The AI Situation in Software Development
Working with AI in coding shifts your time from implementation to upfront design and detailed prompting. You can give a full spec, a high-level goal, or something in between, but each approach costs time. Context windows limit how much you can feed, so you must compress and refine. Domain-specific models matter, and feedback loops with tests and tooling are crucial. Ultimately, you still spend time, but now it's in words, not code.
I feel I am still implementing in words instead of code.
- petilon
One aspect AI is weak in is controlling complexity. If you tell it to implement something it will go ahead and implement it, without considering how much complexity it adds to the system or weighing alternatives. An experienced engineer on the other hand may decide the feature is too minor relative to the complexity it adds, and may decide to not do the feature. Or he may make some clever compromises to get most of the functionality while keeping the codebase simple. AI is weak in this judgement, it doesn't spontaneously exercise architectural restraint. As a result the code may progressively become too complex even for AI manage, and it becomes whack-a-mole where you can't make a change without breaking something.
- qprofyeh
With previous engineering trends like blockchains and microservices, you could choose not to jump on the bandwagon. However the coding agents trend is different and is changing the very fabric (sry for Claudeism) of software engineering, for better or worse. I do know we will never go back to mainly programming through code again, that’s for sure.
- usremane
Coding with AI has now introduced feature dopamine. At times this results in the system being prone to more failures because AI may have missed edge cases.
Also i am experiencing a decline in job satisfaction and i'm more prone to procrastination because I know the agents will do the work 10x faster than me. I am personally worried about this shift and I fear becoming less knowledgeable over time or not feeling the need to keeping up with new tech stack as agents do the work.
- sagabai
About "implementing by words bit": I don't believe English is a great language to program.
It's not type-safe, not object oriented, not functional. Has poor tools to highlight syntax or navigate through "wordbase", doesn't fail fast. It has no tests and has too large room for machine or other humans to interpret it.
Very often it's easier for me to express my thoughts in Java, which is ironically known to be a "wordy" language. But it's nowhere close to wordiness of English.
- livvy
And you immediately give up your IP for someone else to use. The 4th option, if you have something in your mind worth building, is to just build the thing, without an LLM.