learning rust as I work on a passion project. └── Dey well
slowdog 1y ago
It's a reasonable take from the author, but the argument that you shouldn't use a tool you don't understand cuts both ways. Avoiding powerful tools can be just as much of a trap as using them blindly. Like any tool, there's a right and wrong time to use an LLM. The best approach is to use it to go faster at things you already understand and use it as an aid to learn things you don't but don't blindly trust it. You still need to review the code carefully because you're ultimately responsible for it, your name is forever on it. You can't blame an LLM when your code took down production, you shipped it. It’s a double-edged sword: you can get things done faster, but it's easy to become over-reliant, lazy, and overestimate your skills. That's how you get left behind. The old advice has never been more relevant: "stay hungry."
hirvi74 1y ago
I'm already lazy and getting progressively stupider over time, so LLMs can't make me any worse. I also think it's a matter of how one uses them. I do not use any of the LLMs via their direct APIs. I do not want LLMs in any of my editors. So, when I go to ask questions in with web app, it takes a bit more friction. I'm honestly an average at best programmer, and I do not really need LLMs for much. I mainly use LLMs to just ask trivial questions that I could have googled. However, LLMs are not rife with SEO ads and click-bait articles (yet).
- theshrike79 1y ago
  They work SO much better in agentic mode where they can use "tools" and access the files directly - even if you limit them to read only.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
I usually only use AI for things that I previously didn't do at all (like UI development). I don't think its making me lazy or stupid. I'm sure it's writing lazy stupid JavaScript, but the alternative is that my users got a CLI. Given that alternative, I think they don't mind the stupid JavaScript.
lvl155 1y ago
I am too stupid and old to code up to the standards of my younger days. AI allows me to get my youth back. I learned so many new things since Sonnet 4 came out in May. I doubted AI too until Sonnet 4 surprised me with my first AGI moment.
Mars008 1y ago
I tried digging with excavator, I became lazy and fat.
lackoftactics 1y ago
It’s on us as developers to use LLMs thoughtfully. They’re great accelerators, but they can also atrophy your skills if you outsource the thinking. I try to keep a deliberate balance: sometimes I switch autocomplete off and design from scratch; I keep Anki for fundamentals; I run micro‑katas to maintain muscle memory; and I have a “learning” VS Code profile that disables LLMs and autocomplete entirely. As unfashionable as it sounds on hacker news, a hybrid workflow and some adaptation are necessary. In my case, the LLM boom actually pushed me to start a CS master’s (I’m a self‑taught dev with 10+ years of experience after a sociology BA) and dive into lower‑level topics, QMK flashing, homelab, discrete math. LLMs made it easier to digest new material and kept me curious. I was a bit burned out before; now I enjoy programming again and I’m filling gaps I didn’t know I had. I often get down-voted on Hacker News for my take on AI, but maybe I am just one of the few exceptions who get a lot out of LLMs
yodsanklai 1y ago
I recently had the following experience. I vibe-coded something in a language I'm not super familiar with, it seemed correct, it type-checked. Tests passed. Then reviewer pointed many stylistic issues and was rightfully pissed at me. When I addressed the comments, I realized I would not have made those mistakes had i written the code myself. It was a waste of time for me and the reviewer. Another thing that happens quite often. I give the task to the LLM. It's not quite what I want. I fix the prompt. Still not there. Every iteration takes time, in which I lose my focus because it can take minutes. Sometimes it's very frustrating, I feel I'm not using my brain, not learning the project. Again, loss of time. At the current stage, if I want to be productive, I need to restrict the use of the LLMs to the tasks for which there's a high change that it'll get it right in the first try. Out of laziness, I still have the tendency to give it some more complex tasks and ultimately lose time.
Incipient 1y ago
I'm getting very tired of these 'either extreme' articles (produced, I expect, for clicks). The reality is today: - if you don't use AI coding at all you'll be left behind. No one writes HTML by hand, AI just means one less thing by hand - doing "hey AI give me an app" absolutely is garbage, see the Tea app debacle - relying on AI and not understanding what it's doing will absolutely degrade your skill and make a dev lazy, don't ask it for a bunch of Web endpoints and hope they're scalable and secure Now will AI be able to make an entire app perfectly one day? Who knows. edit: formatting
nunez 1y ago
I came to the same conclusion two days after using Claude. It's extremely easy to build heaps of absolutely vile code with this thing, but I can see it accelerating senior/staff/staff+ devs who knows what they are doing in certain situations. In my case, it built an entire distributed system for me, with APIs, servers and tests, but on my goodness the compile errors were unending and Claude does crazy stuff to reconcile them sometimes.
carbonbioxide 1y ago
If you use it for the right thing it's great, but if you fall into the trap of trying to make everything for you, you will for sure become super lazy. The reality is, the more power these tools have, the bigger the responsibility you have to stay sharp and understand the generated code. If that's what you're interested in of course
penguin_booze 1y ago
I wonder if the author designed the website after they started coding with AI. Another Tonsky clone.
ryandvm 1y ago
LLMs are the ultimate leetcode solvers because they're stellar at small, atomic, functional bits of code that, importantly, have already been done and written about before. But at this point in time they are terrible about reasoning about novel or overly complex problems. It is deliciously ironic that LLMs can absolutely crush the software engineering interview process, but frankly it's no surprise to those of us that have been complaining that whiteboard coding interviews are a bullshit way to hire senior software engineers. I look forward to watching the industry have to abandon it's long held preference for an interview metric that has no predictive capability for software engineering success.
cooloo 1y ago
So true. Like every tool it could be a double edged sword

132 points by mikae1 1y ago

j45 1y ago

> "When I tried to fix the security issues, I quickly realized how this whole thing was a trap. Since I didn't wrote it, I didn't have a good bird's eye view of the code and what it did. I couldn't make changes quickly, which started to frustrated me. The easiest route was asking the LLM to do the fixes for me, so I did. More code was changed and added. It worked, but again I could not tell if it was good or not." Maintaining your own list of issues to look for and how to resolve them, or prevent them outright is almost mandatory, and also doubles as a handy field reference guide for what gaps exist in applying LLM's to your particular use when someone higher up asks.

mockingloris 1y ago
Very well said. Just because AI can churn out a usable code project as fast as it takes for my cup garri to soak(3 mins) doesn't mean it should be used that way. It takes mastery, just like with actual programming syntax. There are many ways to achieve a business objective. Choosing the right one for the specific use case and expected outcome takes iterations. AI HAS replaced whole niche markets and it's just the beginning. The best any dev can do in this context is sharpen their use of it. That becomes a superpower; well defined context and one's own good grasp of the tech stack being worked on. Context: I still lookup rust docs and even prompt for summaries and bullet point facts about rust idioms for better understanding of the code. I identify as a JS dev first but, currently learning rust as I work on a passion project. └── Dey well
- j45 1y ago
  Agreed, I only think people get lazy with AI if they let the AI do the thinking for them, rather than using it as a thinking machine to push their level of thinking wherever they are. In a way, LLMs are a fuzzy semantic relation engine and you can almost get to the point of running many forecasts or scenarios of how to solve a problem, or it could be solved, long before daring to write a user story or spec for how to write it. The issue with industrial software development is it's incremental at best, and setting those vectors from the start of a project can benefit from a more accurate approach that reflects how projects often really start, instead of trying to 1-10 shot things, which can be fun, but not always sustainable. It can be very benefical I find to require AI to explain and teach you at al times so it's keeping the line of thought and "reasoning" aligned.

TheCleric 1y ago

I am so glad someone else has this same experience as me because everyone else seems all in and I feel like I’m staring at an emperor without clothes.

CharlesW 1y ago
What were you using? Did you use it for a real project? I ask because you're going to have a vastly different experience with Cursor than with Claude Code, for example.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  Didn’t take long for the “you’re using the wrong tool / holding the tool wrong” replies to appear.
  - verdverm 1y ago
    Knowing how to search prompt Google became a skill among programmers, so has prompt/context engineering
    - jimbokun 1y ago
      Nah, Google made search unreasonably good at finding what users are looking for regardless of how poor the query was. Calling searching in Google a “skill” is similar to calling getting sucked into social media a skill.
      - verdverm 1y ago
        It's different for programming, and especially evident when you are looking to solve a problem with an error message
        jimbokun 1y ago
        You add “site: stack overflow.com”.

rikafurude21 1y ago

He freely admits that the LLM did his job way faster than he could, but then claims that he doesnt believe it could make him 10x more productive. He decides that he will not use his new "superpower" because the second prompt he sent revealed that the code had security issues, which the LLM presumably also fixed after finding them. The fact that the LLM didnt consider those issues when writing his code puts his mind at rest about the possibility of being replaced by the LLM. Did he consider that the LLM wouldve done it the right way after the first message if prompted correctly? Considering his "personal stance on ai" I think he was going into this experience expecting exactly the result he got to reinforce his beliefs. Unironically enough thats exactly the type of person who would get replaced, because as a developer if youre not using these tools youre staying behind

mockingloris 1y ago
Your last sentence exactly! With a bit of tonic.
sieabahlpark 1y ago
[dead]
stavros 1y ago
Eeeh, the LLM wouldn't have done it correctly, though. I use LLMs exclusively for programming these days, and you really need to tell them the architecture and how to implement the features, and then review the output, otherwise it'll be wrong. They are like an overeager junior, they know how to write the code but they don't know how to architect the systems or to avoid bugs. Just today I suspected something, asked the LLM to critique its own code, paying attention to X Y Z things, and it found a bunch of unused code and other brittleness. It fixed it, with my guidance, but yeah, you can't let your guard down. Of course, as you say, these are the tools of the trade now, and we'll have to adapt, but they aren't a silver bullet.
- throwanem 1y ago
  > I use LLMs exclusively for programming these days Meaning you no longer write any code directly, or that you no longer use LLMs other than for coding tasks?

hazek112 1y ago

Haha I encountered this But maybe AI is just better than I ever was at front end and react Maybe I should do something else

cryptoz 1y ago

I really think people are approaching LLMs wrong when it comes to code. Just directing an agent to make you something you’re unfamiliar with is always going to end up with this. It’s much better to have a few hours chat with the LLM and learn some about the topic, multiple times over many days, and then start. And ask questions and read all the code and modify it yourself; and read the compile errors and try to fix then yourself; etc. Come back to the LLM when you’re stuck. Having the machine just build you something from a two sentence prompt is lazy and you’ll feel lazy and bad. Learn with it and improve with it. You’ll end up with more knowledge and a code base for a project that you do (at least somewhat) understand, and you’ll have a project that you wouldn’t have attempted otherwise.

zackify 1y ago
Completely agree
deleted 1y ago
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CjHuber 1y ago
The problem is not in making something you're unfamiliar with. The problem is doing something that your familiar with, trying out an LLM to see if it can assist you, then you are kind of impressed for the first few prompts so you let it off the leash and suddently you find yourself in a convoluted codebase you would never write that way with so many weird often nonsensical things different to how you normally approach them (or any sane person would) so that you can basically throw it all in the trash. The only way this can be avoided is by diligently checking every single diff the LLM makes. but let's be honest, its just so damn inviting to let it off the leash for a moment. I think the LLM accounting benchmark is a good analogy. The first few prompts are like the first month in accounting. the books are correct before so the LLM has a good start. in the accounting benchmark then the miscalculations compound as do the terrible practices in the codebase.

robotbikes 1y ago

[flagged]

ants_everywhere 1y ago

Unfortunately the author is competing with 100% of other devs who are using AI and the vast majority of whom are not becoming lazy or stupid.

arrowsmith 1y ago

Congratulations, you tried AI and you immediately noticed all the same limitations that everyone else notices. No-one is claiming the technology's perfect. How many more times is someone going to write this same article?

z3c0 1y ago
How many more times is someone going to write this same comment?
loloquwowndueo 1y ago
As many times as “if you’re not using AI your developer career is over” articles come out as well.
- verdverm 1y ago
  Would you hire someone who refuses to use search or stack overflow for professional coding?
  - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
    Do you ask people whether they use search or stack overflow during job interviews/assessments?
    - verdverm 1y ago
      Not directly, I tell them they can and watch how they do. It's a fairly good indicator for the questions they don't know the answers to (I make sure they cannot memorize their way through)
    - AstralStorm 1y ago
      These days, even the search will give you AI answers, either directly, via a slop site wasting your time or even on stack overflow...
  - Vektorceraptor 1y ago

kamens 1y ago

The hard way solves this for me / I still get to vibe as much as I want: https://kamens.com/blog/code-with-ai-the-hard-way https://kamens.com/blog/code-with-ai-the-hard-way

jimbokun 1y ago
This is the best compromise for coding with LLMs I’ve seen! On an old sitcom a teenager decides to cheat on an exam by writing all the answers on the soles of his shoes. But he accidentally learns the material through the act of writing it out. Similarly, the human will maintain a grasp of all the code and catch issues early, by the mechanical act of typing it all out.
- kamens 1y ago
  You just reminded me about my math teacher letting us use programs on our TI-83 to cheat on the test if we could type the programs in ourselves. Definitely worked

xwowsersx 1y ago

I think one of the reasons "coding with AI" conversations can feel so unproductive, or at least vague, to me, is that people aren't talking about the same thing. For some, it means "vibe coding" ... tossing quick prompts into something like Cursor, banging out snippets, and hoping it runs. For others, it's using AI like a rubber duck: explaining problems, asking clarifying questions, maybe pasting in a few snippets. And then there's the more involved mode, where you're having a sustained back-and-forth with multiple iterations and refinements. Without recognizing those distinctions, the debate tends to talk past itself. For me, anything that feels like anything remotely resembling a "superpower" with AI starts with doing a lot of heavy lifting upfront. I spend significant time preparing the right context, feeding it to the model with care, and asking very targeted questions. I'll bounce ideas back and forth until we've landed on a clear approach. Then I'll tell the model exactly how I want the code structured, and use it to extend that pattern into new functionality. In that mode, I'm still the one initializing the design and owning the understanding...AI just accelerates the repetitive work. In the end, I think the most productive mindset is to treat your prompt as the main artifact of value, the same way source code is the real asset and a compiled binary is just a byproduct. A prompt that works reliably requires a high degree of rigor and precision -- the kind of thinking we should be doing anyway, even without AI. Measure twice, cut once. If you start lazy, yes...AI will only make you lazier. If you start with discipline and clarity, it can amplify you. Which I think are traits that you want to have when you're doing software development even if you're not using AI. Just my experience and my 2c.

jimbokun 1y ago
Have you quantified all of this work in a way that demonstrates you save time vs just writing the code yourself?
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Just yesterday I gave gemini code a git worktree of the system I'm building at work. (Corp approved yadda yadda). Can't remember the prompt was "evaluate the codebase and suggest any improvements. specifically on the <nameofsystem> system" Then I tabbed out and did other stuff Came back a bit later, checked out its ramblings. It misunderstood the whole system completely and tried to add a recursive system that wasn't even close to what it was supposed to be. BUT it had detected an error message that just provided an index where parsing failed on some user input like "error at index (10)", which is completely useless for humans. But that's what the parser library gives us, so it's been there for a while. It suggested a function that grabs the input, modifies it with a marker at the index given by the error message and shows clearly which bit in the input was wrong. Could I have done this myself? Yes. Would I have bothered, no I have actual features to add at this point. Was it useful? Definitely. There was maybe 5 minutes of active work on my part and I got a nice improvement out of it. And this wasn't the only instance. Even the misunderstanding could've been avoided by me providing the agent better documentation on what everything does and where they are located.

cogman10 1y ago

A problem I'm seeing more and more in my code reviews is velocity being favored over correctness. I recently had a team member submit code done primarily by an LLM that was clearly wrong. Rather than verifying that the change was correct, they rapid fired a cr and left it up to the team to spot problems. They've since pushed multiple changes to fix the initial garbage of the LLM because they've adopted "move fast and break things". The appearance of progress without the substance.

exasperaited 1y ago
Move fast and fire them?
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Even better: Fire yourself.
anon7725 1y ago
> The appearance of progress without the substance. This is highly rewarded in many (most?) corporate environments, so that’s not surprising. When’s the last time you heard “when will it be done?” When’s the last time you heard “can you demonstrate that it’s right|robust|reliable|fast enough|etc?”
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  I am very lucky to work somewhere where they at least ask both questions!
- kenjackson 1y ago
  I think the latter question is implied. Because if you don’t care if it’s right then the answer is always “it’s done now”.
  - mrbombastic 1y ago
    Maybe it is implied but many places i have worked there were engineers with high velocity who made a mess for everyone else, and they were usually rewarded because people only saw the fast output and the bugs were dispersed amongst the masses

ronreiter 1y ago

AI will cause senior developers to become 10 times more effective. AI will cause junior developers to become 10 times less effective. And that's when taking into account the lost productivity of the senior developers who need to review their code. Unfortunately for the writer, he will probably get fired because of AI. But not because AI will replace him - because seniors will.

ath3nd 1y ago
> AI will cause senior developers to become 10 times more effective Bold statement! In the real world, senior developers were actually 19% less effective by using LLMs in the only study up to date. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... Very brave to have an edgy opinion based on vibes that is counter to the only actual study though. Claiming that things are XYZ just because it feels like it is all the rage nowadays, good for being with the times. > Unfortunately for the writer, he will probably get fired because of AI. But not because AI will replace him - because seniors will Here is another prediction for you. In the current real world LLMs create mountains of barely working slop on a clean project, and slowly pollute it with trash feature after feature. The LGTM senior developers will just keep merging and merging until the project becomes such a tangled mess that the LLM takes billion tokens to fix it or it outright can't, and these so called senior developers had their skills deteriorate to such an extent that they'd need to call the author of the article to save them from the mess they created with their fancy autocomplete.

shinycode 1y ago

A lot of people is using the tool in a wrong way. It’s massively powerful, there’s a lot of promisses but it’s not magic. The tool works on words and statistics. Better be really thoughtful and precise beforehand. No one notices that Cursor or Claude code is not asking questions to clarify. It’s just diving right in. We humans ask ourselves a lot of questions before diving in so when we do it’s really precise. When we use CC with a really great level of precision on a well defined context the probability of answering right goes up. That’s the new job we have with this tool.

snickerdoodle12 1y ago
"you're holding it wrong!"

fennec-posix 1y ago

I see LLMs as a force multiplier. It's not going to write entire projects for me, but it'll assist with "how do i do x with y" kind of problems. At the end of the day I still understand the codebase and know where its faults lie.

sampton 1y ago

In the past few months I have used AI to read more open source projects than I ever had. Tackled projects in Rust that I was too intermediated to start. AI doesn't make you lazy.

Jcampuzano2 1y ago

I find it interesting how many people complain that AI produces code that mostly works but overlooks something, or that it was able to generate something workable but wasn't perfect and didn't catch every single thing on it's first try. For fucks sake it probably got you to the same first draft you would have gotten to yourself in 10x less time. In fact there plenty of times where it probably writes a better first draft than you would have. Then you can iterate from there, review and scrutinize it just as much as you should be doing with your own code. Last I checked the majority of us don't one shot the code we write either. We write it once, then iterate on things we might have missed. As you get better you prompt instinctively to include those same edge cases you would have missed when you were less experienced. Everybody has this delusion that your productivity comes from the AI writing perfect code from step 1. No, do the same software process you normally should be doing, but get to the in between steps many times faster.

fzeroracer 1y ago
Missing the forest for the trees here. The benefit of writing your own first draft is the same reason why you take notes during classes or rephrase things in your head. You're building up a mental model of the codebase as you write it, so even if the first draft isn't great you know where the pieces are, what they should be doing and why they should be doing it. The cognitive benefits of writing notes is well known. If you're using an AI to produce code you're not building up any model at all. You have to treat it as an adversarial process and heavily scrutinize/review the code it outputs, but more importantly it's code you didn't write and map. You might've wrote an extensive prompt detailing what you want to happen, but you don't know if it did happen or not. You should start asking yourself how well you know the codebase and where the pieces are and what they do.
- SonOfKyuss 1y ago
  It really depends on the scale of the code you are asking it to produce. The sweet spot for me with current models is about 100-200 lines of code. At that scale I can prompt it to create a function and review and understand it much faster than doing it by hand. Basically using it as super super autocomplete, which may very well be underutilizing it, but at that scale, I am definitely more productive but still feel ownership of the end result.

1024core 1y ago

I have been using LLMs for coding for the past few months. After initial hesitation and fighting the the LLMs, I slowly changed my mode from adversarial to "it's a useful tool". And now I find that I spend less time thinking about the low-level stuff (shared pointers, move semantics, etc. etc.) and more time thinking about the higher-level details. It's been a bit liberating, to be honest. I like it now. It is a tool, use it like a tool. Don't think of "super intelligence", blah blah. Just use it as a tool.

marcosdumay 1y ago
> shared pointers, move semantics Do you expect LLMs to get those ones right?
- sjoedev 1y ago
  My experience using LLMs is similar to my experience working with a team of junior developers. And LLMs are valuable in a similar way. There are many problems where the solution would take me a few hours to derive from scratch myself, but looking at a solution and deciding “this is correct” or “this is incorrect” takes a few minutes or seconds. So I don’t expect the junior or the LLM to produce a correct result every time, but it’s quick to verify the solution and provide feedback, thus I have saved time to think about more challenging problems where my experience and domain knowledge is more valuable.
  - AstralStorm 1y ago
    Oh, let's check how good you are at spotting security issues... Or plain old bugs. "It's easy to decide if a solution is correct or not." Yeah right. So you have metrics for it?
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      The metric is: I run the code and it works? I've read other people's code for 25 years for a living. I'm pretty good at it. So when I get a piece of code or an algorithm, I can read it check if it looks like something I'd allow in a pull review. We also have this thing called "unit tests", which are pretty good at detecting erroneus code. Some people even write them first and then adjust their code to match.

Havoc 1y ago

I’d definitely be wary of vibe coding anything that is internet facing. But at same time there has to be some middle ground here too - bit of productivity gains without any significant tangible downside. Even if that middle ground is just glorified auto complete

mockingloris 1y ago

AI can churn out usable code faster than it takes for my cup garri to soak(2-3 mins) doesn't mean it should be used that way. Software and technology takes mastery; imagine the string manipulation syntax for different programming languages. There are many ways to achieve a business objective. Choosing the right language/coding style for the specific use case and expected outcome takes iterations and planning. AI still in infancy yet it has replaced and disrupted whole niche markets and it's just the beginning. The best any dev can do in this context is sharpen their use of it and that becomes a superpower; well defined context and one's own good grasp of the tech stack being worked on. Context: I still lookup rust docs and even prompt for summaries and bullet point facts about rust idioms/concepts that I am yet to internalize. JS is what I primarily write code in but, currently learning rust as I work on a passion project. └── Dey well

slowdog 1y ago

It's a reasonable take from the author, but the argument that you shouldn't use a tool you don't understand cuts both ways. Avoiding powerful tools can be just as much of a trap as using them blindly. Like any tool, there's a right and wrong time to use an LLM. The best approach is to use it to go faster at things you already understand and use it as an aid to learn things you don't but don't blindly trust it. You still need to review the code carefully because you're ultimately responsible for it, your name is forever on it. You can't blame an LLM when your code took down production, you shipped it. It’s a double-edged sword: you can get things done faster, but it's easy to become over-reliant, lazy, and overestimate your skills. That's how you get left behind. The old advice has never been more relevant: "stay hungry."

hirvi74 1y ago

I'm already lazy and getting progressively stupider over time, so LLMs can't make me any worse. I also think it's a matter of how one uses them. I do not use any of the LLMs via their direct APIs. I do not want LLMs in any of my editors. So, when I go to ask questions in with web app, it takes a bit more friction. I'm honestly an average at best programmer, and I do not really need LLMs for much. I mainly use LLMs to just ask trivial questions that I could have googled. However, LLMs are not rife with SEO ads and click-bait articles (yet).

theshrike79 1y ago
They work SO much better in agentic mode where they can use "tools" and access the files directly - even if you limit them to read only.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

I usually only use AI for things that I previously didn't do at all (like UI development). I don't think its making me lazy or stupid. I'm sure it's writing lazy stupid JavaScript, but the alternative is that my users got a CLI. Given that alternative, I think they don't mind the stupid JavaScript.

lvl155 1y ago

I am too stupid and old to code up to the standards of my younger days. AI allows me to get my youth back. I learned so many new things since Sonnet 4 came out in May. I doubted AI too until Sonnet 4 surprised me with my first AGI moment.

Mars008 1y ago

I tried digging with excavator, I became lazy and fat.

lackoftactics 1y ago

It’s on us as developers to use LLMs thoughtfully. They’re great accelerators, but they can also atrophy your skills if you outsource the thinking. I try to keep a deliberate balance: sometimes I switch autocomplete off and design from scratch; I keep Anki for fundamentals; I run micro‑katas to maintain muscle memory; and I have a “learning” VS Code profile that disables LLMs and autocomplete entirely. As unfashionable as it sounds on hacker news, a hybrid workflow and some adaptation are necessary. In my case, the LLM boom actually pushed me to start a CS master’s (I’m a self‑taught dev with 10+ years of experience after a sociology BA) and dive into lower‑level topics, QMK flashing, homelab, discrete math. LLMs made it easier to digest new material and kept me curious. I was a bit burned out before; now I enjoy programming again and I’m filling gaps I didn’t know I had. I often get down-voted on Hacker News for my take on AI, but maybe I am just one of the few exceptions who get a lot out of LLMs

yodsanklai 1y ago

I recently had the following experience. I vibe-coded something in a language I'm not super familiar with, it seemed correct, it type-checked. Tests passed. Then reviewer pointed many stylistic issues and was rightfully pissed at me. When I addressed the comments, I realized I would not have made those mistakes had i written the code myself. It was a waste of time for me and the reviewer. Another thing that happens quite often. I give the task to the LLM. It's not quite what I want. I fix the prompt. Still not there. Every iteration takes time, in which I lose my focus because it can take minutes. Sometimes it's very frustrating, I feel I'm not using my brain, not learning the project. Again, loss of time. At the current stage, if I want to be productive, I need to restrict the use of the LLMs to the tasks for which there's a high change that it'll get it right in the first try. Out of laziness, I still have the tendency to give it some more complex tasks and ultimately lose time.

Incipient 1y ago

I'm getting very tired of these 'either extreme' articles (produced, I expect, for clicks). The reality is today: - if you don't use AI coding at all you'll be left behind. No one writes HTML by hand, AI just means one less thing by hand - doing "hey AI give me an app" absolutely is garbage, see the Tea app debacle - relying on AI and not understanding what it's doing will absolutely degrade your skill and make a dev lazy, don't ask it for a bunch of Web endpoints and hope they're scalable and secure Now will AI be able to make an entire app perfectly one day? Who knows. edit: formatting

nunez 1y ago

I came to the same conclusion two days after using Claude. It's extremely easy to build heaps of absolutely vile code with this thing, but I can see it accelerating senior/staff/staff+ devs who knows what they are doing in certain situations. In my case, it built an entire distributed system for me, with APIs, servers and tests, but on my goodness the compile errors were unending and Claude does crazy stuff to reconcile them sometimes.

carbonbioxide 1y ago

If you use it for the right thing it's great, but if you fall into the trap of trying to make everything for you, you will for sure become super lazy. The reality is, the more power these tools have, the bigger the responsibility you have to stay sharp and understand the generated code. If that's what you're interested in of course

penguin_booze 1y ago

I wonder if the author designed the website after they started coding with AI. Another Tonsky clone.

ryandvm 1y ago

LLMs are the ultimate leetcode solvers because they're stellar at small, atomic, functional bits of code that, importantly, have already been done and written about before. But at this point in time they are terrible about reasoning about novel or overly complex problems. It is deliciously ironic that LLMs can absolutely crush the software engineering interview process, but frankly it's no surprise to those of us that have been complaining that whiteboard coding interviews are a bullshit way to hire senior software engineers. I look forward to watching the industry have to abandon it's long held preference for an interview metric that has no predictive capability for software engineering success.

cooloo 1y ago

So true. Like every tool it could be a double edged sword