Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer

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.

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

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.

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.

This.

I am mid career now.

High level langages like js or python have a lot of bad design / suboptimal code... as well as some java code in many places.

Some bad java code (it just needs to be a sql select in a loop) can easily perform thousand time worse than a clean python implementation of the same thing.

As said above, once c was high level programing language and still is in some places.

I do not code in python / go / js that much these days, but what made me a not so bad developper is my understanding of computing mechanism (why and how to use memory instead of disk, how to arange code so cpu can use it's cache efficiently...)

As said in many posts, code quality even for vibe coded stuff depends more on what was prompted and how many efforts the PR diff is human readable to get maintainable and efficient softwares at the end of the day.

Yet senior devs often spend more time reviewing code instead of actually writting some. Vibe coding ultimately feels the same for me at the moment.

I still love to write some code by hand, but I start to feel less and less productive with this approach while at the same time feeling I don't really lost my skills to do so.

I think I really feel and effectively am more efficient at delivering thing with appropriate quality level for my customers now that I have agentic coding skills in my belt.

AI makes you not be a programmer (at least, that seems to be the goal). So it’s a little different from those.

It’s like a carpenter talking about IKEA saying “I remember when I got an electric sander, it’s the same thing”.

The problem I have with a lot of these "oh I've heard it all before"-type posts is that some of what you heard is true. Yes, IDEs did make for some bad programmers. Yes, scripting languages has made for some bad programmers. Yes, some other shortcuts have made for bad programmers.

They haven't destroyed everyone but there definitely are sets of people who used the crutches and never got past them. And not just in a "well they never needed anything more" but worse programmers than they should or could have been.

C doesn't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work.

IDEs don't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work.

Intellisense/autocomplete doesn't make you dependent on constant Internet connectivity, charge a monthly subscription, or expose you to lawsuits from powerful companies claiming copyright over your work.

lol all of the latter points are true though (except for it being only men, though i get how things were back in the day)

> "C makes you a bad programmer. Real men code in assembler."

So, who is it that supposedly said that? Not K&R (obviously). Not Niklaus Wirth. Not Stroustrup. Not even Dijkstra (Algol 60) and he loved writing acerbic remarks about how much the average developer sucked. I don't recall Ken Thompson, Fred Brooks (OS/360), Cutler, or any other OS architect having said anything like that either. Who in that era that has any kind of credibility said that?

The "Real Men Don't Use Pascal" essay was a humorous shitpost that didn't reflect any kind of prevailing opinion.

"Paying a guy from the Philippines to write your code and submit it under your name is just another tool no different than using an IDE!"

Surely we agree that some boundary exists where it becomes absurd right? We are just quibbling over where to draw the line. I personally draw it at AI.

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

Now I'm just telling AI what to do.

Actually kind of worse: adopt and become irrelevant.

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?)

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.

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

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

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.

Are you a consultant? Because otherwise there’s a thing called a “career ladder”, and you are very much being paid to self-improve. And if you don’t, that’s going to feature prominently in your next promotion review.

I love to code, like fun code, solving a relatively small concrete problem with code feels rewarding to me....however, writing business code on the other hand? Not really.

I do however, love solving business problems. This is what I am hired for. I speak to VP/managers to improve their day to day. I come up with feasible solution and translate them into code.

If AI could actually code, like really code(not here is some code, it may or may not work go read documentation to figure out why it doesn't), I would just go and focus on creating affordable software solutions to medium/small businesses.

This is kind of like gardening/farming, before industrial revolution most crops required a huge work force, these days with all the equipment and advancements a single farmer can do a lot on their own with small staff. People still "hand" garden for pleasure, but without using the new tech they wouldn't be able to compete on a big scale.

I know many fear AI, but it is progress and it will never stop. I do think many devs are intelligent and will be able to evolve in the workplace.

> I’m hired to solve business problems with technology, not to self-improve or get on my high horse because I hand-wrote a silly abstraction layer for the n-th time

So, this "solve business problems" is some temporary[1] gig for you?[2]

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[1] I'm reminded of the anti-union people who are merely temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

[2] Skills atrophy. Maybe you won't need the atrophied skill in the future, but how sure are you that this is the case? The eventual outcome?

> The real issue arises when you stop bothering to read all the code that the LLM writes.

Fluency in reading will disappear if you aren't writing enough. And for the pipeline from junior to senior, if the juniors don't write as much as we wrote when young, they are never going to develop the fluency to read.

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.

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.

> "...many people did..."

I'm trying to think of any examples of someone who said that "a generation ago" at all? I assume that they were some sort of fringe crackpot.

This is the smartest answer in this polarized thread

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.

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.

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 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.

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).

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 guess yours might have been intended to be a facetious comment, but a quick google for designer weaving shows up a UK company as the first hit for me that sells their work for approximately $1500 per square foot.

If the demand for this work is high, maybe the individual workers aren't earning $100k per year, but the owner of the company who presumably was/is a weaver might well be earning that much.

What the loom has done is made the repeatable mass production of items cheap and convenient. What used to be a very expensive purchase is now available to more people at a significantly cheaper price, so probably the profits of the companies making them are about the same or higher, just on a higher volume.

It hasn't entirely removed the market for high end quality weaving, although it probably has reduced the number of people buying high-end bespoke items if they can buy a "good enough" item much cheaper.

But having said that, I don't think weavers were on the inflation-adjusted equivalent of 100k before the loom either. They may have been skilled artisans, but that doesn't mean the majority were paid multiples above an average wage.

The current price bubble for programming salaries is based on the high salaries being worth paying for a company who can leverage that person to produce software that can earn the company significantly more than that salary, coupled with the historic demand for good programmers exceeding supply.

I'm sure that even if the bulk of programming jobs disappear because people can produce "good enough" software for their purposes using AI, there will always be a requirement for highly skilled specialists to do what AI can't, or from companies that want a higher confidence that the code is correct/maintainable than AI can provide.

This is a key insight.

In my day job, I use best practices. If I'm changing a SQL database, I write database migrations.

In my hobby coding? I will never write a database migration. You couldn't force me to at gunpoint. I just hate them, aesthetically. I will come up with the most elaborate and fragile solutions to avoid writing them. It's part of the fun.

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

well, faster, till you have to touch old code that now neither you nor AI understands

Not in my experience... I am more productive and produce better output than the devs i know that rely on AI tooling

What an odd thing for them to put in the article. This is an example of AI generated code making someone a better programmer (by improving their ability to read code and give feedback). So it contradicts the title.

They could rename it "Using AI Generated Code Makes Programming Less Fun, for Me", that would be more honest.

The problem for programmers is (as a group) they tend to dislike the parts of their job that are hardest to replace with AI and love the stuff that is easiest for machines to copy. It turns out meetings, customer support, documentation, tests, and QA are core parts of being a good engineer.

I find a that actually a disturbing assumption. I've learned a lot from reading other peoples code, seeing how they were thinking and spotting errors, so the good and the bad. I believe that in order to actually write good code its important to actually understand what is the context of the task which basically requires a lot of code reading, which is also sometimes quite enjoyable when you have competent authors. Reading code is an essential part of the game. If you cannot do that you'll just create huge balls of mud with or without ai usage. Though using ai will speedrun the mud so yeah, there is an argument for not using it.

Using a compiler will also make you much worse at writing assembly code. Doesn’t bother me at all. Haven’t written any assembly since the 20th century.

Having someone else write the code is about as far from intentional practice as can be.

I do think the “becoming dependent on your replacement” point is somewhat weak. Once AI is as good as the best human at programming (which I think could still be many years away), the conversation is moot.

Agreed mostly, especially in terms of efficiency. I have, however, been seeing more people recently with a built in dependency on their IDEs to solve their problems.

Maybe it's more like being a taxi driver using a self-driving car.

No, it's more akin to running around the neighborhood for 3 miles vs driving to the gym and run on a treadmill there for 3 miles.

AI bus sometimes will just decide to take you to different city on a whim tho

How is AI not a stochastic parrot? That’s exactly what it is. That never precluded it from being useful.

But AI is still a stochastic parrot with no actual intellectual capability... who actually believes otherwise? I figured most people had played with local models enough by now to understand that it's just math underneath. It's extremely useful, but laughably far from intelligence, as anyone who has attempted to use Claude et al for anything nontrivial knows.

About a year ago, another commenter said this in response to the question "Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?":

> "I’m a senior and LLM’s never provide code that pass my sniff test, and it remains a waste of time."

Even a year ago that seemed like a ridiculous thing to say. LLM's have made one thing very clear to me: A massive percentage of developers derive their sense of self worth from how smart coding makes them feel.

So what you're saying is that two years ago, people were saying that AI won't take our jobs. And that it hasn't taken our jobs.

Fascinating.

Two years ago there were also hundreds of people constantly panic-posting here about how our jobs would be gone in a month, that learning anything about programming was now a waste of time and the entire profession was already dead, with all other knowledge work guaranteed to follow. People were posting about how they were considering giving up on CS degrees because AI would make them pointless. The people who used language like "stochastic parrots" were regularly mocked by AI enthusiasts, and the AI enthusiasts were then mocked in return for their absurd claims about fast take-off and imminent AGI. It was a cesspool of bad takes coming from basically every angle, strengthening in certainty as they bounced off each other's idiocy.

Your memory of the discourse of that era has apparently been filtered by your brain in order to support the point you want to make. Nobody who thoughtlessly adopted an extreme position at a hinge point where the future was genuinely uncertain came out of that looking particularly good.

> First AI is clearly not a stochastic parrot

No it very clearly is. Even still today, it is obvious that it has zero understanding of anything and it's just parroting training data arranged in different ways.