Engineers who dismiss AI

If we sees ourselves less as a programmer and more as a software builder, then it doesn’t really matter if our programming skills atrophy in the process of adopting this tool, because it affords us to build at a higher abstraction level), kind of like how a PM does it. This up-leveling in abstractions have happened over and over in software engineering as our tooling improves over time. I’m sure some excellent software engineers here couldn’t write in assembly code to save their lives, but are wildly productive and respected for what they do - building excellent software.

That said, as long as there’s the potential for AI to hallucinate, we’ll always need to be vigilant - for that reason I would want to keep my programming skills sharp.

AI assisted software building by day, artisanal coder by night perhaps.

> how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities?

Couldn't the same statement, to some extent, be applied to using a sorting lib instead of writing your own sorting algorithm? Or how about using a language like python instead of manually handling memory allocation and garbage collection in C?

> What I want above all is AI that helps me become better at my job and continue to build skills and knowledge

So far, on my experience, the quality of what AI outputs is directly related to the quality of the input. I've seen some AI projects made by junior devs that a incredibly messy and confusing architecture, despite they using the same language and LLM model that I use? The main difference? The AI work was based on the patterns and architecture that I designed thanks to my knowledge, which also happens to ensure that the AI will produce less buggy software.

>For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities?

My cynical view is you can't, and that's the point. How many times before have we seen the pattern of "company operates at staggering losses while eliminating competition or becoming entrenched in enough people's lives, and then clamps down to make massive profits"?

Do you save time by using a calculator / spreadsheet or try to do all calculations in your head, because your ability to do quick calculations degrades the more you rely on tools to do it.

I'm not too worried about degrading abilities since my fundamentals are sound and if I get rusty due to lack of practice, I'm only a prompt away from asking my expert assistant to throw down some knowledge to bring me back up to speed.

Whilst my hands on programming has reduced, the variety of Software I create has increased. I used to avoid writing complex automation scripts in bash because I kept getting blocked trying to remember its archaic syntax, so I'd typically use bun/node for complex scripts, but with AI I've switched back to writing most of my scripts in bash (it's surprising at what's capable in bash), and have automated a lot more of my manual workflows since it's so easy to do.

I also avoided Python because the lack of typing and api discovery slowed me down a lot, but with AI autocomplete whenever I need to know how to do something I'll just write a method stub with comments and AI will complete it for me. I', now spending lots of time writing Python, to create AI Tools and Agents, ComfyUI Custom Nodes, Image and Audio Classifiers, PIL/ffmpeg transformations, etc. Things I'd never consider before AI.

I also don't worry about its effects as I view it as inevitable, with the pendulum having swung towards code now being dispensable/cheap to create, what's more important is velocity and being able to execute your ideas quickly, for me that's using AI where I can.

You can’t and that’s the new normal. We’re probably the only generation which was given an opportunity to get properly good at coding. No such luxury will be available in a few years optimistically; pessimistically it’s been taken away with GPT 5.2 and Opus 4.5.

This is part of the learning curve. When you vibe code you produce something that is as if someone else wrote it. It’s important to learn when that’s appropriate versus using it in a more limited way or not at all.

You can always ask it to nudge you in the right direction instead of giving the solution right away. I suspect this way of using it is not very popular though.

This is not a new problem I think. How do you use Google, translator, (even dictionaries!), etc without "degenerating" your own abilities?

If you're not careful and always rely on them as a crutch, they'll remain just that; without actually "incrementing" you.

I think this is a very good question. How should we actually be using our tools such that we're not degenerating, but growing instead?

I worry about that too.

But at this point, it's like refusing to use vehicles to travel long distances in fear of becoming physicaly unfit. We go to the gym.

I think we should label devs overreliant on AI as "Engineers who dismiss themselves"

Perhaps in that case the critics should bend their ire on the marketing departments, rather than trashing the tech?

Really though, the potential in this tech is unknown at this point. The measures we have suggest there's no slowdown in progress, and it isn't unreasonable for any enthusiast or policy maker to speculate about where it could go, or how we might need to adjust our societies around it.

> You want to market to engineers, stick to provable statements.

And that's where the "AI" is lacking.

"AI can write a testcase". Can it write a _correct_ test case (i.e. one that i only have to review, like i review my colleague work) ?

"AI can write requirements". Now, that i'm still waiting to see.

Is it possible you're not the target audience if you are aware that LLMs are impressive and useful? Regardless of the inane hype and bubble around them.

You have to be particularly gullible to fall for these tactics. Especially when the quality of LLM products has declined over the last 18 months.

Allow me to repeat myself: AI is for idiots.

Because it has been true for the last 3 years. Just because a saying is repeated a lot doesn't mean it's wrong.

A year ago I could get o1-mini to write tests some of the time that I would then need to fix. Now I can get Opus 4.5 to do fairly complicated refactors with no mistakes.

These tools are seriously starting to become actually useful, and I’m sorry but people aren’t lying when they say things have changed a lot over the last year.

I mean, luddites have consistently been correct. Technological advancements have consistently been used to benefit the rich at the expense of regular people.

The early Industrial Revolution that the original Luddites objected to resulted in horrible working conditions and a power shift from artisans to factory workers.

Dadism was a reaction to WWI where the aristocracy's greed and petty squabbling led to 17 million deaths.

This guy's knowledge of art history is the Dada wikipedia page and the Banksy movie from 20 years ago.

Allow me to repeat myself: AI is for idiots.

> Just normal Luddite things, which attracts those most threatened in their personal identity by the new technology.

I feel like “Luddite” is a misunderstood term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

> Malcolm L. Thomas argued in his 1970 history The Luddites that machine-breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, undermine lower-paid competing workers, and create solidarity among workers. "These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made." [emph. added] Historian Eric Hobsbawm has called their machine wrecking "collective bargaining by riot", which had been a tactic used in Britain since the Restoration because manufactories were scattered throughout the country, and that made it impractical to hold large-scale strikes. An agricultural variant of Luddism occurred during the widespread Swing Riots of 1830 in southern and eastern England, centring on breaking threshing machines.

Luddites were closer to “class struggle by other means” than “identity politics.”

As before, the big gap I still see is between engineers who set something up the right way and engineers who push code up without considering the bigger picture.

One nice change however is that you can guide the latter towards a total refactor during code review and it takes them a ~day instead of a ~week.

If anything I’ve learnt more because I’m having to go and find bugs in areas that I’m not super clued up on… yet ;)

No. The opposite. The people who “move faster” are literally just producing tech debt that they get a quick high five for, then months later we limp along still dealing with it.

A guy will proudly deploy something he vibe coded, or “write the documentation” for some app that a contractor wrote, and then we get someone in the business telling us there’s a bug because it doesn’t do what the documentation says, and now I’m spending half a day in meetings to explain and now we have a project to overhaul the documentation (meaning we aren’t working on other things), all because someone spent 90 seconds to have AI generate “documentation” and gave themselves a pat on the back.

I look at what was produced and just lay my head down on the desk. It’s all crap. I just see a stream of things to fix, convention not followed, 20 extra libraries included when 2 would have done. Code not organized, where this new function should have gone in a different module, because where it is now creates tight coupling between two modules that were intentionally built to not be coupled before.

It’s a meme at this point to say, ”all code is tech debt”, but that’s all I’ve seen it produce: crap that I have to clean up, and it can produce it way faster than I can clean it up, so we literally have more tech debt and more non-working crap than we would have had if we just wrote it by hand.

We have a ton of internal apps that were working, then someone took a shortcut and 6 months later we’re still paying for the shortcut.

It’s not about moving faster today. It’s about keeping the ship pointed in the right direction. AI is a guy a guy on a jet ski doing backflips, telling is we’re falling behind because our cargo ship hasn’t adopted jet skis.

AI is a guy on his high horse, telling everyone how much faster they could go if they also had a horse. Except the horse takes a dump in the middle of the office and the whole office spends half their day shoveling crap because this one guy thinks he’s going faster.

Fellow diagnosed ADHD here. And I know every ADHD is different and people are different.

What helps me is:

- Prefer faster models like VSCode's Copilot Raptor Mini which, despite the name, is like 80% capable of what Sonnet 4.5 is. And is much faster. It is a fine tunned GPT 5 mini.

- Start writting the next prompt while LLMs work or keep pondering about the current problem at hand. This helps our chaotic brain to keep focused.

I find that any additional overhead caused by the separate AI chat is saved 20x over by basically never having to use a browser to look at documentation and S/O while coding.

As I see it, this is an inherent part of the tech industry. Unless you expressly choose to focus your career on maintaining legacy code, your value as a dev depends on your ability and willingness to continuously learn new tech.

100% agree. My only super power is weaponized “trying to understand”, spending a Saturday night in an obsessive fever dream of trying to wrap my head around some random idea.

That happens to produce good code as a side effect. And a chat bot is perfect for this.

But my obsession is not with output. Every time I use AI agents, even if it does exactly what I wanted, it’s unsatisfying. It’s not sometning I’m ever going to obsess over in my spare time.