[pandler]

In addition to not enjoying it, I also don’t learn anything, and I think that makes it difficult to sustain anything in the middle of the spectrum between “I won’t even look at the code; vibes only” and advanced autocomplete.

My experience has been that it’s difficult to mostly vibe with an agent, but still be an active participant in the codebase. That feels especially true when I’m using tools, frameworks, etc that I’m not already familiar with. The vibing part of the process simultaneously doesn’t provide me with any deeper understanding or experience to be able to help guide or troubleshoot. Same thing for maintaining existing skills.

[daxfohl]

It's like trying to learn math by reading vs by doing. If all you're doing is reading, it robs you of the depth of understanding you'd gain by solving things yourself. Going down wrong paths, backtracking, finally having that aha moment where things click, is the only way to truly understand something.

Now, for all the executives who are trying to force-feed their engineering team to use AI for everything, this is the result. Your engineering staff becomes equivalent to a mathematician who has never actually done a math problem, just read a bunch of books and trusted what was there. Or a math tutor for your kid who "teaches" by doing your kid's homework for them. When things break and the shit hits the fan, is that the engineering department you want to have?

[zdragnar]

I'm fairly certain that I lost a job opportunity because the manager interviewing me kept asking me variations of how I use AI when I code.

Unless I'm stuck while experimenting with a new language or finding something in a library's documentation, I don't use AI at all. I just don't feel the need for it in my primary skill set because I've been doing it so long that it would take me longer to get AI to an acceptable answer than doing it myself.

The idea seemed rather offensive to him, and I'm quite glad I didn't go to work there, or anywhere that using AI is an expectation rather than an option.

I definitely don't see a team that relies on it heavily having fun in the long run. Everyone has time for new features, but nobody wants to dedicate time to rewriting old ones that are an unholy mess of bad assumptions and poorly understood.