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.
I’m still writing 90% of my code by hand at work. I think if you have total or close to total mastery in your domain, you should probably work faster than AI.
It takes a while for AI to generate code (Opus is pretty slow) and then you have to go review it and do rounds and rounds of fixes. It might be faster to use AI if there were unknowns or if you werent quite sure how to write the code. Otherwise I just find it faster to write it myself.
That being said I do use AI under some soecific circumstances:
- im working in a code base or area of code im unfamiliar with
- Im working in a language in unfamiliar with
- prototyping ideas
- generating boilerplate heavy code
For 1. And 2. I dont usually have ai write code for me. I would just ask it questions like “how do I write X in an idiomatic way in language Y”.
For 3, I have it generate code that I then toss and rewrite if the prototype works.
For 4, this is rare in a good code base. Most of the boiler plate heavy code at work is in unit tests.
If you are a senior level dev you will spend less time writing your own code than ai and you will understand it better, and will not slowly lose your critical thinking skills in the process.
I am still more productive not using ai than anyone else on my team who uses it.
My company gave us access to AI tools and encourage us to use them, but nothing is forced, which is nice. I like using Claude for light scripting, explaining bits of code, and as a second set of eyes during review.
If you have AI generate all of your code, you’re going to have a bad time. But if you’re completely against AI and unwilling to use it, you’re probably going to be left in the dust.
AI does not have a foothold in my area, because it still takes far more time to understand what it did, and debug it. Faster to just do it ourselves.
However, there are some programming jobs where people can use what it makes without checking much, or understanding what it does. And while this probably has some cost to pay down the line, if it gets the job done today, then everyone wins.
I know some freelancers, and small shops, that make a lot of money untangling the code made by the above.
It’s been creeping slowly into my workplace over the past year. I’ve gotten by without using it myself so far, but there’s been a soft push by management for developers to use AI in their daily work. Experienced devs with a measured approach to AI (“it’s not a silver bullet, but incredibly and increasingly useful”) are given a platform, while AI skeptics are quietly ignored.
Management says they don’t plan on replacing engineers with AI, but it’s hard not to get that impression when a draft for an upcoming company AI meeting has a heading titled “A Bigger Department Without Hiring a Bigger Department”.
Writing code was never 100% of the job. The hard part of software engineering is understanding the problem and figuring out the most elegant path to solve it. If AI can do the code-writing part faster, then it’s a good tool to use.
I still spend a third of my week in meetings. I put out on-call fires late at night.
I also spend a good chunk of my time interviewing potential hires. I pretty much expect them to use AI for their code assignments. Including prompt history is a plus if they do. What I do gauge is their ability to explain their code, defend the decisions and know how to adapt to changing circumstances.
I know how to get to this point by starting a couple of decades ago. I do recognise that I don’t have the same grasp of our codebase as if I had written it by hand. I do review everything that gets deployed, but the volume is higher and it doesn’t stick as well.
I don’t know how to get in as a jr today. We’ll know in a few years how it’s done. It’s a new landscape, but if you’re passionate about the field you’ll figure it out.
Not there yet at my company, but management is starting to shove AI down the throats of the more senior engineers at first. I’ve definitely heard of companies where they strictly push for as much AI as possible which is just completely self destructive and delusional.
It sucks that we have to use this crap even if we don’t want it or need it just because the suits see the line go up (even if the line is completely made up of garbage code that will explode one day), but that doesn’t mean you should quit the field. There’s still plenty work to be done, and that will probably go upwards as the symptoms of reckless AI usage start showing up.
The work is worse by all means, you are encouraged or forced to work in a way that strips all enjoyment away, you are forced to nitpick code made by others that you know vibe coded the entire thing, and fixing tons of stupid as hell bugs that a human would probably not make. But still, it takes an actual engineer that knows what they’re doing to be able to clean up that mess and do some actual engineering.
What I fear the most is what comes after the pre-AI senior engineers start leaving or going to retirement, and you’re left with engineers who finished their degrees without ever truly diving into details like one would before AI, starting jobs without learning properly and picking up all the domain knowledge.
