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Depends who you ask and what they're working on. It's easy for me to avoid, but one of the frameworks I use for conveniently making stuff in the JUCE gui layer has gone heavily AI. So what I add to it isn't, but the tools I'm using can't be AI-free. I'm watching to see if it stays good.

Relatedly, you're not going to find many healthcare providers who aren't using AI in a way you can opt out of entirely. I mean, if AI is filtering all the faxes that come into a facility, there's no way to pull out one person's faxes to sort by hand.

Also there's a lot of really poorly coded human-developed stuff out there as well. So.

I don't know why anyone would write a passion project that way either, unless they are brand new to coding. There is always boring work that does not require much thought, like logging or unit tests.

This is true and I'd also point out software made "entirely by hand" hasn't been a thing for a long time before ai turned up. Most modern coding frameworks "scaffold" the basics of your project and have done for decades

And the reason vibe-coded stuff is bad is that the humans responsible neither know nor care how it works or if it does so properly. Which is just a function of whether they care and their human-created work would be bad for the same reason.

for the environment. I will say, I miss the days when AI slop was mostly Obama, Trump, and Biden playing Wii Sports. It was AI slop, but it was CLEVER AI slop.

I don’t need code to have interesting things to say, i just need it to work I don’t just need pictures on my wall or books on my shelf, i want them to have interesting things to say

Not saying a line shouldn't be drawn. Just that it's going to be difficult to decide where that line is, the results will often be annoying, and "No AI full stop" will not be an option.

Then I'll still do everything I can to sink that stolen ship. To be clear, slop coding does not NEED to involve mass theft from writers and artists and everyone else's personal data, but right now, anything based on Claude or ChatGPT still does.

AI coding tools simply automate what human coders were already doing: going on github to find and copy open source code someone else aleady wrote.

Moral questions are harder. The open source licenses were drafted in the pre-LLM era and the vast majority of the code was written then too. Nobody who contributed to the Apache web server *intended* to allow training on their work. But... they did. Whereas authors (probably) did not allow it.

I think we're going to need to keep evaluating What It All Means and What We Demand as more and more ppl come in to the industry without ever learning to do things by hand and thus understanding AI's output. Best case is it's like car mechanics, where fewer ppl need to actually know how a car works.

learn to code, they said it’s the best career path around, they said

It's also that I have no expectations of the code other than it work. But I can certainly see the assets, hear the voices, read the text etc.

It's going to be *really* important for game programmers to not fart out 10k PRs on the regular or you are going to find a horse head in your bed from QA

Also getting people to do art for you is actually kinda cheap. Code, not so much.

What do you mean "long term data if those fixes are any good"? Did they fix them or not? Accelerating the detection and mitigation of security vulnerabilities is pretty huge.

I will be treating it on a MAYBE wireframe v1 basis, I'm certain once I dig in I'm gonna find bad UI shit that I'm going to have to convey we don't want with the REAL devs I'm working on the main website redesign with RIGHT AS THIS IS HAPPENING. But no one saw fit to include me on this convo to...

I understand it’s absolutely indispensable for finding security bugs as well. That’s not something you can just ignore.

Cool. And? tante.cc/2026/07/15/u...

I just wish it didn't cause so many weird issues also. I've been inundated with new bugs in areas that shouldn't have been touched in the code but AI messed with anyway. Another agent will fix what the first one broke, sure, but why is the first one breaking things to begin with?

Which tools? LLM-based debuggers struggle with nondeterministic physics and frame-timing bugs—corner cases that static analysis can't reproduce.

But the difference between a product that uses it but maintains proper standards throughout, and one where they just said "let the AI do the work" and stamp their name on it will always be obvious.

this is not a defense of AI coding, but “nobody understands the codebase, really” is a more and more frequent problem in games generally.

To be fair, this has been a big problem for over a decade I worked somewhere that about 25 years ago a small group of the devs quit and started a consulting company, then told the original company "You're going to hire us, because no one else knows how this code works" And they all got raises

Yeah this is absolutely not a problem in games alone. I have seen some suggested solutions for this, such as having the AI document its own code and have humans review it as part of the review process, so there are potential methods to deal with this. No idea if they are effective to be fair.

Arguably, outside of live service games, tech debt feels less consequential to me for games than for enterprise stuff which probably has a longer maintained lifecycle. Caveat that I’m an engineer but not a coder. AI compounded tech debt in things like ATC and financial stuff scares me shitless.

AI could never make Fallout: New Vegas* *unsure if complimentary or not

Yeah we recently had a case where the devs looked at some logs, said hm maybe we had a deadlock, then punted the whole thing to Claude saying "we suspect a deadlock" it said "yeah this routine is fucked, mate" Then we still had to figure out where this routine came from and fix it, but it helped

This whole shit has not freed me up to “become an architect”, it has stuck me in an endless stream of code review. Mine, LLM additions, other people’s PRs - code review is what I spend most of my “freed up” time on.

This btw is my theory why we haven’t seen great productivity gains in software despite AI. We have these tools that lower the barrier for code generation, but as any dev knows, lines of code has no correlation with productivity.

automated unit testing and stress testing being handled by an agent is leagues ahead of where it was even two years ago it’s so incredibly helpful

"wait how the fuck did this change break this other completely unrelated system" is a fun thing you get to ask with every patch

You can also tell it to generate a program which prints "hello, world" and then tell it to check over its own work and it'll hand you about 12000 lines of code suggestions.

I regret to inform everybody that, yes, AI DOES largely seem to be the future and really ISN’T a bubble/fad in any meaningful capacity, especially in the ways that most people think about those phenomena.

I take some relief knowing my job is secure. But I sure damn hope IT isn't pulling out their hair more than they do normally. I've kinda accepted AI code is gonna be something I run into no matter what. Best to just keep making do as we can.

Maybe it's copium, but I don't think AI truly affects the security of those with the skill to understand the abstract issues and design, particularly in complex systems. I'm not writing code by hand any longer either, but so much of my job is still really understanding what needs to be done.

i was just fired from my job due to ai ”not enough work to do”

Maybe I'm just in a niche field, but is everyone else not doing really deep code reviews? My background is engineering and not computers, my coding is self taught, but it seems like it would be horrendous to review AI written code?

Tbqf, I am perhaps in the minority, I have found the AI thing to place an even emphasis on engineers who know what they're doing.

PragProg had an interesting email the other day day, suggesting AI is useful with a high-quality code base, but the lower the code quality the more problematic the AI-generated code. If there’s interest, I’ll try and dig it up. In the meantime, I’m still chewing on this: arxiv.org/html/2203.04...

Same. So many feels like this www.reddit.com/r/comics/com...

You might have too narrow a view of software. For example, AI remains pretty useless for firmware. There is also more conventional work, but which involves super sensitive IP. But, in general, yes, steaming piles of vibe is becoming normal. But since models collapse when recursively trained… 🤷‍♂️

I was a pretty top notch software engineer 3-5 years ago. I suspect I'm unemployable now. What I was great at (clean code, high quality, easy to read/modify, strong APIs) is almost meaningless in the age of AI. Glad I'm out and don't have to worry about it.

So I’ll have to give up all software? I’m listening.

You might want to consider actually resisting, then. Rather than embracing the "oh well, I guess that's how it is" doomerism. Perhaps look at works of Emily Bender, Timnet Gebru, Ed Zitron, and many others here. You don't have to buy what the LLM pushers are selling.

I figured I'd be able to retire working in SaaS 😕

I was already burnt out on software development and IT for a variety of reasons, but the rise of AI definitely signaled to me that now was the time to get out.

Yeah, as a software dev it is truly bizarre. I do think there will continue to be a period of uncertainty around our job security but ultimately AI will also serve to make orgs that thought throwing people at things and churning out spaghetti was the solution 10x “better” at that.

Worked on SAP/ABAP before I retired years ago and in this case, I would have gladly welcomed these tools. I haven't kept up since I left the field, but I imagine that my former employer's IT department is now much smaller.

Yeah, I really hate where we are with this, but for things like tracing a gnarly bug, it’s hard to argue with it’s ability to be relentless in a way that’s difficult for me to be, at least without completely burning out.

I think part of this is that software engineers are typically not organized/unionized (by design. larger salary, larger carrot). Add on to this the demanding and entitled attitude toward free software (just look at the wave of decomps) and it's a perfect shitstorm for this

Gemini helped me quite a bit with rewriting a budget spreadsheet to eliminate some bad older dependencies and solve some bug reports from beta testers. I didn't let it write my formulas, but it was very helpful in diagnosing why they weren't doing what I wanted.

I’ve been able to do this with my regulatory reporting. Just take my 120 pg summary report for the FDA and do a comprehensive gap assessment against the most recently released guidance documents. It’s saved me WEEKS of work, in some cases. And I’m not even on the clinical research side.

A friend at a small 10 man shop were estimating it'd take a man-year of time to do an Unreal engine upgrade because they were badly out of date. AI did it in two weeks, during which the CTO that guided it was mostly able to do other work. With engineering, that genie's not going back in the bottle.

To be fair I’ve also talked to devs who are just like NEW TECH IS AMAZING and aren’t bothered by either of those things but it’s a minority viewpoint in my experienc.

We’ve got mods like Rim3D and Project Viewpoint, the Daggerfall MMO, if vibecoding can do all that those are doing I think the vibes are good

I have Thoughts and Opinions on vibe coding, but since the landscape is "AI, everywhere" it boils down to holding people's feet to the fire that they are responsible for what the AI slops out. I can't avoid using AI powered stuff, but I can avoid directly using AI (no Claude, chatgpt, etc for me)

(I’m over simplifying here, but really - there is art you can’t do in physical media that can only be done digitally, and eventually there will be media produced with AI tools that can’t be reproduced by digital means. )

No, it's like writing a requirement document and then having a developer implement it for you. It absolutely does mean you lose the ability to hand code, at least temporarily.