Developers Drowning in Messy AI Code

“I use AI a lot and I encourage using it in as a thoughtful collaborator, rubber ducky, and force multiplier. Why am I, for instance, going to spend 45 minutes building a complex JSON or XML architecture or Python dictionary when a LLM can do it a fraction of the time with just plain-language inputs? There are a lot of great use cases! The place where I think it annoying is when people plagiarize it, just asking chat to do all the work for them and then copying-and-pasting the output saying “look”

“AI / LLM is learning from existing knowledge. Based on this, creativity is already out of question? ---- I just generated code yesterday for bigger codebase from 0. When brainstorming, AI looks smart to know what logic required and to secure it. The scaffolding is working, but after looks deeper, it missing some key points and the directory structure a mess. I wonder how many vulnerability & unmaintainable apps already published now.”

“I'm sure you have the most flexibility designing the production orchestration yourself but I've been using Anthropic Managed Agents, which have become more and more capable over the last couple months (memory store, subagent profiles, dynamically loaded skills). You can give it MCP servers and skills and it can even have login credentials for a user passed in to its environments on each individual run. It's been working pretty well. It also motivated me to create a much more robust M”

“I completely agree with this approach. LLMs are great at translating intent into implementation, but they're not the best tool for regenerating the same deterministic code over and over. If auth, CRUD, billing, and other common SaaS patterns are already solved, those should come from reusable templates or components. Let the LLM focus on the parts that actually vary: business rules, workflows, and edge cases. That's also much more predictable, faster, and significantly cheaper in terms o”

“I think the biggest hurdle right now isn't hallucinations. It's confidentiality and compliance. Anything that gets sent to an AI for refinement, research, summarization, or transformation has the potential to expose privileged information if it isn't handled correctly. That's why I think adoption is not only slow but can be dangerous for anything that directly affects legal work. Hallucinations are still a concern, but they're much easier to manage than most people think. Som”

“The thing causing this is probably the gap between the product you’re building and the context it needs to work well. AI features feel hollow when they’re operating on a blank slate. They’re likely working with very little real product context and no clear understanding of what users are actually trying to accomplish. You’re right that if the people building it aren’t using it, the problem is probably the product itself. Distribution or change management won’t solve that in the long-term. It doe”

“The irony here is that the more established a pattern the better the AI should be at it -- the issue is the nuance and always integrating more and more "things".”

“I agree that templates have been a successful solution for a long time. Rails is probably the best example of that. The difference I'm exploring is that templates still assume the developer knows which template to start from and how to adapt it. My hypothesis is that there are two different problems: The application foundation (auth, RBAC, CRUD, routing, migrations, project structure), which is largely deterministic. The business domain , which is unique and benefits from AI. I don't thi”

So, a template?

“I would say the noise surrounding AI. People largely believe that AI is a magic wand that’ll solve all problems. In reality, it’s just an advanced text prediction system. It doesn’t think for you. You still need to put in the effort. Don’t get me wrong, AI supercharges anything where there’s a strong use case, but people largely misunderstand the use cases where AI has real value and amount of value it can deliver”

“I agree with this. Most of the time the hard part isn't writing basic code, it's figuring out the right logic, handling edge cases, and building something that actually fits the business need. AI ca be much more useful there instead of just generating boilerplate.”

“The privacy part gets lost because most of the discussion around AI coding is about speed, not what's actually happening to the code and data in that pipeline. There's the model provider's retention policy, whether prompts get used for training or kept around, and then there's just what you're pasting into the chat window in the first place, API keys, internal logic, stuff that shouldn't leave your machine. Most people check the first thing once and never think about the”

“What are you doing now to solve these problems?? I want to do a needs assessment on an idea I have.”

“I would recommend being very selective on taking AI courses, honestly. most of them are just repackaging basic prompting tips you can find on youtube in ten minutes. if you want claude to help with wireframes, look up how to use artifacts. you can literally just prompt it to generate an interactive react component or an svg wireframe based on your PRD. just play around with it and write out what you want like you're talking to a human designer. you'll learn way more doing that than sitti”

“I am a frontend engineer and actively use AI. I caught myself that i never write code manually, only if i have to tweak some styling. I feel lazy and dumb compared to pre-AI era. Even if i have to write some small changes in code that take like 2 minutes - it is easier to spend those 2 minutes explaining everything in details to AI and point out what and how it needs to change. Because i dont have to think about the process, i only explain the idea and desired solution - then wait until its done”

“This is absurd, plenty of companies including my big tech company have no QA at all. It just means the burden is shifted to developers who need to held accountable. Splitting the responsibility like this creates a mess.”

“I learned a long time ago that is just asking for trouble. Devs generally are mediocre testers plus you want a 3rd party independent person to do testing. I also have seen qa personal throws more edge cases and have better experience with tools. Devs even if you make another one do it I find they avoid it or do a half ass job meeting only the bare requirements and even have seen issues when they find something unrelated and don’t want to log it and so on. Now qa should be writing as mean automat”

“I've worked at many places where devs write unit, but no e2e, or you have specific automation testers who write e2e, which ive found never scales.”

“No not all work is specced or scoped as it should be, to our annoyance. it is something we are actively trying to improve on”

“I dont think they mean the dev qa's his own stuff. You QA each other's work”

“Sounds like automation is a space for QA to learn ai, or your 1/3 QA at least needs to be given full power to write automation with ai”

“Yeah I agree. So many people are on the same point too. We have a couple of common problems but this one is the most obvious one I suppose.”

“In what place are devs not also writing their own tests? Maybe I'm an outlier but it's always been on the devs to write tests”

“automation is picking up slowly but using AI to speed up manual testing is something we struggling to figure out”

“It IS annoying bro. So many people commented the same thing btw, AI generates but not kills ideas. I also face the same problem and every time I just find myself optimizing the prompt lol. Can you explain in detail what would you want as a feature specifically?”

“What actually needs to through QA and what is low risk and ship without it? Defining that could take a lot off their plate”

“mostly manual with part automation. Automation has been slow to implement as 2/3 members of QA don’t have automation experience”

“I mean if you are working alone yes but think if u have 10 person team working on the same product then how are you guys going to share the context when working without ppls overriding each other”

“Yeah clear answer. I agree. Also the memory part is the most obvious one right now IMO. It just forgets.”

“So you would want a not necessarily AI, tool that organizes your workflow. Pretty cool I guess. It would make it easier for developers using 1-2 screens too.”

“I didn’t mean vibe coding though. Ai just makes it faster I am trying to say. I am actually kinda against vibe coding because it kills the feeling of developing. Developing is entertaining for me. But AI just does the basic but time consuming work and that is a win for me.”

“Imagine it’s 1996, and you replace the word “AI” with the word “internet”. If someone said you guys are just trusting using the internet too much and should still be investing in physical mediums would you, knowing all you know now? It’s better to lean into something new and be wrong than it is to resist it and be years behind as far as business goes.”

“So you say AI makes us impatient for building before real user feedbacks ? What would be your solution for that if you could choose one feature for AI’s ?”

“Personally, I'd take a step back and say how are you validating quality in your software - regardless of who or what wrote it? I've been part of the go/no-go decision on a lot of large software projects - the sort of thing where nobody could read it all, and even if they could then so what? Those decisions are made on quality gate outcomes and accepted risks into live. Any software thats developed and shipped with no QA phase is a disaster waiting to happen; AI gives you the capability t”

“Hey, I have heard about that course. It's that complete AI programming & prompting course na?!”

“I think we're solving the wrong problem. Everyone is obsessed with making models smarter. After spending the last few months building an AI platform for travel operators, I'm convinced intelligence stopped being the bottleneck a while ago. The real bottleneck is orchestration. Generating an itinerary takes seconds. Keeping a conversation coherent while someone changes dates six times, cuts the budget in half, switches destinations, adds family members, asks about visas, and expects every”

“Hey, I’m just genuinely curious if anyone has found any good methods to keep QA from bottlenecking everything in a AI powered SDLC? I work for a small development company (10-15 devs & 2-3 QA) and every road points to QA buckling under the increased output of AI supported devs. Would love any advice to help with this or feel free to share your own experience. submitted by /u/Middle_Key_8469 [link] [comments]”

“It feels fast and convenient, but the real question is not speed. The real question is: what happens to your code, your data, and your business logic when you trust a tool too much? Coding is not just “writing code.” For a lot of founders, coding is the business. If the code, data, or workflow gets exposed, copied, or reused the wrong way, the damage is bigger than people think. I’m not AI. I think AI is useful. I just feel like people forget that privacy and trust still matter. Do you think sol”

“Skip the courses and just start feeding it real wireframe briefs from your actual backlog, you'll pick up the prompting patterns way faster from you own use cases than from generic tutorials”

“Im curious on the automation of tech support most (if not all) big techs are adopting. To be honest it’s a piece of shit, simply useless and rarely works. I got tired of my neobank AI assistant and switched to a traditional banking where I can visit a branch any time I need to solve issues When talking to a mobile operator I don’t call them (simply useless AI robot), but simply go to their office. I missed the point where customer service and software in general became of so poor quality. Gettin”

“Outside of visualization I have yet to find a practical use for any kind of AI where integration does not create just as many problems as it solves, and I wonder if our firm may be falling behind. We do mostly large apartment buildings (all Revit) and the level of baseline repetitious work involved doesnt really justify the time cost to create, train, and integrate a local model with revit to then do things like place door tags. Design wise, zero use case. With code compliance, I would only real”

“I’m an AI sceptic PM, and my organisation has made it abundantly clear they want us shoving AI into our strategy. Anyone doing this for long enough knows that our game is a delicate balance of user goals, business goals, and placating leadership who may have spent too long away from the coal face (if they were ever at it). And AI is the biggest leadership fad I’ve ever seen. So yes. AI is part of my roadmap. But I still expect the biggest swings to come from the range of gratuitous usability iss”

“hellointerview helps me to get updated, after being rusted as people manager for years. Learning from AI directly is good, but without framework it tend to overwhelm you in the end. If you're looking for pivot to AI, what's your plan here? I think AI bubble will pop soon.”

“So am looking for more normal people, experienced people using AI, but I feel like whenever I hit youtube or other platforms the AI culture is way deep in the trenches and don't feel like this is how the majority of people tackle work, especially at their jobs.What I see is mostly solo-devs going full battlestar gallactica on things. And I just want to see other people, normal people talk about and show how they use these new tools.I'm also more interested in the first principles of things and n”

“Is it just me or everyone, I know that Ai can help make my work more faster and help progress, but it's very hard to find a tool that just suits my purpose. Does anyone else feels like that?”

“Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.”

“Perhaps OP’s question is more so asking, how does Legora itself work and how can I build those tools? Learning the tools (code) that build the tools (Legora). You’ll also discover that most everything modern software is built with is open source and free, including LLM’s.”

“Every few years we invent a new productivity metric. First it was lines of code. Then story points. Then pull requests. Now it’s AI tokens. They’re fine for engineering, but none of them answer the only question that matters: Did the customer get more value? What’s your favorite “looks impressive, means almost nothing” metric? submitted by /u/NoBed1845 [link] [comments]”

Nope, AI is just a fad.

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“i have used AI heavily in the last 3 years AI wasn't even that good up until early this year.”

“The goal feels underspecified. I'm not sure I fully understand the perceived gaps between frontier LLMs and AGI. I read Gwern's original article and it was written two years ago. Several statements it makes were true at the time but no longer are.In particular I'm not sure the statements about models making bizarre mistakes still holds at this point. It's been a long time since I saw good models do something that seemed genuinely stupid or strange. In the rare cases it happens it can be easily e”

“We kept asking ourselves one question for a year and a half: can an AI actually design a scalable backend from a description of how it should behave, not demo-ware, something that holds up in production? We didn't know. Some weeks it felt like the answer was no, or that we'd end up with code that looks right and falls apart the second real traffic hits it. We just launched it. You describe how your backend should behave, schema, auth, endpoints, whatever, and it builds the architecture a”

“Genuine question for people who've shipped real projects here. We've gotten incredibly good at using AI to build fast. But one thing I've noticed: the ops side almost never comes up in vibe coding conversations. It's all about the build, never about keeping the thing running. Specifically around uptime monitoring — are you watching your apps after launch? Or are you relying on users to tell you when something breaks? I ask because I've talked to a lot of people who shipped so”

“In the age of AI, I very strongly feel Electron will succumb to eventually fading into obscurity. It's clunky, resource intensive, and a PITA to work with. Getting Claude or other frontier models to write a WinUI/ Swift app is going to be common place and preferred over Electron for most use cases. Electron filled the gap of being able to write desktop apps but only being armed with JS knowledge.A company I worked for wrote a kiosk app in Electron, which was a focal point of the business. The pa”