I Will Never Use AI to Code (opens in new tab)

The final sentence says it all:

> The thing is that even if I was wrong (I'm not) and AI was somehow helpful for software engineering (it isn't), I still wouldn't want to use it.

So even if you were wrong on the facts (you are) you still wouldn't change your mind? In other words, you're unreasonable and know you're unreasonable and think that's totally fine?

Well, cool. Next time, lead with that.

It's fine if people don't want to use AI for anything, and honestly I don't even believe you need to justify it. The justification given here is interesting and I think shows misunderstanding.

At one point the author writes

> AI is a tool that can only produce software liabilities

which I would argue is completely caused by misuse of AI. Sure, you can have AI write a ton of code that often comes with subtle bugs. But using AI doesn't mean that it has to write any code for you at all. I've been using LLM often for security analysis and the results are quite good. Vulnerabilities that we had collectively missed were shown and we could fix them ourselves.

In this case, instead of creating liabilities, we were able to use LLM to get more information about our code. It's completely possible we could have deduced this information on our own, but we didn't and LLM is capable of doing it much more quickly than humans.

I love using AI to code, as it saves me a lot of boring and repetitive typing.

I only commit code that is roughly the same as I would have written anyway.

It feels as good for developer ergonomics as the move away from CRT monitors.

I was a hand tool woodworker, but the first time I had to rip 56 6 foot boards into 7 strips I immediately purchased a table saw. Now I use hand tools rarely because I find the speed and quality of my cuts are better. I still use hand tools for things that require certain standards, but electric tools almost always produce better quality results.

It’s about the same for AI coding, I just get better results.

What's bad about AI:

- Vendors get to know everything about you

- Chips are becoming more politicized; I fear artificial scarcity as with housing will be put on chips, driving up prices.

- It causes a lot of centralisation. No, I cannot run deepseek at home. I don´t have 100.000+ USD laying around. 1TB of VRAM is not chump change.

- It can be a threat to the flourishing of open source. There is no longer a reason for me to work with other devs to build something in public together. I just have the LLM write what I need. It isolates.

These are the only drawbacks. Eveything else is clearly the artisans' ego getting in the way. That being said, if a piece of code is critical infra onto which many other things hinge, I will still hand code it.

This kind of writing makes you sound immature.

People used to drive manual. Now it’s all automatic transmission. Some cars even drive itself.

People used to proudly use Vi to write code. But now IDE is commonplace.

People used to write asm by hand. Transport Tycoon was written in assembly. But these days that would be insane.

Technological progress is an absolute thing. It produces too much convenience and wealth to ignore.

We still know how to ride horses but we also drive cars, now.

You want to be delivery service that takes 2 days instead of 30 minutes to bring you pizza so that you don't forget how to ride your horse..?

> my chosen craft

Your craft can be typing out code on a keyboard; or it can be building things in the best possible way with the best available tools.

I Will Never Swear Again After Realizing How Cringey It Looks In Reality

AI discourse perfectly illustrates why you should just ignore people with view points on the extreme ends of the spectrum.

People still have fun riding horses. Doesn’t mean we use them to get anywhere anymore

I’ll never use a tractor. Real farming is done with a horse and plow.

I'm all in favor of talking about drawbacks of AI coding and potential future problems. No problem. But at this point just the blanket statement that you'll never use it is not reasonable. It's the equivalent of a master car mechanic seeing a robot that can pretty reliably rebuild a transmission in a few minutes saying "I'll never use that; I'll always do it myself." Okay, sure buddy. You keep taking 8 hours to do what now takes everyone else 5 minutes. Knock yourself out.

Why is this submission flagged? It's on topic isn't it?

"I will never use AI to code" (publicly)

Not the hill I would die on.

I noticed that my friends who like AI, don't like coding much

Good for you?

Meanwhile written by AI.

As much as I also enjoyed the actual coding part, a lot of it is just .. boring plumbing. I enjoy solving the problems - designing the solutions, the algorithms, choosing the right tech, coming up with nice abstractions.

When doing agentic development, you need to be in control, at least for now. Every frontier model will still do incredibly stupid stuff, and if you let it cook unchallenged, you'll have a codebase that doesn't scale. Claude will happily keep piling turds upon your tower of turds, but at some point, even an LLM will have a hard time working in it.

When you are at the wheel, the engineering hasn't changed. You're still solving all the same problems, but you can iterate a lot faster. Code is now ~free, and the cost of having a bad idea is now much cheaper, because you can quite literally speak the solution out loud and fix it in a few minutes.

I share the author's love of coding and thus don't use AI for my own personal for-fun projects.

When it comes to employment and other people paying you to code, though, not using AI is increasingly a non-starter for most of us.

This writing is terrible and immediately put me off. The ‘superfluous’ swearing that the author seems to be proud about is instead going to put off a lot of his potential audience. Anyways, the ideas are nothing new that people haven’t read before as far as arguments against AI and the AI industry.