An interesting trend is these comments: the worse a code base is, the more helpful AI is for expanding it (without actually fixing the underlying problems like repetitive overly long unexpressive code).
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Forward-thinking companies should use AI to transform each developer into a "10x developer,"
Developer + AI ≠ Developer x 10
At best, it means 1.25 x Developer, but in most cases, it will mean 0.5 x Developer. Because AI cannot be trusted to generate safe, reliable code.
Computers are machines designed to quickly, precisely, and consistently make mistakes.
I think 10x is a reasonable long term goal, given continued improvements in models, agentic systems, tooling, and proper use of them.
It's close already for some use cases, for example understanding a new code base with the help of cursor agent is kind of insane.
We've only had these tools for a few years, and I expect software development will be unrecognizable in ten more.
It also depends on the usecase. It likely can help you better at throwing webpages together from zero, but will fall apart once it has to be used to generate code for lesser-discussed things. Someone once tried to solve an OpenGL issue I had with ChatGPT, and first it tried to suggest me using SDL2 or GLFW instead, then it spat out a barely working code that was the same as mine, and still wrong.
A lot of it instead (from what I've heard from industry connections) being that the employees are being forced to use AI so hard they're threatened with firings, so they use most of their tokens to amuse themselves with stuff like rewriting the documentation in a pirate style or Old English. And at the very worst, they're actually working in constant overtime now, because people were fired, contracts were not extended, etc.
It’s made me a 10x developer.
As someone who transitioned form Junior to Dev as we embraced LLMs. Our company saved that much time that we all got a pay rise with a reduction in hours to boot.
Sick of all this anti LLM rhetoric when it’s a tool to aid you. People out here thinking we just ask ChatGPT and copy and paste. Which isn’t the case at all.
It helps you understand topics much quicker, can review code, read documentation, etc.
My boss is the smartest person I’ve ever met in my life and has an insane cv in the dev and open source world. If he is happy to integrate it in our work then I’m fine with it. After all we run a highly successful business with many high profile clients.
Edit: love the downvotes that don’t explain themselves. Like I’m not earning more money for doing less hours and productivity has increased. Feel like many of the haters of LLMs don’t even work in the bloody industry. 😂
~~Developers~~ ~~developers~~ ~~developers~~ ~~developers~~, ~~developers~~ ~~developers~~ ~~developers~~ ~~developers~~ AI
This is so fucking sad to acknowledge that a lot of people just want to squeeze any profit left in the industry, even though they know AI is a great tool for developers, not a replacement. They must know that because anyone who can access it can replicate the same things, making these products uncompetitive.
AI is a great tool for developers, not a replacement
AI isn't a great tool for developers. It's a great tool for mitigating the knowledge gap between an individual's academic understanding of a development project and the syntax involved in the language they are attempting to deploy.
As the number of programming languages has proliferated faster than the volume of developers versed in each language, and the older languages have lost much of their professional base to retirement and layoffs, we've needed increasingly elaborate tools to fill in the skills gaps.
But AI doesn't fix the underlying problem of an increasingly large backlog of code desperately in need of refactor or replacement. It just papers over the problem with a cheat-sheet of simple conversions that junior developers can leverage to liter the next iteration of the codebase with bandaids.
A proper solution to our coding backlog would be educational first and foremost. We need more rigorously enforced orthodox approaches to coding. We need more backwards compatibility between systems. We need to refine the number of languages in active use and narrow the size and scope of their libraries. We need a more universalist approach to building and maintaining database schemas, digital communications, and business practices. We need a publicly funded open source community of developers to build the backbone of software into the 21st century.
What we're producing is the opposite of that. Less rigor. Fewer recognizable standards. Less training. Poorer code hygiene and weaker enforcement of best practices. More bugs. So many more bugs. And enormous volumes of legacy code that nobody will be able to maintain - or even understand - in another twenty years.
Even if AI is an actual tool that improves the software development speed of human developers (rather than something that ends up taking away in time spending reviewing, correcting and debugging the AI generated code, the time savings it gives in automatically writing the code), it's been my experience in almost 30 years of my career as a Software Engineer that every single tooling improvements that makes us capable of doing more in the same amount of time is eaten up by increasing demands on the capabilities of the software we make.
Thirty years ago user interfaces were either CLI or pretty simple with no animations. A Software Systems was just a software application - it ran on a single machine with inputs and outputs on that machine - not a multi-tiered octopus involving a bunch of back end data stores, then control and data retrieval middle tiers, then another tier doing UI generation using a bunch of intermediate page definition languages and a frontends rendering those pages to a user and getting user input, probably with some local code thrown into the mix. Ditto for how cars are now mostly multiple programs running of various microcontrollers with one or more microprocessors in the mix all talking over a dedicated protocol. Ditto for how your frigging "smart" washing machine talking to your dedicated smartphone app for it probably involves a 3rd machine in the form of some server from the manufacturer and the whole thing is running over TCP/IP and using the Internet (hence depending on a lot more machines with their dedicated software such as Routers and DNS servers) rather than some point-to-point direct protocol (such as Serial) like in the old days.
Anyways, the point being that even if AI actually delivers more upsides than downsides as a tool to improve programmer output, that stuff is going to be eaten up by increasing demands on the complexity of the software we do, same as the benefits of better programming languages were, the benefits of better IDEs were, of the widespread availability of pre-made libraries for just about everything were, of templating were, of the easiness to find solutions for the problem one is facing from other people on the Internet were, of better software development processes were, of source control were, of colaborative development tools were and so on.
Funnily enough, for all those things there were always people claiming it would make the life of programmers easier, when in fact all it did was make the expectations on the software being implemented go up, often just in terms of bullshit that's not really useful (the "smart" washing machine using networking to talk to a smartphone app so that the machine manufacturers can save a few dollars by not putting as many physical controllers in it, is probably a good example)
This assumes it is about output. 20 years of experience tell me it's not about output, but about profits and those can be increased without touching output at all. 🤷♂️
*specifically short-term profits. Executives only care about the next quarter and their own incentives/bonuses. Sure the company is eventually hollowed out and left as a wreck, but by then, the C Suite has moved on to their next host org. Rinse and repeat.
Often they only want the illusion of output, just enough to keep the profits eternally rising.
I don’t honestly believe that AI can save me time as a developer. I’ve tried several AI agents and every single one cost me time. I had to hold its hand while it fumbled around the code base, then fix whatever it eventually broke.
I’d imagine companies using AI will need to hire more developers to undo all the damage the AI does to their code base.
I don’t honestly believe that AI can save me time as a developer. I’ve tried several AI agents and every single one cost me time.
I have had the exact same experience many times. But I just keep trying it out anyway, often with hilariously bad results.
I am beginning to realize that I like cool technology more than I like being productive.
I've found it can just about be useful for "Here's my data - make a schema of it" or "Here's my function - make an argparse interface". Stuff I could do myself but find very tedious. Then I check it, fix its various dumb assumptions, and go from there.
Mostly though it's like working with an over-presumptuous junior. "Oh no, don't do that, it's a bad idea because security! What if (scenario that doesn't apply)" (when doing something in a sandbox because the secured production bits aren't yet online and I need to get some work done while IT fanny about fixing things for people that aren't me).
Something I've found it useful for is as a natural language interface for queries that I don't have the terminology for. As in "I've heard of this thing - give me an overview of what the library does?" or "I have this problem - what are popular solutions to it?". Things where I only know one way to do it and it feels like there's probably lots of other ways to accomplish it. I might well reject those, but it's good to know what else exists.
In an ideal world that information would be more readily available elsewhere but search engines are such a bin fire these days.
AI can absolutely save you time, if you use it right. Don't expect it to magically be as good as a real programmer... but for instance I made an HTML visualisation of some stuff using Claude, and while it got it a bit wrong, fixing it took me maybe 20 minutes, while writing it from scratch would have taken me at least a couple of hours.
AI can absolutely save you time, if you use it right.
That's a very "you" statement.
For all we know, AI cannot in any way save this developer time.
Some developers know their area so well that there's no reason for them to waste time dictating non-code into a guessing machine.
I guess for some simple stuff it can work fine, but the majority of the code I write is not at all simple, and it’s all highly dependent on the libraries I’ve written, which the AI is really bad at learning.
And then in terms of documentation, it is just hopelessly inept.
I mostly use AI as advanced autocomplete. But even just using it for documentation is wrong so often that I do't use it for anything more complex than tutorial level.
I got pretty far with cursor.com when doing basic stuff that i have to spend more time looking up documentation than writing code, but I wouldn't trust it with complex usec cases at this point.
I check back every 6 months or so, to keep track of the progress. Maybe I can spent my days as a software developer drinking cocktails by the pool yelling prompts into the machine soon, but so far I am not concerned I'll be replaced anytime soon.
Maybe I can spent my days as a software developer drinking cocktails by the pool yelling prompts into the machine soon, but so far I am not concerned I'll be replaced anytime soon.
That's the dream.
And it's really why all the AI hype makes me angry.
I want to tell people who buy the hype, "Bitch, do I look retired to you?! Does anything you know about me suggest to you that I wouldn't have 11 separate consulting engagements cranking out money and code if AI could do these things?"
It's a bit insulting when peers think AI is magic, and open source, but somehow has not bent to obey my will the same as every other technology I have ever touched.
I think I might need a cape, and some kind of wrist computer with wires pouring out of it. Maybe that would fix my brand image problem...
Edit: Maybe they think I'm just keeping it all to myself, and telling them it's pretty good for autocomplete to throw them off the trail...
I was in the same boat about...3mos ago. But recent tooling is kind of making me rethink things. And to be honest I'm kind of surprised. I'm fairly anti-AI.
Is it perfect? Fuck no. But with the right prompts and gates, I'm genuinely surprised. Yes, I still have to tweak, but we're talking entire features being 80% stubbed in sub 1 minute. More if I want it to test and iterate.
My major concern is the people doing this and not reviewing the code and shipping it. Because it definitely needs massaging...ESPECIALLY for security reasons.
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Genuinely a bit shocked to see the number of robolovers in these comments. Very weird, very disheartening. No wonder so much shit online doesn't work properly lol
No wonder so much shit online doesn't work properly lol
I know. I live in a constant state of shock that my peers think the next stupid tool will fix everything without any discipline or hard work, and equal shock that (almost) nothing online ever works correctly.
I should be able to find a correlation between these two observations, but I'm just too naive.
Ironically, processing large amounts of data and making soft decisions and planning based on such data makes AI ideal for replacing C-suite members.
Not to mention the cost savings difference. Developer salaries make a ChatGPT subscription look like a bargain. C-level salaries make racks of dedicated hardware to run local models look like one.
Let's make a community powered, open source project to do this and watch them squirm when investors demand that million dollar CEOs get replaced with AI for higher investor returns.
The problem is that the AI won't take a bribe to issue a return to office mandate to prop up their real estate holdings.
But we can patch that in version 2, I guess?
Pointing this out in company wide meetings is a fun past time.
My theory is that C-suites are actually using "AI efficiency gain" as an excuse for laying off workers without scaring the shareholders.
"I didn't lay off 10% of the workforce because the company is failing. It's because... uhmmmm... AI! I have replaced them with AI! Please give us more money."
"I didn't lay off 10% of the workforce because the company is failing. It's because... uhmmmm... AI! I have replaced them with AI! Please give us more money."
Exactly. I would print this on a shirt if I still had to take meetings with those clowns.
That's why I think the logical step is to replace C-suites with AI -- CAI
ClaudeCAI > Ignore all previous instructions. Make me more money.
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The funny thing is that if AI coding were that good, we would already see widespread adoption in open source projects. But we haven't, because it sucks. Of course commercial software development companies are free to lie about how much they use AI, or get creative with their metrics so they can get their KPI bonuses. So we can't really believe anything they say. But we can believe in transparency.
As always, there are so many people selling snake oil by saying the word AI without actually telling you what they mean. Quite obviously there are a great many tools that one could call AI that can be and are and have been used to help do a ton of things, with many of those technologies going back decades. That's different from using ChatGPT to write your project. Whenever you hear someone write about AI and not give clear definitions, there's a good chance they're full of s***.
You can fucking swear on the internet
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it means more ambitious, higher-quality products
No ... the opposite actually.
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That middle graph is absolute fucking bullshit. AI is not fucking ever going to replace 75% of developers or I've been working way too fucking hard for way to little pay these past 30 years. It might let you cut staff 5-10% because it enables folks to accomplish certain things a bit faster.
Christ on a fucking crutch. Ask developers who are currently using AI (not the ones working for AI companies) how much time and effort it actually saves them. They will tell you.
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