Four months ago I asked if and how people used AI here in this community (https://lemmy.world/post/37760851).
Many people said that didn’t use it, or used only for consulting a few times.
But in those 4 months AIs evolved a lot, so I wonder, is there people who still don’t use AI daily for programming?
Yes. I have tried various agents over the last ~1.5 years on multiple occasions on a bunch of different kinds of engineering type tasks. So far there has been a total of 1 time where the output was reasonable enough that I could build on it and not feel ashamed of the result (and that time probably saved me like half an hour). All other times, I wasted a bunch of time debugging crap and then just wrote the thing from scratch myself.
The closest I’ve come to somewhat consistent success with them is when I struggled to come up with a good search query for an issue I was having and after asking a longer prompt to an LLM it either gave me a close enough answer that I could figure it out from there, or the answer included some keywords that helped me come up with a query that got the results I needed.
By and large, I consider them crap for anything beyond the basics. On the other hand, I absolutely understand why they may look great in cases where the person using them doesn’t have an idea of what the output should look like. They’re a minimal productivity boost at best, at an insane cost.
“Are there programmers that still don’t use AI?”
What a fucking loaded question, OP. I think you got your answer, in plenty.
I’m not using it either.
ai evolved a lot in the last four months guys it’s not just a glorified auto complete it’s totally different than earlier it’s evolving guys like it’s real c’mon guys
If you use ai you’re not programming anything so… Yeah only real programmers don’t use ai.
Nope, never use it. I know how to write code myself.
Not the great rebuttal you think it is… AI isn’t really about writing code that I couldn’t write. Unless you’re a beginner it is absolutely not at that level yet. It’s about saving time.
Which it definitely can do. Especially for one-off tasks. For vibe coding projects my experience has been mixed. AI seems pretty good for getting things going, especially in areas you aren’t familiar with (e.g. I wrote a simple Chrome extension with it; never written a Chrome extension before). But after a certain point they seem to get stuck in a muddle and you basically have to stop using AI, fix all the code it wrote badly and continue yourself.
But overall it can still be significantly faster than being prideful and doing it all by hand.
At my job I don’t. I once used it for some open source code where I implemented a fairly complex one line formula; I did eventually figure out the problem and don’t remember how helpful the AI’s suggestions were.
Nothing has really changed in the past four months. If you really disagree, feel free to try my vibecoding challenge; it closes on March 1, but that’s surely no obstacle for the amazing vibecoding chatbots which didn’t exist in November and only recently evolved. I did all three challenges by hand and no vibecoder has yet been able to match my mediocre, lackluster work.
👋I personally find AI amoral, so I don’t use it.
Models trained on open source software, contribute nothing back to those software repos, give zero authorship to those original authors, and packaged up to sell back to us programmers.
Not to mention the resource impact of their massive data centers.
I don’t want anything to do with it.
And after 25 years of professional programming, this is increasingly looking like the hill I’m going to die on.
“Still” shut up, clanker.
I don’t. I don’t care how much AI “evolves”. I don’t need it so I don’t use it.
Restaurants exist and some of them are quite good. But I still have a home cooked meal for every meal. The existence of restaurants doesn’t make home cooking obsolete.
In the last 4 months I’ve picked up welding and haven’t coded. Ez.
Can you elaborate?
i am a beginner hobby program who has not used any AI tools intentionally at all in any aspects of my life so far
I see intentionally because some stuff nowadays defaults to AI tools on
I use AI for small, atomic, stuff that don’t bring any intellectual value to spend time for.
Like “Typescrit. Find smallest element in an array”. “Python. Simulate keboard event to avoid computer going to sleep mode”. Or copy/past error message because I missed an import and I just want to know which one.
I also use it sometime for well identified algorithm that could be interesting but are not the core of the problem. Like “C#. Clustering algorithm to group points together in a point cloud”.
The generated code is catastrophic in term of performances/memory, but it’s good enough 80% of the time.
But eveytime I tried to use AI for higher level stuff, or that require several interdependant concepts, it ended up into hallucination pit.
- I have this problem
- Cool ! Use solution A !
- Doesn’t work
- My Bad, use solution B !
- Doesn’t exist
- Indeed ! For this problem you should apply method A which will work !
- (-_-)’
I still refuse to use it for anything other than minor curiosity. I often read AI summaries on coding questions I throw at DDG or google, but I’ll usually open the Stack Overflow link or Reddit to read the actual post just to be sure.
I occasionally use perplexity to help find the right documentation on topics I am not yet familiar with.
Other than that, I never use AI. I don’t have copilot, I have tried it and found it distracting. And I never let AI generate code for me.
I’d suggest you Context7 MCP, if you have an AI that supports tool calling you can use their API to make your agent call for updated docs about a given framework or language.
