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Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

100 points by SpyCoder77 5mo ago

bitwize 5mo ago
[flagged]
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  Did you ask your agent to write this?
  - helf 5mo ago
    [dead]
deweller 5mo ago
"Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes." This has not been my experience. Sure it feels like more work to fix the AI code problems sometimes - it is a different skillset than writing code from scratch. But the speed that I can deliver software has significantly increased by using coding agents.
- jjulius 5mo ago
  >This has not been my experience. >But the speed that I...
  - bensyverson 5mo ago
    First-hand experience is perfectly valid. I agree with the parent; I'm able to produce more. And with proper documentation and unit tests in place, I don't feel I need to review every line.
- rkozik1989 5mo ago
  Honestly, the effectiveness of LLMs in coding depends a lot on what you're working on. If you're dealing with a software package like Odoo that's been around for literal decades an LLMs output can be borderline useless. The problem is that in its training data it has examples from every version that's ever been released and each succeeding major version makes breaking changes to the previous one, so pretty much what happens is that the LLM can't accurately tell what in its training data belongs to which version before concocting a reply.
- munksbeer 5mo ago
  I must be doing something very different from the anti-AI people on here. It is ridiculously empowering. Got an issue in production? Give your agent the knowledge of how to locate the logs, and where the codebase is, and ask it to diagnose, and off it goes. It almost always finds the issue, and while it has been doing that, I've been able to get on with more productive things. In terms of coding, if you work on it, and give it the correct guidelines, guardrails and ability to check its own work, it produces very high quality results. The worst part is in such a short space of time I just don't think I can ever back to normal coding. I don't mind that, but it sucks when I'm offline. I honestly don't know what people are doing wrong, or what sort of code they're writing that they can't get an AI to work well for them.
  - MintPaw 5mo ago
    There's just different types of programming, I also find that if I give a decent description of a bug an LLM will often find the problem, and that great in a system that's mostly legacy and hard to repro. LLMs are also good for quick small scale from-scratch projects. But there's a middle ground where you're really have to build something out that's super complicated and performant. Or do refactors that have a high quality bar. Situations where code bloat really matters. LLMs tend to create crazy amounts of code, not really thinking through the broader system and taking system level in-variance constraints seriously.
  - deweller 5mo ago
    This is also my experience 80% of the time. Now that I am used to this, the other 20% feels like a lot more work than it used to. Is it more work? No. But my expectations have changed.
xiphias2 5mo ago
I think Andrej Karpathy's quote summarizes well what all software engineers are going through: ,,you can outsource your thinking but not your understanding'' There's just no way to not generate much more amount of code with LLMs than we would do as humans, so well structuring code gets much more important than ever before.
- jdiff 5mo ago
  The compounding issue is that understanding atrophies without thinking constantly reinforcing it. Shed no tears for the boilerplate, but the exercise is useful.
- belmarca 5mo ago
  I don't fully agree with the quote. You can't really outsource thinking nor understanding. You can outsource the generation of streams of tokens that may or may not be appropriate for what you're looking for. But you absolutely have to know what you're looking for, or have a very solid intuition of what it should look like and behave, otherwise you're just digging your own grave. The skill is in making the LLMs reliably generate useful and pertinent streams of tokens. That takes work, reading the output, intuition, experience, rigor, real commitment to doing good work, not fall prey to being lazy, etc.
spicyusername 5mo ago
You're going to keep seeing this because people don't like AI adoption. But the fact is this is not how it is. Every competent developer I know is delivering significantly more after being AI enabled. Anyone seriously using the tools without a chip on their shoulder is going to say the same. Are the tools delivering perfect code 100% of the time, no, of course not. But that's the new skill. Guiding them so they deliver good enough code at 5-50x the velocity. As the models improve and the ecosystem tries out new workflows, the skill changes and the output gets better and better. What we're capable of delivering now is incredible and would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
- svieira 5mo ago
  > 50x the velocity :blinks: You are producing in a week what used to take you a year?
  - discreteevent 5mo ago
    And at the same time they talk about "competent developer"s
  - spicyusername 5mo ago
    Lol, it's not sustained 50x for every task every minute. But there are definitely many tasks that used to take a very long time that now take almost no time at all, and that can be delivered in parallel with other tasks.
    - devmor 5mo ago
      That's a very silly claim to make, because you can make that same claim about writing a bash script.
    - svieira 5mo ago
      Yes, but what _percentage_ are they? Or is this the XKCD optimization graph all over again?
    - brazukadev 5mo ago
RugnirViking 5mo ago
I don't think this article is correct exactly, but I do feel that I'm less proud of my work. Less likely to go the extra mile. At first, I tried to do all the due diligence - reading and understanding all of the black box's output. But its clear what my workplace wants - more velocity, more code. If you take time reviewing, you're a blocker. If you lgtm that 3k LoC PR, that's great responsiveness. If you spend two days on a "simple fix" that involves broad cross cutting changes to the system and multiple library updates, you should be doing something else. We are all working across more areas of the system, less specialization, less understanding. And it is great. It does produce fixes, produce a facimilie of understanding. It answers my questions, and is often right. And tinkering with the process of it is satisfying. Integrating more and more data, writing better specs, you can get better results. Its tempting to think that it could be sustainable, this way of working, but also so scary to lose the understanding, to not have the confidence in how things work. Finding duplicated stacks using different libraries, or even the same library, is becoming more and more common. Even our debugging tools, our tracing grow fragmented and unstandardized. I liked the old way of working. It was fun for me, if often frustrating. It was solving hard sudoku on the train. This new way is lower friction, but more stress. It's steering a rocket ship using chopsticks to hold the wheel. You desperately want to slow things down and work methodically, to be sure, and safe. But you won't get anywhere near as far if you do that. Somewhere quiet, the tech debt demon smiles.
- mooreds 5mo ago
  I have so many questions. How long have you been doing this? Are you at a product company, a consultancy, a place where technology is an enabler but not core, or somewhere else? What happens when there are bugs or an outage due to that 3k LoC PR?
  - RugnirViking 5mo ago
    7 years experience as a developer or thereabouts. Its probably been a year since the agentic coding stuff has become really widespread, picking up pace a lot around jan. Even the old hands, 20 years plus at the company and those few holdouts who refused to use AI before are deep in it now. We're at a product company, not a consultancy. Hard to say exactly about tech, the tech is namely the product, but its b2b, so massive contracts move like glaciers, customer purchase decisions are often as much or more about the claims we made as the reality of the code. As for outages, its the same as it always was. We have our testing, in layers. unit tests, integrations, e2e, staging envs. Layers and layers before it reaches the customer. If there ever is something that reaches there, as has happened, its so hard to pin the blame on AI, and of course we run a blameless culture here anyhow. Tickets are assigned, emergency patches are made, and the behemoth lumbers on. I don't think AI makes our defences much better though. We catch the things we always caught, and miss those we always missed, in greater and greater volume. I don't pin blame on stupid management or whatever, I think this is complacency rather than a specific effort to push ai, as some claim. AI has just made it easier to work on more and understand less, and this is the result, no external intervention needed. I don't have a solution other than observing that trying to stop this is fighting the tides. People used to hate working on legacy codebases, where the original developers werent around to explain themselves, now everything is a legacy codebase right from inception - even if you personally don't use ai, the job is fundamentally different.
pxtail 5mo ago
In my case it's less about actual "rotting" and more about the feeling that any mine attempts to write code are futile and meaningless - if my LLM limits are exhausted it's actually more productive to go do something else (or write specs on how it should be done) and return back later and do LLM assisted coding than coding without it because in literally minutes I can then produce equivalent of hours-long "manual" coding session.
andai 5mo ago
The emperor has semi-transparent clothes.
jesse_dot_id 5mo ago
I'm experiencing the opposite.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
agentultra 5mo ago
> At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code Probably because they mandate its adoption. And while there are plenty of developers who will happily comply and see it as a good thing. There are others who will do it because they have to or risk losing their jobs. It's a bit of a silly thing to claim. "We made everyone use it, so they did, and now adoption is going up!"
- zeroonetwothree 5mo ago
  A lot of the code generated isn’t for the products shipped to users. At Meta someone told me that around 80% of generated code is for internal tools and dashboards (most of which have no usage).
- suttontom 5mo ago
  It's not even clear what this means. If an agent generates some code and I delete half and rewrite it, is the code AI-generated? If I start to write def calculate_average() and the "AI" auto complete fills it in when I hit tab, does that mean AI generated the code? What about auto complete which existed before LLMs? Did anyone ever measure how much code was "generated" using that?
giwook 5mo ago
404 media tends to put out quality articles in my opinion but this one feels a bit like clickbait. It seems like they're overgeneralizing quite a bit here and focusing on a narrow subset of the population while ignoring the people who are actually thriving with their new AI-enabled dev workflows. LLMs are not a panacea by any means and they have lots of cons. But I for one would find it difficult to go back to a world where I can't lean on LLMs in my day-to-day. One very specific example that could not possibly contribute to the brainrot mentioned in this article: AI saves time and reduces the headache of having to pore through pages of documentation (if there even is any) to find how that one method works or what arguments it can take. This alone is immensely helpful and can keep you in a state of flow instead of sending you off on a potentially fruitless side quest that derails your whole train of thought. It's also taken me quite a bit of time, effort, and experimentation to find the right tools and the right ways to work AI into my workflows which I would bet that the developers mentioned in this article have not explored too deeply if at all. Claiming AI is rotting your brain because you can't one-shot an entire app or even a single feature is a straw man fallacy.
- zeroonetwothree 5mo ago
  Well it’s certainly not “clickbait” since the title clearly tells you what it’s about.
  - giwook 5mo ago
    Sure. I meant it feels like it because it's presenting a rather sensationalistic headline that is pretty clearly just focusing on the perspective of one subset of the population instead of trying to accurately portray the nuance. There's always pros and cons but this article sounds like "it's only cons!".
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  > But I for one would find it difficult to go back to a world where I can't lean on LLMs in my day-to-day It is difficult for me to read this and believe your brain isn't rotted If you've become reliant on it, then your skills have atrophied. Your brain has rotted.
hirvi74 5mo ago
I feel the opposite, but then again, I do not use AI to actually write the code for me. It's like the faster StackOverflow search.
amelius 5mo ago
Yesterday I had been talking to an AI all day, and left work with a feeling of non-accomplishment even though I probably did slightly more than I would do normally, though time will tell if the maintenance costs will be higher or not. And I used to love my work :(
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
general1465 5mo ago
I have usually positive experience with AI. What it excels in are tasks which are having clear boundaries and proper context. I have also worked in customer support for some time and I have found that huge problem for some people (often times developers) is that they are lacking theory of mind. Like they literally can't comprehend that I don't see into their heads and they need to articulate their question with correct context otherwise I can't help them. AI is like a litmus test for it. People who have theory of mind, are capable of putting together a question which will give them good results out of AI. On the other hand people who are struggling with the fact that AI can't see what you mean unless it is in a context window will have bad time with it. These people also usually suck in managing other people because - once again - they are unable to provide tasks with enough context and properly set boundaries. At best they will give you some vague poorly defined tasks and get mad when you will do it differently than they had in their mind.
- helf 5mo ago
  [dead]
askllk 5mo ago
The only use case for AI is for looking up historical references and current events. The latter is probably the most used part, which is why models are only useful if they scrape news sites. You can also use it for regurgitating manuals, but generative AI for coding is counterproductive. Only the tool and gaming addicted people like it and pretend to be more productive, for which there is no public evidence. I don't see any software improving at any faster rate.
- mrits 5mo ago
  This reminds of Facebook will go the way of Myspace any day now rhetoric.
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  > Only the tool and gaming addicted people like it and pretend to be more productive, for which there is no public evidence. I don't see any software improving at any faster rate. I’m curios, which models have you used? I’ve been using Shmopus 69 and it’s out of the world, it’s so good that I don’t understand how people existed before it.
cowlby 5mo ago
I wonder how much this is correlated to token budgets? I'd be curious to see a split between $20/$100/$200/$500+ usage and see if there is different responses. I'm in the $400 range with Claude + Cursor subscription, use Opus exclusively, and my experience is wildly different from this.
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  Totally this. My employer provides $2k in tokens and I personally maxed out 3 credit cards just to continue spawning agents. Never felt so smart and enlightened before! Remove the last sentence before posting.
  - actualwitch 5mo ago
    > Remove the last sentence before posting. Huh? What did you mean by that?
    - mibsl 5mo ago
      Probably "/s", if I had to guess.
sd9 5mo ago
AI agents have made me far more productive, but the work now feels like drudgery. The most intellectually stimulating parts of the job were automated away first, and I am getting increasingly sick of typing into a chat bot all day. I got into software engineering because I was always fascinated by getting computers to do stuff, and I really enjoyed the manual task of programming. It's been a dream to earn a living doing something I would do in my spare time. I was pretty good at it too. I'm not having fun any more, so I've decided to leave the field and become a teacher. I won't earn nearly as much money but I expect to feel more fulfilled, and I hope I can help make a difference to some young people. I've had an extraordinarily privileged career, and many people never get the luxury of enjoying their work at all. But I'd rather try to enjoy what I do day to day than persist in something that's lost its spark.
- zeroonetwothree 5mo ago
  I am still coding interesting and complex stuff manually. I just make the AI do the boring stuff like data processing scripts or setting up tests. So it works kind of well for me
  - sd9 5mo ago
    That's what I'd like to do in my spare time. My job has become intolerant of that slow pace though now they've drunk the kool aid. I work at a startup and we're expected to produce game changing new features every day.
    - r_lee 5mo ago
      I'm curious, how do you think people around you there are taking it? I just can't help but feel like that is unsustainable and everyone is just going to burn out
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
- coldpie 5mo ago
nate8bit 5mo ago
It's pretty interesting because if you look at the net value over the last 2 to 3 years, you'd expect to see a flurry of high value/high complexity/high velocity software being delivered. But we haven't. We've seen outages almost normalized now and the only new thing being built are more AI integrations - and I have to ask: for whom? To me, there's a pretty big gap between the delivery and claim of AI, and the question is - do you stay an IC or do you become an agent manager (in which case you will lose your technical edge for sure).
000ooo000 5mo ago
Commercial software development will increasingly become dominated by the 'get shit done' types who had less appreciation for the craft. The slop will flow and no one will care, because the people who cared for the craft will have left or been pushed out. A shame.
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  My gf, who’s multiple levels below me in exp, is already expected to write full stack + CI for the same salary. I still have the luxury of seniority to be able to say “fuck off”, but not for long. You’ll do the work of 10 people and be happy, now you’re all 10x developers for 1x pay, rejoice!
belmarca 5mo ago
I have just stepped down from a CTO job where I built a FinTech's stack from the ground up. I leveraged a Claude Max plan for about 8 months and I can say with absolute certainty I would not have been as productive without it. I have barely written any code by hand during that time, but I did read almost every single line of code produced. My role was much more that of an "editor", as another article posted here mentioned. There is no doubt in my mind that you can be very highly productive with AI, it's just not the magical silver bullet some people market it as. I have a lot of notes describing the process that I'm considering publishing. Just yesterday I was interviewing for a very interesting job and I completely flunked the coding question in an unacceptable way for my level of experience. The question was easy, I just couldn't get past some syntactic issues. For 8 months, Claude wrote all of my Python classes and Pydantic types. Now I had to write a dataclass, and because I always just resorted to standard classes before the advent of LLMs, I stumbled. And froze. And panicked. And that was it. Of course you could say I should have just scrapped the dataclass and written it as a simple class. The point is I felt very, very stupid. LLMs suddenly felt like a huge disadvantage. All this to say I disagree with LLMs "rotting" my brain. Quite the opposite, I know that it's possible to use LLMs to be efficient and correct. It's more the actual mechanical act of writing that gets rusty.
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  Ooh, don’t feel sad. They’ve just hadn’t caught up to revolution yet. And let’s not use the bad S word! Let’s call it “temporarily agent deprived”. Just buy another $200 subscription and it will be okay again.
- snowe2010 5mo ago
  Wait, your final outlook on the situation isn’t that the LLM rotted your brain? Are you sure that this isn’t a case of “I refuse to believe I could have done the wrong thing for 8 months”?
  - belmarca 5mo ago
    I didn't "do the wrong thing" for 8 months. I built reliable, robust software that did what it was designed for. Would you say calculators rot brains? Did the invention of writing rot the brain?
chromatin 5mo ago
Is this substantially different, cognitively or skills-wise, than moving into management and directing a team to write code, but no longer writing code oneself?
- mplanchard 5mo ago
  And how many managers are on the line for incidents?
hirako2000 5mo ago
I've used LLMs to help with code since before vibe coding was termed. Experienced mental pains I never felt with any other activity except watching tiktok reels for hours. Got into points of no returns on numerous side projects, ai slop neither ai or myself could touch. I've developed a better mental loop. I simply review every lines of code it spits out, and refine the loop to get less code produced. But always demand the full file again. I commit each change. And inspect the diff for review. I don't feel drain or pain. LLMs still aren't standalone developers, but they can be tamed to execute well on well defined scope. If we review what they do, every time.
pullshark91 5mo ago
Doesn't open as it is for me. https://archive.is/2vjJm https://archive.is/2vjJm
throwmeaway3121 5mo ago
Throw away account for obvious reasons. I feel the same way as many. I've been coding for more than 20 years and I've always loved it. The ability to architect and craft something from nothing. But now with all the vibe coders and agentic coding, I pretty much lost a lot of the interest. I sometimes receive PRs to review of thousands of code where it's clear that they were from some AI and never even tested to begin with, why should I as a reviewer do that for you? If you want to use any AI, at least make sure that it works as it's supposed to, since I'll already have to go through all the code that you didn't write, and likely didn't even read yourself. Then similarly when I have to build something I sometimes use AI, but it's like cheating, and reducing my coding ability, I can already feel that. But at the end I think that the business just wants that, so I use that, and start to care less about the output, the quality, the whole architecture, so thanks to AI I'm putting less effort, I let AI work for me, while I do other things. Maybe that's the way
- beej71 5mo ago
  A lot of us really like solving hard problems, and the higher order problems just aren't challenging in that way. Abstracting ad infinitum, imagine you just have a button that completes the entire job. Incredible productivity gains! But also: boring as shit!
tomaytotomato 5mo ago
As a senior dev I would say there is a risk of muscle memory atrophy, but the learning opportunities outweigh the risk. Today I learned about a more elegant helper method in Apache Commons' StringUtils library for Java. The function was `trimToNull()` Normally I would have just done if (StringUtils.isBlank(foo)) { responseDTO.setFoo(null); } Now I can just do responseDTO.setFoo(trimToNull(foo)); I had written the original code, Claude suggested the improvement. I enjoy shipping code and reviewing what Claude writes. To add to that, what I find most helpful is the boring stuff, the JIRA cleanup, trawling Wikis and other sources to find out what the historical context of something was. Normally that would take me all day to do, with a 30 minute code change. Now I can do that in about 15 minutes and think about building or shipping some tool which I never had time to do.
- beej71 5mo ago
  One thing I tell my students is that after they've coded something up and it's working, they can give it to an LLM and get a code review. Code reviews have always been beneficial, and AI gives us a chance to get them a lot more frequently. I also tell students to be critical of the response that the LLM gives them; be opinionated and have a rationale. But in almost all classes, I tell them to not use LLMs to generate the solution up front. This ties into what you were saying about the boring stuff. If you know something like the back of your hand, the knowledge gain by rewriting it for the zillionth time is minimal. And so the loss from using an LLM to generate it is also minimal. But if it's something new and you're punting to the AI, you are sacrificing skills gain.
mountain_peak 5mo ago
In the words of the late, great Hal Finney, "The thing I always love is when there's an intellectual challenge that when you master it gives you practical abilities." Tangential capabilities from mentally challenging tasks are your personal differentiator - regardless of what tools you use or what you're working on. Running 5 miles puts you way ahead of the person who rode their e-bike for 20. Performing the hard work pays off - not always monetarily, but like exercise, it's uplifting and healthy, and provides long-term advantages. Corporations need differentiators as well - hopefully they rely on their creative and innovative employees to stand out, regardless of tooling.
senectus1 5mo ago
software developers are crafters. AI turns crafting into production line. its no wonder that a lot of developers are feeling empty.

100 points by SpyCoder77 5mo ago

bitwize 5mo ago

[flagged]

wiseowise 5mo ago
Did you ask your agent to write this?
- helf 5mo ago
  [dead]

deweller 5mo ago

"Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes." This has not been my experience. Sure it feels like more work to fix the AI code problems sometimes - it is a different skillset than writing code from scratch. But the speed that I can deliver software has significantly increased by using coding agents.

jjulius 5mo ago
>This has not been my experience. >But the speed that I...
- bensyverson 5mo ago
  First-hand experience is perfectly valid. I agree with the parent; I'm able to produce more. And with proper documentation and unit tests in place, I don't feel I need to review every line.
rkozik1989 5mo ago
Honestly, the effectiveness of LLMs in coding depends a lot on what you're working on. If you're dealing with a software package like Odoo that's been around for literal decades an LLMs output can be borderline useless. The problem is that in its training data it has examples from every version that's ever been released and each succeeding major version makes breaking changes to the previous one, so pretty much what happens is that the LLM can't accurately tell what in its training data belongs to which version before concocting a reply.
munksbeer 5mo ago
I must be doing something very different from the anti-AI people on here. It is ridiculously empowering. Got an issue in production? Give your agent the knowledge of how to locate the logs, and where the codebase is, and ask it to diagnose, and off it goes. It almost always finds the issue, and while it has been doing that, I've been able to get on with more productive things. In terms of coding, if you work on it, and give it the correct guidelines, guardrails and ability to check its own work, it produces very high quality results. The worst part is in such a short space of time I just don't think I can ever back to normal coding. I don't mind that, but it sucks when I'm offline. I honestly don't know what people are doing wrong, or what sort of code they're writing that they can't get an AI to work well for them.
- MintPaw 5mo ago
  There's just different types of programming, I also find that if I give a decent description of a bug an LLM will often find the problem, and that great in a system that's mostly legacy and hard to repro. LLMs are also good for quick small scale from-scratch projects. But there's a middle ground where you're really have to build something out that's super complicated and performant. Or do refactors that have a high quality bar. Situations where code bloat really matters. LLMs tend to create crazy amounts of code, not really thinking through the broader system and taking system level in-variance constraints seriously.
- deweller 5mo ago
  This is also my experience 80% of the time. Now that I am used to this, the other 20% feels like a lot more work than it used to. Is it more work? No. But my expectations have changed.

xiphias2 5mo ago

I think Andrej Karpathy's quote summarizes well what all software engineers are going through: ,,you can outsource your thinking but not your understanding'' There's just no way to not generate much more amount of code with LLMs than we would do as humans, so well structuring code gets much more important than ever before.

jdiff 5mo ago
The compounding issue is that understanding atrophies without thinking constantly reinforcing it. Shed no tears for the boilerplate, but the exercise is useful.
belmarca 5mo ago
I don't fully agree with the quote. You can't really outsource thinking nor understanding. You can outsource the generation of streams of tokens that may or may not be appropriate for what you're looking for. But you absolutely have to know what you're looking for, or have a very solid intuition of what it should look like and behave, otherwise you're just digging your own grave. The skill is in making the LLMs reliably generate useful and pertinent streams of tokens. That takes work, reading the output, intuition, experience, rigor, real commitment to doing good work, not fall prey to being lazy, etc.

spicyusername 5mo ago

You're going to keep seeing this because people don't like AI adoption. But the fact is this is not how it is. Every competent developer I know is delivering significantly more after being AI enabled. Anyone seriously using the tools without a chip on their shoulder is going to say the same. Are the tools delivering perfect code 100% of the time, no, of course not. But that's the new skill. Guiding them so they deliver good enough code at 5-50x the velocity. As the models improve and the ecosystem tries out new workflows, the skill changes and the output gets better and better. What we're capable of delivering now is incredible and would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

svieira 5mo ago
> 50x the velocity :blinks: You are producing in a week what used to take you a year?
- discreteevent 5mo ago
  And at the same time they talk about "competent developer"s
- spicyusername 5mo ago
  Lol, it's not sustained 50x for every task every minute. But there are definitely many tasks that used to take a very long time that now take almost no time at all, and that can be delivered in parallel with other tasks.
  - devmor 5mo ago
    That's a very silly claim to make, because you can make that same claim about writing a bash script.
  - svieira 5mo ago
    Yes, but what _percentage_ are they? Or is this the XKCD optimization graph all over again?
  - brazukadev 5mo ago

RugnirViking 5mo ago

I don't think this article is correct exactly, but I do feel that I'm less proud of my work. Less likely to go the extra mile. At first, I tried to do all the due diligence - reading and understanding all of the black box's output. But its clear what my workplace wants - more velocity, more code. If you take time reviewing, you're a blocker. If you lgtm that 3k LoC PR, that's great responsiveness. If you spend two days on a "simple fix" that involves broad cross cutting changes to the system and multiple library updates, you should be doing something else. We are all working across more areas of the system, less specialization, less understanding. And it is great. It does produce fixes, produce a facimilie of understanding. It answers my questions, and is often right. And tinkering with the process of it is satisfying. Integrating more and more data, writing better specs, you can get better results. Its tempting to think that it could be sustainable, this way of working, but also so scary to lose the understanding, to not have the confidence in how things work. Finding duplicated stacks using different libraries, or even the same library, is becoming more and more common. Even our debugging tools, our tracing grow fragmented and unstandardized. I liked the old way of working. It was fun for me, if often frustrating. It was solving hard sudoku on the train. This new way is lower friction, but more stress. It's steering a rocket ship using chopsticks to hold the wheel. You desperately want to slow things down and work methodically, to be sure, and safe. But you won't get anywhere near as far if you do that. Somewhere quiet, the tech debt demon smiles.

mooreds 5mo ago
I have so many questions. How long have you been doing this? Are you at a product company, a consultancy, a place where technology is an enabler but not core, or somewhere else? What happens when there are bugs or an outage due to that 3k LoC PR?
- RugnirViking 5mo ago
  7 years experience as a developer or thereabouts. Its probably been a year since the agentic coding stuff has become really widespread, picking up pace a lot around jan. Even the old hands, 20 years plus at the company and those few holdouts who refused to use AI before are deep in it now. We're at a product company, not a consultancy. Hard to say exactly about tech, the tech is namely the product, but its b2b, so massive contracts move like glaciers, customer purchase decisions are often as much or more about the claims we made as the reality of the code. As for outages, its the same as it always was. We have our testing, in layers. unit tests, integrations, e2e, staging envs. Layers and layers before it reaches the customer. If there ever is something that reaches there, as has happened, its so hard to pin the blame on AI, and of course we run a blameless culture here anyhow. Tickets are assigned, emergency patches are made, and the behemoth lumbers on. I don't think AI makes our defences much better though. We catch the things we always caught, and miss those we always missed, in greater and greater volume. I don't pin blame on stupid management or whatever, I think this is complacency rather than a specific effort to push ai, as some claim. AI has just made it easier to work on more and understand less, and this is the result, no external intervention needed. I don't have a solution other than observing that trying to stop this is fighting the tides. People used to hate working on legacy codebases, where the original developers werent around to explain themselves, now everything is a legacy codebase right from inception - even if you personally don't use ai, the job is fundamentally different.

pxtail 5mo ago

In my case it's less about actual "rotting" and more about the feeling that any mine attempts to write code are futile and meaningless - if my LLM limits are exhausted it's actually more productive to go do something else (or write specs on how it should be done) and return back later and do LLM assisted coding than coding without it because in literally minutes I can then produce equivalent of hours-long "manual" coding session.

andai 5mo ago

The emperor has semi-transparent clothes.

jesse_dot_id 5mo ago

I'm experiencing the opposite.

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agentultra 5mo ago

> At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code Probably because they mandate its adoption. And while there are plenty of developers who will happily comply and see it as a good thing. There are others who will do it because they have to or risk losing their jobs. It's a bit of a silly thing to claim. "We made everyone use it, so they did, and now adoption is going up!"

zeroonetwothree 5mo ago
A lot of the code generated isn’t for the products shipped to users. At Meta someone told me that around 80% of generated code is for internal tools and dashboards (most of which have no usage).
suttontom 5mo ago
It's not even clear what this means. If an agent generates some code and I delete half and rewrite it, is the code AI-generated? If I start to write def calculate_average() and the "AI" auto complete fills it in when I hit tab, does that mean AI generated the code? What about auto complete which existed before LLMs? Did anyone ever measure how much code was "generated" using that?

giwook 5mo ago

404 media tends to put out quality articles in my opinion but this one feels a bit like clickbait. It seems like they're overgeneralizing quite a bit here and focusing on a narrow subset of the population while ignoring the people who are actually thriving with their new AI-enabled dev workflows. LLMs are not a panacea by any means and they have lots of cons. But I for one would find it difficult to go back to a world where I can't lean on LLMs in my day-to-day. One very specific example that could not possibly contribute to the brainrot mentioned in this article: AI saves time and reduces the headache of having to pore through pages of documentation (if there even is any) to find how that one method works or what arguments it can take. This alone is immensely helpful and can keep you in a state of flow instead of sending you off on a potentially fruitless side quest that derails your whole train of thought. It's also taken me quite a bit of time, effort, and experimentation to find the right tools and the right ways to work AI into my workflows which I would bet that the developers mentioned in this article have not explored too deeply if at all. Claiming AI is rotting your brain because you can't one-shot an entire app or even a single feature is a straw man fallacy.

zeroonetwothree 5mo ago
Well it’s certainly not “clickbait” since the title clearly tells you what it’s about.
- giwook 5mo ago
  Sure. I meant it feels like it because it's presenting a rather sensationalistic headline that is pretty clearly just focusing on the perspective of one subset of the population instead of trying to accurately portray the nuance. There's always pros and cons but this article sounds like "it's only cons!".
bluefirebrand 5mo ago
> But I for one would find it difficult to go back to a world where I can't lean on LLMs in my day-to-day It is difficult for me to read this and believe your brain isn't rotted If you've become reliant on it, then your skills have atrophied. Your brain has rotted.

hirvi74 5mo ago

I feel the opposite, but then again, I do not use AI to actually write the code for me. It's like the faster StackOverflow search.

amelius 5mo ago

Yesterday I had been talking to an AI all day, and left work with a feeling of non-accomplishment even though I probably did slightly more than I would do normally, though time will tell if the maintenance costs will be higher or not. And I used to love my work :(

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general1465 5mo ago

I have usually positive experience with AI. What it excels in are tasks which are having clear boundaries and proper context. I have also worked in customer support for some time and I have found that huge problem for some people (often times developers) is that they are lacking theory of mind. Like they literally can't comprehend that I don't see into their heads and they need to articulate their question with correct context otherwise I can't help them. AI is like a litmus test for it. People who have theory of mind, are capable of putting together a question which will give them good results out of AI. On the other hand people who are struggling with the fact that AI can't see what you mean unless it is in a context window will have bad time with it. These people also usually suck in managing other people because - once again - they are unable to provide tasks with enough context and properly set boundaries. At best they will give you some vague poorly defined tasks and get mad when you will do it differently than they had in their mind.

helf 5mo ago
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askllk 5mo ago

The only use case for AI is for looking up historical references and current events. The latter is probably the most used part, which is why models are only useful if they scrape news sites. You can also use it for regurgitating manuals, but generative AI for coding is counterproductive. Only the tool and gaming addicted people like it and pretend to be more productive, for which there is no public evidence. I don't see any software improving at any faster rate.

mrits 5mo ago
This reminds of Facebook will go the way of Myspace any day now rhetoric.
wiseowise 5mo ago
> Only the tool and gaming addicted people like it and pretend to be more productive, for which there is no public evidence. I don't see any software improving at any faster rate. I’m curios, which models have you used? I’ve been using Shmopus 69 and it’s out of the world, it’s so good that I don’t understand how people existed before it.

cowlby 5mo ago

I wonder how much this is correlated to token budgets? I'd be curious to see a split between $20/$100/$200/$500+ usage and see if there is different responses. I'm in the $400 range with Claude + Cursor subscription, use Opus exclusively, and my experience is wildly different from this.

wiseowise 5mo ago
Totally this. My employer provides $2k in tokens and I personally maxed out 3 credit cards just to continue spawning agents. Never felt so smart and enlightened before! Remove the last sentence before posting.
- actualwitch 5mo ago
  > Remove the last sentence before posting. Huh? What did you mean by that?
  - mibsl 5mo ago
    Probably "/s", if I had to guess.

sd9 5mo ago

AI agents have made me far more productive, but the work now feels like drudgery. The most intellectually stimulating parts of the job were automated away first, and I am getting increasingly sick of typing into a chat bot all day. I got into software engineering because I was always fascinated by getting computers to do stuff, and I really enjoyed the manual task of programming. It's been a dream to earn a living doing something I would do in my spare time. I was pretty good at it too. I'm not having fun any more, so I've decided to leave the field and become a teacher. I won't earn nearly as much money but I expect to feel more fulfilled, and I hope I can help make a difference to some young people. I've had an extraordinarily privileged career, and many people never get the luxury of enjoying their work at all. But I'd rather try to enjoy what I do day to day than persist in something that's lost its spark.

zeroonetwothree 5mo ago
I am still coding interesting and complex stuff manually. I just make the AI do the boring stuff like data processing scripts or setting up tests. So it works kind of well for me
- sd9 5mo ago
  That's what I'd like to do in my spare time. My job has become intolerant of that slow pace though now they've drunk the kool aid. I work at a startup and we're expected to produce game changing new features every day.
  - r_lee 5mo ago
    I'm curious, how do you think people around you there are taking it? I just can't help but feel like that is unsustainable and everyone is just going to burn out
    - deleted 5mo ago
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coldpie 5mo ago

nate8bit 5mo ago

It's pretty interesting because if you look at the net value over the last 2 to 3 years, you'd expect to see a flurry of high value/high complexity/high velocity software being delivered. But we haven't. We've seen outages almost normalized now and the only new thing being built are more AI integrations - and I have to ask: for whom? To me, there's a pretty big gap between the delivery and claim of AI, and the question is - do you stay an IC or do you become an agent manager (in which case you will lose your technical edge for sure).

000ooo000 5mo ago

Commercial software development will increasingly become dominated by the 'get shit done' types who had less appreciation for the craft. The slop will flow and no one will care, because the people who cared for the craft will have left or been pushed out. A shame.

wiseowise 5mo ago
My gf, who’s multiple levels below me in exp, is already expected to write full stack + CI for the same salary. I still have the luxury of seniority to be able to say “fuck off”, but not for long. You’ll do the work of 10 people and be happy, now you’re all 10x developers for 1x pay, rejoice!

belmarca 5mo ago

I have just stepped down from a CTO job where I built a FinTech's stack from the ground up. I leveraged a Claude Max plan for about 8 months and I can say with absolute certainty I would not have been as productive without it. I have barely written any code by hand during that time, but I did read almost every single line of code produced. My role was much more that of an "editor", as another article posted here mentioned. There is no doubt in my mind that you can be very highly productive with AI, it's just not the magical silver bullet some people market it as. I have a lot of notes describing the process that I'm considering publishing. Just yesterday I was interviewing for a very interesting job and I completely flunked the coding question in an unacceptable way for my level of experience. The question was easy, I just couldn't get past some syntactic issues. For 8 months, Claude wrote all of my Python classes and Pydantic types. Now I had to write a dataclass, and because I always just resorted to standard classes before the advent of LLMs, I stumbled. And froze. And panicked. And that was it. Of course you could say I should have just scrapped the dataclass and written it as a simple class. The point is I felt very, very stupid. LLMs suddenly felt like a huge disadvantage. All this to say I disagree with LLMs "rotting" my brain. Quite the opposite, I know that it's possible to use LLMs to be efficient and correct. It's more the actual mechanical act of writing that gets rusty.

wiseowise 5mo ago
Ooh, don’t feel sad. They’ve just hadn’t caught up to revolution yet. And let’s not use the bad S word! Let’s call it “temporarily agent deprived”. Just buy another $200 subscription and it will be okay again.
snowe2010 5mo ago
Wait, your final outlook on the situation isn’t that the LLM rotted your brain? Are you sure that this isn’t a case of “I refuse to believe I could have done the wrong thing for 8 months”?
- belmarca 5mo ago
  I didn't "do the wrong thing" for 8 months. I built reliable, robust software that did what it was designed for. Would you say calculators rot brains? Did the invention of writing rot the brain?

chromatin 5mo ago

Is this substantially different, cognitively or skills-wise, than moving into management and directing a team to write code, but no longer writing code oneself?

mplanchard 5mo ago
And how many managers are on the line for incidents?

hirako2000 5mo ago

I've used LLMs to help with code since before vibe coding was termed. Experienced mental pains I never felt with any other activity except watching tiktok reels for hours. Got into points of no returns on numerous side projects, ai slop neither ai or myself could touch. I've developed a better mental loop. I simply review every lines of code it spits out, and refine the loop to get less code produced. But always demand the full file again. I commit each change. And inspect the diff for review. I don't feel drain or pain. LLMs still aren't standalone developers, but they can be tamed to execute well on well defined scope. If we review what they do, every time.

pullshark91 5mo ago

Doesn't open as it is for me. https://archive.is/2vjJm https://archive.is/2vjJm

throwmeaway3121 5mo ago

Throw away account for obvious reasons. I feel the same way as many. I've been coding for more than 20 years and I've always loved it. The ability to architect and craft something from nothing. But now with all the vibe coders and agentic coding, I pretty much lost a lot of the interest. I sometimes receive PRs to review of thousands of code where it's clear that they were from some AI and never even tested to begin with, why should I as a reviewer do that for you? If you want to use any AI, at least make sure that it works as it's supposed to, since I'll already have to go through all the code that you didn't write, and likely didn't even read yourself. Then similarly when I have to build something I sometimes use AI, but it's like cheating, and reducing my coding ability, I can already feel that. But at the end I think that the business just wants that, so I use that, and start to care less about the output, the quality, the whole architecture, so thanks to AI I'm putting less effort, I let AI work for me, while I do other things. Maybe that's the way

beej71 5mo ago
A lot of us really like solving hard problems, and the higher order problems just aren't challenging in that way. Abstracting ad infinitum, imagine you just have a button that completes the entire job. Incredible productivity gains! But also: boring as shit!

tomaytotomato 5mo ago

As a senior dev I would say there is a risk of muscle memory atrophy, but the learning opportunities outweigh the risk. Today I learned about a more elegant helper method in Apache Commons' StringUtils library for Java. The function was `trimToNull()` Normally I would have just done if (StringUtils.isBlank(foo)) { responseDTO.setFoo(null); } Now I can just do responseDTO.setFoo(trimToNull(foo)); I had written the original code, Claude suggested the improvement. I enjoy shipping code and reviewing what Claude writes. To add to that, what I find most helpful is the boring stuff, the JIRA cleanup, trawling Wikis and other sources to find out what the historical context of something was. Normally that would take me all day to do, with a 30 minute code change. Now I can do that in about 15 minutes and think about building or shipping some tool which I never had time to do.

beej71 5mo ago
One thing I tell my students is that after they've coded something up and it's working, they can give it to an LLM and get a code review. Code reviews have always been beneficial, and AI gives us a chance to get them a lot more frequently. I also tell students to be critical of the response that the LLM gives them; be opinionated and have a rationale. But in almost all classes, I tell them to not use LLMs to generate the solution up front. This ties into what you were saying about the boring stuff. If you know something like the back of your hand, the knowledge gain by rewriting it for the zillionth time is minimal. And so the loss from using an LLM to generate it is also minimal. But if it's something new and you're punting to the AI, you are sacrificing skills gain.

mountain_peak 5mo ago

In the words of the late, great Hal Finney, "The thing I always love is when there's an intellectual challenge that when you master it gives you practical abilities." Tangential capabilities from mentally challenging tasks are your personal differentiator - regardless of what tools you use or what you're working on. Running 5 miles puts you way ahead of the person who rode their e-bike for 20. Performing the hard work pays off - not always monetarily, but like exercise, it's uplifting and healthy, and provides long-term advantages. Corporations need differentiators as well - hopefully they rely on their creative and innovative employees to stand out, regardless of tooling.

senectus1 5mo ago

software developers are crafters. AI turns crafting into production line. its no wonder that a lot of developers are feeling empty.