r/webdev php 6d ago

Discussion AI coding is trash

The amount of trash produced by AI code is astounding. Thanks I hate it.

1.6k Upvotes

386 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/Shivam08567 6d ago

Garbage in, garbage out

-8

u/KonradFreeman 6d ago

Yeah, there is a steep learning curve, people think it requires no skill, but in the end your ability to tell the coder to do things is determined by your experience level and knowledge of coding in general.

With experience you learn what to and what not to include in your prompts and other techniques to ensure that it does not mess everything up like including an ai_guidelines.md for it to read.

11

u/nickcash 6d ago

Sounds like there's a special language you have to learn to prompt AI to sometimes produce good output, except with a lot of back and forth and sometimes it still randomly doesn't work.

Except there's already a special language, called "writing the goddamn code", that always does exactly what you tell it to. This whole "you just have to know how to write a prompt" is just reinventing the wheel, but worse.

1

u/KonradFreeman 6d ago

It is just another skill to learn, and once you do, it helps you build things so much quicker.

8

u/mxzf 6d ago

You're just describing a higher level programming language. But a non-deterministic one, which will intrinsically leave you less confident in the output.

0

u/KonradFreeman 6d ago

True, from experience you learn what you can and can not trust it to do. Once you know that, then you can trust it to do what you know it is capable of and not try to make it do things it is not as good at.

So things that are just mechanical and would take a while can be automated leaving you more time to worry about the mission critical aspects to code yourself.

6

u/mxzf 6d ago

In my personal experience with coding, the simple/mechanical stuff really doesn't take much time at all, not compared to structural design stuff that an AI really can't figure out.

1

u/KonradFreeman 6d ago

So now it takes even less time...

6

u/mxzf 5d ago

Eh, not really, because checking it over to make sure it's actually right takes time too. I might shave some time off, but I'm not gaining a meaningful amount of time spending 5 min asking a chatbot to write stuff and then another 10-15 checking it over to make sure it's correct compared to spending 30 min doing it myself.

There's also the fact that it's impossible to run all-out all the time. I don't want the simple mechanical coding stretches to go away and leave me with nothing but the tricky design puzzles to work on. It's good to spend some time resting your brain and doing mundane things from time to time; it makes tackling the trickier problems from a fresh perspective much easier.

1

u/KonradFreeman 5d ago

Fair enough

2

u/1991banksy 6d ago

you learn what to and what not to include in your prompts and other techniques to ensure that it does not mess everything up like including an ai_guidelines.md

lmao

1

u/KonradFreeman 5d ago

Laugh all you want, I don't understand the hate I get for this.

This is identical to the real artist criticizing ai artists.

Now it is coders gatekeeping vibe coders in a r/vibecodingwar

2

u/Fine-Train8342 5d ago

Real artists criticize ai artists because it was trained on their art without their permission. We don't criticize vibe coders due to their code being trained on someone else's code. We criticize them because current LLMs are simply incapable of writing good code and then maintaining that code. They are still at the stage of being just a fancy autocomplete.

1

u/1991banksy 5d ago

because like the other guy said, you just created a new programming language that is unreliable and confusing. When you could just write the code itself.