Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer

My opinion is that these are not analogous.

Programming takes practice. And if all of your code is generated via LLM, then you're not getting any practice.

It's the same as saying using genAI will make you a bad artist. In the sense that putting hands-to-medium makes you a good artist, that is true. Unless you take deliberate steps to learn, your skills will attrophe.

However, being a good programmer|artist is different from being a successful programmer|artist. GenAI can help you churn out tons of content, and if you can turn that content into income, you'll be successful.

Even before LLMs, successful and capable were orthogonal features for most programmers. We had people who made millions churning out a crud website over a few months, and others that can build game engines, but are stuck in underpaid contracting roles.

I'll always remember a lab we had in university where we hand-wrote machine code to do blinkenlights, and used an array of toggle switches to enter each byte into memory by hand.

All of this is true, but all of the examples that came before were deterministic, so once you understood the abstraction, you still understood the whole thing.

AI is different.

Those are all syntactic changes, AI attempts to be semantic, totally different.

I already miss the fun heads down days of unraveling complex bugs.

Now I'm just telling AI what to do.

[delayed]

And you/we will be replaced by an AI that will solve the business problem (the day they get so good to actually do that, which might happen or not but... who knows?)

I agree, I was always annoyed in projects where these kids thought they were still in school and spinning up incredible levels of over abstraction that led to some really horrible security problems.

and a teacher is hired to teach, but some self-improve so they may become headmaster

Maybe you become worse at solving business problems with technology once you let that muscle atrophy?

For me AI is really powerful autocomplete. Like you said, I wrote the abstraction years ago. Writing the abstraction again now is not required.

A time and place may come where the AI are so powerful I’m not needed. That time is not right now.

I have used Rider for years at this point and it automatically handles most imports. It’s not AI, but its one of the things that is just not needed for me to even think about.

It doesn't make you a bad developer, it just stops novel and innovative ways of doing something, because the cheaper way is to just use what's free.

I've also heard similar arguments about "Using stackoverflow instead of RTFM makes you a bad programmer."

These things are all tradeoffs. A junior engineer who goes to the manual every time is something I encourage, but if they go exclusively to only the manual every time they are going to be slower and produce code more disjoint and harder to maintain than their peers who have taken advantage of other people's insights into the things the manuals don't say.

But theyre worse at navigating nuance and complexity than humans...

Me too! I got into ESP32s and sensors thanks to AI. I wouldn't have had time or energy after stressful work all day but thanks to them I can get firmware written for my projects. Along the way I'm also learning how the firmware has to be written and finding issues with what the AI wrote and correcting them.

If people aren't learning from AI it's their fault. Yeah AI makes stuff up and hallucinates and can be wrong but how is that different than a distracted senior dev? AI is available to me 24/7 to answer my questions in minutes or seconds where half the time when I message people I have to wait 30-60min for a response.

People just need to approach things intelligently and actually learn along the way. You can easily get to the point where you're thinking more clearly about a problem than the AI writing your code pretty quickly if you just pay attention and do the research you need to understand what's happening. They're not as factual as a textbook but they don't need to be to give you the space to ask the right questions and they'll frequently provide sources (though I'd heavily recommend checking them. Sometimes the sources are a joke)

I second this. It's like having a second brain with domain expertise in pretty much anything I could want to ask questions of. And while factual assertions may still be problematic (hallucinations), I can very quickly run code and see if it does what I want or not. I don't care if it hallucinates if it solves my problem with code that is half decent. Which it does.

I do agree this is where AI shines. If you need a quick rehash of something that's been done a zillion times before or a quick integration between two known good components, AI's great.

But the skills you describe are still skills, reading and researching and doing your own fact finding are still important to practice and be good at. Those things only get more important in situations off the beaten path, where AI doesn't always give you trustworthy answers or do trustworthy work.

I'm still going to nurture some of these skills. If I'm trying to learn, I'll stick to using AI only when I'm truly stuck or no longer having fun.

I am using AI to learn EVERYTHING. Spanish, code, everything. Honestly, the largest acceleration I am getting is in research towards design docs (which then get used for implementation).

Absolutely. It's a tireless rubik's cube. One that you can rotate endlessly to digest new material. It doesn't sigh heavily or not have the mental bandwidth to answer. Yes, it should not be trusted with high precision information but the world can get by quite well on vibes.

I have definitely had Claude make recommendations that gave me structural insight into the code that I didn't have on my own, and I integrated that insight.

People who claim "It's not synthesized, it's just other people's work run through a woodchipper" aren't precisely right, but they also aren't precisely wrong... And in this space, having the whole ecosystem of programmers who published code looking over my shoulder as I try to solve problems is a huge boon.

This is the smartest answer in this polarized thread

That may be dangerous. The more obscure the topic, the more likely it is that the AI will come up with a working but needlessly convoluted solution.