I have been reading a lot that 90% of their code is AI generated, companies are pushing developers to use AI as it makes them fast. But I am a little cautious of believing them. Is it true? Also sorry I didn’t find a css career subreddit so I am asking here.
AI sucks in my domain. One of our competitors uses it and they say they get amazing results when senior people use the tools but can’t give them to juniors because they keep messing up.
I’m glad it doesn’t work in my niche to be honest. I’m in the frontlines debugging broken code and the last thing I need is bloat. This would actually slow me down a lot. I find it pretty shitty at diagnosing even small pieces of code, and I can’t try stuff like Claude Code because I’m not allowed to transfer some of the code we use to the cloud because it’s under NDAs. But if it can’t get the simple stuff right, I can’t trust it with the keys to our Lambo.
I stay informed about it all to know when/if I should quit software engineering and do something else, but it seems fine so far. It looks like I won’t be able to take it easy in the future and go back to pissing webapp code, which means less opportunities, but oh well.
Oh and I do know two companies that mandate LLM usage. Somebody from my current company left for one of those and hates it.
I am not a professional programmer but it seems to me that the idea that AI is needed to increase the firehose of code being written to “improve” programming and how well computers work is as absurd as the idea that the point of a university degree in a language is to increase the raw amount of words being written in that language.
The point is to convey ideas with language not produce more language, same thing with code, the point is to solve problems not produce ever larger and larger amounts of code with automation.
Something I know without a doubt is that for many people who love language, they desire a great deal less of the fake, hurtful, useless words that drown out the good ones. People who love words and work in crafting and shaping them tend to think it is inherently good to shape useful words not just mindlessly produce combinations of words in as great a volume possible.
To put it in a more abstracted fashion, relying on AI to produce more and more code faster and faster feels like a Jazz musician saying they rely on AI to fill in all the empty spaces they leave between notes with complementary embelleshing notes. The point of a jazz musician is clearly not to produce the most notes possible, it is to convey meaning with notes.
To bring it back to a concrete example, how many times has Google built a new chat program/app from scratch and then abandoned it? Sure there is lots of code there of very high quality, an intimidating amount to be sure, but isn’t the primary job of the programmer here to say “hey, why don’t we stop writing new code from the ground up for every chat app a different part of the company wants and standardize it to a much smaller codebase with a set of customizations different parts of the company can apply to the same core chat program”?
It seems to me a good programmer would be good at framing problems from a perspective that requires as simple implementation in code as possible within reason, not be best at producing the program with the most lines of code fastest that still solves the problem.