Software developers who use AI to generate all of the code in their codebases with no deep understanding of how any of it works will be drooling all over themselves in the near future they'll be so stupid (including me). We will have no more worth than a random highschooler who has no technical knowledge or experience as our AI companions will eventually get so good you can simply explain the idea for an app you want and it will generate it out of thin air. Now is more important than ever to develop some actual fundamentals or passion if you want to survive.
How I Use AI When Programming
For the past couple months I've been using AI on a daily basis when it comes to writing code, whether this be at my full-time job or on my personal hobby projects. At first I realized at how much better AI was at writing frontend code than me (react specifically) so it just made sense to give it a description of the UI I wanted and how it needed to function. Whatever it ended up generating would be 10x better than anything I could have created, and it would have done it magnitudes faster than me also. I typically didn't let AI touch any backend code because at the time I just didn't trust it enough, but sure enough after a while I finally started to let it go wild in the backend, and surprisingly it was also very good at this
So it did get to a point where AI was writing 100% of the code for any project I was working on. This honestly was quite depressing and slowly eroded the passion I had for software development. Every day I would just in front of this agent and get it spin up something that would take me months of work and dedication all within a couple minutes, and the final result was something that would've been better than mine
Then I decided you know what, it's time to go back to the basics...,
I took it upon myself recently to try and do something that I had not done in quite some time, something that would seem crazy in today's AI driving software development world.... I was going to write code by hand. I did still use AI to help me out and point me in the right direction when I was stuck or needed some clarification on something (you're a fool if you don't use AI for this, it's a fantastic tool to learn new concepts very quickly).
A Simple HTML Parser API
At first it was kinda rough not gonna lie. I wanted a simple little API server that parsed HTML data and returned it as JSON data to the user, and Golang seemed like the perfect pick for this project. I've taken up learning different languages recently other than JS/TS (Rust and Golang mostly) and I absolutely LOVE Golang. It took some time to remember the basics, installing third-party packages and importing them into your files, and POINTERS. Pointers absolutely shocked me to the core while working on this project, not that I didn't understand what pointers are but the amount of times my code attempted to dereference a nil pointer and panicked was maddening. I had to actually think about the structure of my data, which fields of the struct were pointers, and having to ensure nothing was nil before I attempted to set or update a value. Another problem that took me forever to figure out was a function that passed in a pointer to a custom struct, attempted to allocate it to the address of a new struct declared inside the function, and then got mad when it was still nil after the function had ran.
Slowly over the course of about 2 weeks (this was not that big of a project) I created a semi-impressive html parser using golang that runs on a little server and take in GET requests and parse any page you want. Most important, this was FUN and for the first time in a very long time I felt that passion again for coding. That initial spark that made me want to go into this industry. It's alive and well again, I would stress any developer out there reading this to take a step back from AI writing the code for a little and see how you feel. AI is amazing and I use it every day for software (again, if you are a software developer who is not using it still you're a fool) as it can exponentially speed up the process of creating software, but it's important to still retain the core skills needed to do this job. You need fundamentals and an understanding of the larger picture for your app (language, hosting, storage, auth, database, caching, etc) and until then you will be a moronic slave to this AI tool that will do you no benefit in the long run. The amount of morons vibe-coding things now is insane, but take the tool away and all these people are useless and only the real developers will be left.
Here's the project for those that are interested https://github.com/awoldt/siteanalysis