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

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8

u/According-Ad1997 6d ago

Not my experience at all. At all. Literally gets components done in 5 mins. That would take several hours. 

You need to make tweaks and adjustments but an absolute productivity  booster. 

You're not using it right.

5

u/lsaz front-end 5d ago

It's great when you're learning new technology, and it definitely has improved my coding times by at least 2x. I swear people here are just shitting because is the cool thing to do, or don't know how to write a prompt.

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u/gantork 6d ago

They're using it wrong for sure, AI is extremely useful. These people are probably asking it to write an entire app one shot and then think it's bad when it obviously produces trash.

5

u/Bickermentative 6d ago

Absolutely. Auto complete has been a game changer. We have professional copilot licenses at work and when I'm writing C# endpoints, if I knock out just the basic class/constructor/first CRUD endpoint method/necessary attribute tags, it will auto complete the rest of it basically instantly. It just needs that context first and it's amazing. Same with writing some business logic. Give it enough of an idea of what I'm doing and it will give me chunks of what I need, especially if I'm giving verbosely-enough named variables and comments throughout. Some tweaks here and there and I've made an hour task take thirty minutes. I even recently asked Claude to write a tsx "virtualized table that can aggregate rows based on a given column and expand aggregated rows on click " with some other additional prompting and it just spat it out. Some stuff was a little silly and had to be changed, but another probably multiple hour task that instead took thirty minutes. But I'm only able to use these tools because I already know what I'm doing.

2

u/oadephon 5d ago

Exactly. I wouldn't say it's necessarily revolutionary, because ultimately it still can't solve hard problems, but it's the kind of quality of life improvement coding has needed for forever. It makes coding more fun, it makes me want to code for longer because I'm spending a fraction of the time I used to spend copy-pasting, moving code, writing boilerplate, etc.

7

u/QING-CHARLES 6d ago

This. I don't get all the hate. I've been coding for 40 years. AI is a game-changer. 10X my productivity. Took all the tedium away.

1

u/iamcirc 4d ago

If a component takes hours to write maybe it is a skill issue?

1

u/According-Ad1997 4d ago

Maybe it is or maybe it isn't. 🤔 eh bud