this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Well you see, if you dont hire junior devs, and senior devs eventually retire... then you have no devs at all and thats usually considered bad.
So you hire junior devs... and train them to use the tools, so that they become competent with them... like literally any other job in the world.
Its like trying to argue that because your site workers on a job can use a CAT to move material way faster, now you dont need to hire new guys... which only works up until your CAT operator retires and you never bothered to train their replacement...
Any half competent manager would consider that to be a super stupid thing to have done...
When people tell me AI makes their job faster I assume they're either shit at their job or their job is useless.
A very very large part of programming is boilerplate code you cant get past, it must be written.
A huge part is integration testing.
You have like hundreds or thousands of tests that are very repetitive. "Open this, click that, do this, type that, wait... assert this happens"
You have all these in a human readable format/doc provided to you by your requirements team
You uabe to convert all of that into code so a program can do the steps, such that it runs every day to confirm "website isnt broken boss!"
Converting all that human text into code is very easy but very monotonous
It can be tens of thousands of lines of code, easily.
This type of task is extremely easy for AI though, especially if you start it off with 10~15 examples to show it how it outta be done
Then you just give it the doc and go "okay draw the rest of the owl please"
This is called "nth shot prompting", where it has samples to start with and then it just copies your work 1000 times given input.
AI is extremely good at this.
It can turn weeks of work into hours.
The ability to turn human contextual English into code is one of its top skills, and turns out for a serious prod scale app at a company, thats like... 90% of software dev
And since we can work in parallel, I can focus more of my effort on that remaining actually challenging 10% where stuff matters more.
Its like swapping from pulling a wagon by hand of dirt to a job site, to instead pulling it with machine.
I get that part done 10x faster/easier, or better, and now I can actually put my time/energy into way more important shit than just hauling dirt around.
Summarized: when ppl talk about it making them do their job faster/better, its usually cuz it got rid of a bunch of boring parts and now they can focus on the actually important parts of their job more, and thus produce way higher quality results net.
Innovating the boring stuff is how you do your job better. AI doesn't do that for you.
There is no innovating it, you simply have to just do it.
This us a purely logical requirement, the cide is already abstracted to the maximum feasible point.
You simply have to write the code that connects the output of pipe A to the input of pipe B
This is called the Domain Rules or Business Rules, its the stuff specific to your apps needs that simply cant be abstracted further.
If we define for example "This endpoint lets you add a person to a room, but a room cannot have more than 8 people" you cannot get around needing to somehow define this business rules in your logic.
Even at its absolute most abstract form, its at least a couple lines of code minimum.
Now, most api endpoints have several rules. And often apis can have hundreds of endpoints. And often businesses maintain multiple apis.
So, 3 x ~7 x ~100 x ~3 puts you at like 6300 lines of code baseline for defining business rules.
And then for every. single. rule. You have to write a test that positive and negative tests these rules.
Which puts us at about 2100 rules, multiple by about easily 10 to 12 lines per test easy.
So 11 x 2100 = 23,100 lines of code for tests, though its prolly closer to double that.
ALL of this is extremely simple and easy to do, its just a lot of fuckin typing lol.
AI can pump this out in about 1/10th the time I can, prolly closer to 1/20th tbh.
And are your tests abstracted as much as possible? Ie Are you decorating methods to describe the acceptable range and domain and have a hypothesis engine test for that? Are you using snapshot testing to make things easier to trace? I can go on but I don't know the context nor do I think we should really sync on the specifics of your job. The point is you are at a point where you think the code can't be made simpler, maybe that is true, but if AI is doing all the boring stuff then I don't know how one would even care to know.
Did you... read what I wrote?