Hate AI

59

u/ajcomeau 17h ago

Start coding your own projects and do the programming yourself. Companies will always make you use their tools and practices. Create your own environment, take control and own the work.

-10

u/Blue4life90 17h ago

..in your own time. the problem with learning as you go in a work environment that has embraced the convenience of AI is you fall badly behind if you avoid it. more knowledge yeilds more growth so you'll have to have double the effort to adapt to an AI landscape while pursuing your own growth.

18

u/ajcomeau 17h ago

Personal projects should be done outside work hours and off company property. Otherwise, there can be questions of ownership if the project becomes valuable.

1

u/Riaayo 3h ago

Depending on your job and contract they may own anything you code on your own time and on your own computer, too, but that doesn't mean your advice isn't solid.

If you make it on company time, and especially on company computers, they very likely own it.

•

u/Blue4life90 43m ago

Well, I apologize for the wording, reading it back to myself, I see it. Fucked up the last sentence. The rest of it's fine. Here's a translation breakdown:

"..in your own time." -adding to the last guys comment.

The problem with learning as you go in a work environment -(key context here. In your free time or at home is NOT what I meant..)

..that has embraced the convenience of AI.. -(..because with other work places that still have actual development teams, this may not be a problem..)

..is you fall badly behind if you avoid it. -(..because your peers code output is drastically higher than what you're capable of doing at your current level).

More knowledge yeilds more growth, -(*..obviously. you're not learning much if you're just prompting..)

..but missing pretext- if you avoid AI and just learn as you go at work, you'll have to have double the effort to adapt to an AI landscape while pursuing your own growth.

•

u/ajcomeau 12m ago

I read any employment contract very carefully just for stuff like that.

12

u/ApplicationOk3587 16h ago

I swear you all are either miserable people or bot accounts. There is literally no harm in someone spending their free time programming without AI. Just because all you think about is a job doesn't mean people still don't enjoy just sitting down and building things themselves using their brains.

-4

u/Blue4life90 15h ago

What are you talking about? lmao. I never said there was any harm in someone programming without AI. I literally said the opposite, "More knowledge yeild more growth" ..as in "people that just 'vibe code' without knowing what they are doing are far weaker in this landscape than than vibe coder that just mindlessly prompts without the skills to QA the response.

1

u/Riaayo 3h ago

Your whole previous post is worded like you're saying if someone tries to code on their own time they will fall behind on vibe-coding. And even with you saying this here, it doesn't really feel like that wasn't what you were saying before.

6

u/WelpSigh 15h ago

Do you really fall behind? I am not sure telling a robot to do something for you is really very enriching. There are definitely some very good workflows with AI but if you're smart enough to write good code you can definitely figure them out quickly.

1

u/Fine-Impression-554 12h ago

Why is there such a thing of "falling behind"? Fall behind.. what?

5

u/Riaayo 3h ago

AI Andys are convinced prompting is just as much a "skill" as actual work and will scream night and day that if you don't get on their bandwagon and legitimize their plagiarism "think for me daddy corp" machine that you will definitely totally absolutely be left behind in the "AI future".

Meanwhile they're hitching their very ability to think and problem solve to unsustainable machines owned by oligarchs that will, at some point, implode or cut them off (and which were made to replace them outright).

1

u/Fine-Impression-554 1h ago

That "skill" is presented in a ~30 min video by some guy from antrophic.

The fundamentals are still needed(searching right things, critical thinking).

We live in a world.

-4

u/Blue4life90 13h ago

Not in the beginning as a junior unfortunately. Guess I should have worded what I said better because I'm catching a lot of slack from people that obviously agree with my sentiment but aren't catching the context.

In a situation like OP, where you are learning to code and working for a company that has basically hired you to vibe code, then due to your lack of experience and refusal to use and learn AI prompting, you absolutely will fall behind. The only person that will appreciate this take the senior dev that has to validate 10,000 plus commits a month because of all the vibe coding monkeys on the payroll, but based on OP description, that guy may not even exist in his workplace.

Unfortunately, in speed of output alone, you just cant beat a computer. Where people have leverage is QA.

-2

u/Remarkable-Poet-4718 11h ago

Thanks for the clear explanation, this really helped me understand recursion better.

21

u/TheLoneTomatoe 17h ago

Agree with the other comments. When I started where I’m at now, it was fun, got to go deep in the code and learn + do new things. CEO learned what Claude was and now we’re expected to rely on it completely and it’s monitored.

So I just started up bigger projects on my off time, and more often than not I can just work on those while Claude does its thing at work. Then I just have to review some code and move on

2

u/CJMooch 17h ago

To so many people, this sounds miserable, and to me this sounds like a peak 9-5 existence lol I will be ecstatic if this is my outcome

16

u/TheLoneTomatoe 17h ago

It’s not terrible, but it’s not very fun.

11

u/Friendly_Recover286 14h ago

You say this but what do you do when the C suite realizes they can fire you and replace you with a college grad for less pay? Pasting requirements into a chatbot and having it review its own code isn't a super specialized job.

2

u/YunalescaQT 5h ago

What does the new college grad do when the C-suite can just send voice commands to the AI and it builds their business for them?

18

u/gsidess 16h ago

Programming used to be a skill. It was also an expression of yourself.

AI came and every SWD/SWE just collectively decided output is worth more than cognitive ability and the environment.

8

u/Biliunas 16h ago

Yeah there is. Generally the closer you get to the hardware, the shittier the LLM performs. It's almost useless for audio languages like pd or max.

6

u/mjTheThird 15h ago

Coding is going to be a lot like making tables. Are there amazing carpenters who make outstanding tables? Yes, of course. But the majority of IKEA tables aren't made by carpenters, and most people are okay with an IKEA table.

4

u/rupertavery64 17h ago

You can write progams you like for yourself. Practically all software in the world uses software somebody built for themselves and decided to share it because it was useful.

2

u/Br3ttl3y 15h ago

Ow-- right in my soul.

2

u/TomWithTime 17h ago

For work? That's hard. You are in a great position though! If you enjoy coding, you can still code in your own free time. You can also invert roles with the ai sometimes and have it scaffold stubs for you to fill in.

Thinking of business requirements and vetting the ai labor is skipping you to what the seniors traditionally did. Many people burn out on writing code and the main job is designing problem solutions anyway. You're in a unique position to take on as much of both as you want and lean into the role as described if you start to burn out in a few years.

Even though I love architecture and system design system , I don't even have a chance to have grasp on them.

Practice and study outside of work will give you the best options no matter how things unfold. I still love code at 11 years in the industry and I am grateful for all of the practice and side projects I took on to improve my skills.

Any other tech jobs where I can enjoy coding and low level things

I'm sure there are but I think you are better off using this opportunity to improve your basics and architecture while getting paid to do so. Your best chance of not having a boss to require you to use ai right now is finding a non technical job where coding isn't one of your responsibilities, but then using your code skills to build things and improve the job. Not sure if that's viable in 2026, but it was a fun way to gain experience 10+ years ago.

1

u/Character_Pie_277 1h ago

If you love systems architecture this is the best moment ever to be a dev imo.

The hard part about making real software was always the systems architecture. Its just we all had to laboriously type up code to implement it.

Now we don't. We can reason about system architecture and now all have a great junior dev who never quits to implement it all in agentic coding.

Your current job sounds like it sucks... having to just prompt without thinking.

But i wouldn't be too disheartened. I think its just more of a case of shitty job rather than you being in the wrong field.

1

u/Stunning_Leather_102 13h ago

Do you maybe have enough free time to do it like that after work hours? Or some kind of personal project? Go touch some grass do something else too. A job is a job.

-1

u/huuaaang 17h ago edited 17h ago

IMO it's just a different window into the execution models. If you really dig into a problem with AI (a good model like Opus 5) you can really learn a lot. The trick is to treat agent like a pair programmer, step through everything, and actually ask pointed questions about the execution models. Don't just prompt it with business requirements and let it run wild.

For example, recently I had to dive into Sidekiq and how Ruby schedules threads to solve for CPU bound thread starving certain I/O operations in other threads, raising warnings. And I really got into the weeds (in a good way). The agent and I explored several solutions and their tradeoffs.

It sure beat Googling stuff without all the context of my actual codebase, which is what I used to do. The agent could even dive into the source code of the specific library versions I am using to help me figure out what's going on and why. It's truly amazing.

I'm convinced that people complaining about AI preventing them from learning anything are just using it wrong. If you job is preventing you from getting into the weeds with AI to analyze problems, that's a problem with your company policy, not AI.

0

u/LopsidedSolution 17h ago

I would quit and go work as a roofer

0

u/_tshepo 13h ago

I think it is a perfect time to start either a YouTube channel or a programmer blog. Where you will have the freedom to build your own projects. 1 feature at a time...

This will be useful for you and educational for upcoming developers.

The other alternative I hear people talk about is starting your own business, getting someone who likes business and partner up. You do tech and they do business.

The other alternative is to be a freelancer for mid sized businesses. Not sure how this works out, but it would give you the freedom of choice.

Once I'm good, I want to freelance a little and job hunt. For now, I'm still writing my code by hand. 😅

0

u/tangentstorm 11h ago

I find I get better results if I tell the AI how to do things, not just what to accomplish. so I'm still actively involved in the implementation, and the results are much closer to what I'd write by hand

-5

u/adambahm 14h ago

I’m the opposite.

Spend 30 seconds building something that takes 10 minutes? Hell yeah.

It’s never perfect, but it’s 80% of the way there. I can use my brain to close the 20% and make it good.

Shipping functional code is more important than my joy of building things. I have my personal projects to build for the fun of it.

At work, just ship code.

-6

u/throwaway_0x90 10h ago edited 4h ago

Sorry you're getting downvoted. You're absolutely correct. The bitter truth is some devs are not going to survive this new AI world.

If you like abstract problem solving with software, as in business processes then AI is great.

If you're just a '90s nerd enjoying the syntax needed to reverse a linked list in C++, just sitting alone at your desk with a liter of Mountain Dew, medium sized pizza and a product spec clearly defined by someone else and you only want to remain undisturbed as you build it... that career path will be extinct in a couple of years.

-1

u/theseyeahthese 9h ago

“ …think about business requirements.”

Bud, that was always the job.

2

u/throwaway_0x90 4h ago

That's the job of mid & senior/staff engineers.

interns & jr are the ones that just want to write as much code as possible based on clearly defined specs given to them. And that's why it's hard to hire jr right now.

-12

u/StoneCypher 17h ago

not really, no. the industry isn't here for you to have fun, and nobody wants to employ people moving at human speed anymore.

-16

u/Pumped-Up-Kickz 17h ago

like an old boomer Fortran bank programmer.

u will be redundant in 3 years.

5

u/Friendly_Recover286 14h ago

You'll be redundant too in 3 years when the AI manager can orchestrate the AI bots to do the tasks better than you can 🤷

This is a hilariously stupid take

-9

u/Pumped-Up-Kickz 12h ago

I'm already practically retired boomer, and living of the proceeds and passive income of the businesses I built with an AI LLM

I build what i want, how i want, when i want.

Fuck working for some company and fuck some product manager telling me what to do.

;)

1

u/YunalescaQT 5h ago

So much larp in this post it hurts.

-16

u/Ambitious_Muscle_362 17h ago

What's the problem. Job is for earning money, if you want to do what you like then get a hobby.

Or a real job.

You are about to leave Redlib