Lots of software folks—especially super experienced, senior ones—talking about how using AI will make you get worse at coding.
I dunno man.. if using AI made you worse at coding, maybe you’re just not using it right. I feel like I only better at coding using AI, compared to the same length of time spent coding without. And at the rate of how good it gets, I suspect it will be a multiplying factor in helping me accelerate at getting even better at coding, faster.
Some observations and solutions:
❌ Poor prompting, like giving vague instructions or desired outcomes. Basically skill issue.
✅ Hot take: Prompting is like a whole new programming language itself. The English part of it is deceptive - just because you speak English doesn't mean you're well versed in prompting. Even hotter take: Just because you know Assembly, C++, Javascript and PHP, doesn't mean you already know how to prompt.
❌ Expecting AI to be able to do everything from a single prompt
✅ One part of skill issue. But Most LLMs until now don't do well if you give them all the information they need to solve it, expecting them to give you the right answer in one go, on first try. Nope. You need progressive prompting, revealing more context as you go. Only the recent o1 model seems to have cracked that, but waaay too expensive now to use for coding.
❌ Stop reading code. Just accepting whatever the AI provides.
✅ If you don't watch what you eat, you become what you eat. Rubbish in, rubbish out. No quality control means poor code, as simple as that. Just because the provider is a robot doesn't mean you stop being a manager and arbiter of what code enters your repo. If you'll never do that with even senior programmers, why would you suddenly get lazy and just accept whatever the AI gives? Human folly, not robot issue.
❌ Spend more time debugging than coding.
✅ If debugging is taking too much time, you're probably prompting wrong, or doing what I said in the first 3 points here. And the right solution is seldom to ask the AI to debug your code, because you got off at the wrong base. Revert, and start over with a fresh prompt knowing what went wrong. And then prompt it together piece by piece instead.
❌ Never believed in AI for coding anyway, so just give it a cursory attempt, and then says it's "meh".
✅ You get as much as you put in. If you never believed in Stack Overflow, you'll think it's shit too when the first answer you get is "Answer is duplicate of xxx", or "Why ? Use my framework instead.". So many folks I see dissing on AI, when you probe further, they just hate it for ego reasons, and never gave it an honest try. Besides, it's such a lame take. Like, when programmers started searching for answers on Stack Overflow, I'm sure the older veterans would complain as they would complain now about AI, that Stack Overflow will make programmers worse at coding. Because they just "copy and paste code"! Yet, googling for answers and on Stack Overflow is now considered an industry norm.
So... in the end, AI is just a tool like Stack Overflow before, but with superpowered search, filtering and personalisation. Think about it. That's just it.
It's just a fking tool.
You can use it to be lazy, or you can use it to get better. Don't blame the tool, blame the skill, change the mindset, or drop the ego.
Ball's in your court.
Top comments (0)