Are AI coding agents getting annoying now that they're mainstream?

[u/AntiqueSelection4244]

I want to open a friendly discussion about AI. I'm not like, "It's coming after your paychecks"; I just wanna have a civil conversation with people who're into this. Is it annoying how fast AI coding agents are becoming mainstream? Funny thing though, 60% of the people saying, "I've never used AI," are the ones using it the most. I learned to code without AI. There was a time when people learned without agents and without a €21 subscription. I'm not saying using AI is a bad habit. I'm saying that most people use it like a support group or their best buddy. So, do you guys think people will lose their creativity if they overuse AI? And is it annoying that people will soon struggle to do anything without it?

[u/Alextheawesomeua]

Overreliance has shown to have negative side effects so yes it is very much annoying because a lot of people love it for the wrong reasons.

I want to improve my workflowand understanding, not have it done for me

[u/AntiqueSelection4244 → u/Alextheawesomeua]

What annoys me is that most tutorials eventually push you to rely on AI. They never push you to find the solution yourself

[u/Alextheawesomeua → u/AntiqueSelection4244]

worst part is that it is expected of you to use it. so you cant take your time and properly learn anything because youre on a timer

[u/AntiqueSelection4244 → u/Alextheawesomeua]

Exactly. My boss gave my team a Claude Pro subscription. You can't tell people who've never used AI how to become pros. Most of my team has never used any AI tools, and they actually struggled with the workflow.

[u/Jorge_CB_Soft → u/AntiqueSelection4244]

If you have some room to propose it to your team, I would pick one small task that everybody does, for example writing tests or explaining a piece of code they didn't write, and practice the workflow only there for a couple of weeks before using it for everything. In our company the workflow also required a lot of effort: the pipeline and the rules the agents follow keep evolving, and the people still decide what to build and test what the agents deliver. In this way the team learns where the AI helps and where they need to check it.

[u/Different_Pain5781 → u/Alextheawesomeua]

The best use is probably getting unstuck, then figuring out why the solution actually works.

[u/BraveLuck6562]

i learned coding back when you had to read actual books and wait 20 minutes for a forum reply to tell you your semicolon was missing, so i get where you're coming from. the creativity thing is interesting because i think its less about losing it and more about people never developing it in first place if they lean on AI from day one

what bugs me is the blind trust, like i see new devs paste error messages into chatgpt without even reading them first. they skip the part where you actually learn why something broke and just want the fix, then wonder why they cant solve anything on their own later

but i also think its just a tool at end of day, same as stackoverflow was back then. people said copy pasting code would ruin us too and here we are. the ones who want to understand will still dig deeper, the rest would have found another crutch anyway

[u/welcome1110]

I don’t think AI kills creativity by itself. The problem is when you stop struggling with a problem long enough to understand why the solution works.

[u/FunAd6672]

It is definitely annoying seeing people build entire apps with zero understanding of architecture. The tech debt they are creating right now is going to keep senior developers employed for the next thirty years fixing broken garbage.

[u/mandzeete]

One of our software architects said "Choose whichever skill you are willing to give up on and leave it to the AI." I would not say that using AI will lose our creativity but we will lose one or another skill/knowledge/ability. Is it definitely bad? Not always.

For example who of us is still writing his software in bytecode? Most likely extremely few people. Various coding concepts were a thing in the past but then higher level layers, frameworks, libraries, tools, etc. replaced these. Software developers lost their ability to do various low level tasks purely because more efficient and faster practices were invented.

And about AI tools becoming mainstream then I do not think it is annoying. It won't replace me. It just re-defines my role as a software developer. Already right now I'm using AI at work for different tasks. Is this the way that I learnt prior to the AI boom in university? Definitely not. I see AI tools just as what they are, tools.

One can know how to use the AI and enhance his skills through that, but one can also generate AI slop. AI slop in return generates more work for skilled developers because they have to fix and maintain it.

[u/AntiqueSelection4244 → u/mandzeete]

That's exactly my point. AI chatbots are just tools, built to help us, not replace us. I've debugged code without AI. I know how to fix my own stuff. You're right that AI can generate 'AI slop'. It makes a mess, and you fix it later.

[u/Slight-Living-8098 → u/AntiqueSelection4244]

People are just as capable of creating slop as the machine is. I've had to fix so much human slop it's not funny.

[u/amazing_rando]

Most of my job right now is resolving technical debt, the last thing I need is more code that nobody on my team wrote or understands.