I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
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I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes At work, we use AI for coding, but our team decided that human review is important. And , while I see where you're coming from, it doesn't have to be as bad as you describe.
We use a mixed human-AI review. Partly questioning the AI ("how do you know that loop terminates?") and partially reading the code. And, also, reading the comments: if the comments/docstrings make sense, you're half-way there.
And when we're writing, we have the AI do a plan, then question it, and review the plan before letting it go. And then run an eyeball over the result.
So, I think we're not forgetting our code, and we have a process that produces decent quality code. And it really helps to have management buy-in and good tools.
One advantage is that I appreciate the damn machine remembering (mostly correctly) the details of thousands of library functions for me. I'm over 60, and remembering library details is harder than when you're 40. And I've been in the business long enough to be suspicious of most hallucinated, too-good-to-be-true API calls, so I don't get sidetracked too often.
So that's our 2026 situation. AI coding sucked in 2025, and who knows what 2027 will bring.
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@brettcodes At work, we use AI for coding, but our team decided that human review is important. And , while I see where you're coming from, it doesn't have to be as bad as you describe.
We use a mixed human-AI review. Partly questioning the AI ("how do you know that loop terminates?") and partially reading the code. And, also, reading the comments: if the comments/docstrings make sense, you're half-way there.
And when we're writing, we have the AI do a plan, then question it, and review the plan before letting it go. And then run an eyeball over the result.
So, I think we're not forgetting our code, and we have a process that produces decent quality code. And it really helps to have management buy-in and good tools.
One advantage is that I appreciate the damn machine remembering (mostly correctly) the details of thousands of library functions for me. I'm over 60, and remembering library details is harder than when you're 40. And I've been in the business long enough to be suspicious of most hallucinated, too-good-to-be-true API calls, so I don't get sidetracked too often.
So that's our 2026 situation. AI coding sucked in 2025, and who knows what 2027 will bring.
@cpr320 I appreciate you sharing your experience, thanks. While I understand what you're saying, which is essentially only use it a little bit and more intentionally, there are too many other problems/harms of using AI, which therefore makes it not worth it for me.
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@cpr320 I appreciate you sharing your experience, thanks. While I understand what you're saying, which is essentially only use it a little bit and more intentionally, there are too many other problems/harms of using AI, which therefore makes it not worth it for me.
@brettcodes I can see that. My experience tracks the first part of your essay. But i've never felt tempted to talk to the damn things when not coding.
The wider implications are severe, I guess...
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I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes You're not alone. We've been under mandates to have LLMs at my work and sometimes it feels amazing to push a button and then a whole feature gets built. It makes you feel like you can do anything in an instant and it doesn't cost all the mental anguish you have to go through when writing it yourself.
I find that I'm more personally detached from the quality of the output, but also I feel mentally removed from the actual inner workings of the code. I can still picture the code in my head and speak definitely about thing I wrote years ago, but I can't do the same for code shipped 2 weeks ago that was written by the LLM
I've been slowly rebelling and getting back to writing my own code, so that I actually have to think about what I'm doing rather than doing software development on autopilot
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@brettcodes I think your observation that "this isn't the job you agreed to" is key. Let the people who are ok driving themselves into the ground chasing "productivity" do so.
You can go be a craftsman and enjoy what you do.
Here's to a second luddite uprising. Let's hope it doesn't end the same way.
@weebull @brettcodes FWIW the ones using AI to chase productivity ate structurally doomed to fail. I wrote a bit about this:
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I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes 15+ years of experience in software engineering here. I feel exactly the same.
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I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes Thanks!
I also choose not to use AI at all.
It wants to do the 10% of my work I love (the remaining is tickets, meetings, waiting for infra...)
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I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes That must have been quite an arduous journey. Congratulations on your arrival.
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I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes I can totally understand. I occasionally use LLMs, in the chat window of the browser, do get some code snippets and more often than not, the code does not what I want it to do.
I see colleagues around me using claude and what not, switching between platforms as they keep running out of tokens. Once they run out of tokens on all platforms, they claim immediately that they can bo longer be productive for that day.
LLMs are tools, but we should not overly rely on them.
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I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes @minimoysmagician Thanks for sharing your emotions, and thanks for resisting. You are absolutely right: AI is taking away the best of it, making what remains pointless. Keep resisting! #NoAI
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I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes
Good text, thanks for sharing!
All of this is why I never started using LLMs. They just mean too much damage on multiple levels, from the individual using them to the system they’re building to the society to the environment.
It is also why I’m trying to find my tribe and keep talking about the skills that the LLM hype undermines, like seeing programming as communication and a tool to build a shared understanding of the world:
https://stolat.town/@marcink/117079431946180511
@Khrys -
I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes Thanks for the post, I read it and it helped me to understand this viewpoint better. I think a lot of this comes to autonomy and being able to choose your own ways of working without a lot of pressure for deadlines.
AI driven development pushes people to handle way bigger changes than they can understand if you don’t pace yourself and take the time to keep up what is happening in the code.
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@brettcodes Thanks for the post, I read it and it helped me to understand this viewpoint better. I think a lot of this comes to autonomy and being able to choose your own ways of working without a lot of pressure for deadlines.
AI driven development pushes people to handle way bigger changes than they can understand if you don’t pace yourself and take the time to keep up what is happening in the code.
@brettcodes I use AI a lot at work to code, but I honestly feel like I’ve managed to dodge the pitfalls often mentioned because I’m not under time pressure and I’ve also purposefully learned to take breaks and not multitask at all anymore.
But I think it’s really important that people shouldn’t be forced to use AI and you can be just as effective without it (depends on the personality and strengths of the person I think)
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@brettcodes I use AI a lot at work to code, but I honestly feel like I’ve managed to dodge the pitfalls often mentioned because I’m not under time pressure and I’ve also purposefully learned to take breaks and not multitask at all anymore.
But I think it’s really important that people shouldn’t be forced to use AI and you can be just as effective without it (depends on the personality and strengths of the person I think)
@brettcodes I want to clarify what I mean by “you can be just as effective without it”. I mean that I assess that my own productivity and quality of my work has improved a lot after starting to use these tools, but it doesn’t mean that it would have a similar effect in every situation and for every developer.
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I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes
I'm so glad to see people in similar situations like me around here. Basically being forced by their employers to "AI or die", no matter the quality or ecological, financial, psychological cost.
Most of the time, the heavy AI-first strategies even directly contradict the ambitious sustainability goals and promises the very same companies put in place just a few years ago. Carbon neutrality in 2030 my ass - they're directly burning our fucking planet! -
@brettcodes I want to clarify what I mean by “you can be just as effective without it”. I mean that I assess that my own productivity and quality of my work has improved a lot after starting to use these tools, but it doesn’t mean that it would have a similar effect in every situation and for every developer.
@brettcodes One thing that resonated with me in the post was the choice of using ai being an all or nothing question. I feel mostly the same way. It is very hard to discriminate in daily work about each task where should AI be used or not. If I would limit my usage, I would do it by switching it off completely for some of the time.
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@brettcodes At work, we use AI for coding, but our team decided that human review is important. And , while I see where you're coming from, it doesn't have to be as bad as you describe.
We use a mixed human-AI review. Partly questioning the AI ("how do you know that loop terminates?") and partially reading the code. And, also, reading the comments: if the comments/docstrings make sense, you're half-way there.
And when we're writing, we have the AI do a plan, then question it, and review the plan before letting it go. And then run an eyeball over the result.
So, I think we're not forgetting our code, and we have a process that produces decent quality code. And it really helps to have management buy-in and good tools.
One advantage is that I appreciate the damn machine remembering (mostly correctly) the details of thousands of library functions for me. I'm over 60, and remembering library details is harder than when you're 40. And I've been in the business long enough to be suspicious of most hallucinated, too-good-to-be-true API calls, so I don't get sidetracked too often.
So that's our 2026 situation. AI coding sucked in 2025, and who knows what 2027 will bring.
@cpr320
Are you aware that the LLM is incapable of cognition and therefore it is absurd to ask it how it knows anything?
@brettcodes -
@brettcodes I can see that. My experience tracks the first part of your essay. But i've never felt tempted to talk to the damn things when not coding.
The wider implications are severe, I guess...
@cpr320
You're asking the machine for a plan. Which means that you'll get the average plan for whatever problem you're dealing with. Better hope these are well understood problems with a robust "best" solution dominating the training data...
@brettcodes -
I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes Expresses my feelings perfectly (and way more eloquent). The environmental and social harm of AI is horrifying, plus I don't want to become a babysitter for chatbots, so fuck AI.
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I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: https://brettcodes.com/im-done-using-ai/
The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.
@brettcodes Thanks for writing/saying all this. So many folks going through this same thing, and sharing always helps. Some of the stories are frighteningly similar!
