Developers Drowning in Messy AI Code
Developers are experiencing a disconnect between the rapid feature development enabled by AI and the lack of focus on long-term maintenance and quality. The initial speed gains are often offset by messy, rework-heavy output and a neglect of crucial upkeep, leading to a feeling of unsustainable development practices.
SOURCES (60)
“writing code manually is obsolete for production systems. I only type syntax when debugging AI failures or verifying security boundaries”
“Seriously, anywhere? Every job I've interviewed for has asked about that above any other question. I've used it a little for some boilerplate generation and it sucked at basically everything I tried it on so no I don't have a ton of experience "leveraging AI for better development" or any other buzzword filled bullshit question about my AI experience. I've got 8 years of experience doing every area of Software Engineering and even DevOps but that doesn't matter beca”
Exactly. Should we go back to assembly language while we’re at it?
“As a product designer with 20+ years' experience, im finding that increasingly, product owners are using AI to create desigms, and give them to a designer... perhaps to polish up? This devalues what design do and is generally pretty insulting. Why do you do it, and why do you think it's okay? submitted by /u/AnonProductDesigner [link] [comments]”
“I recently spent some time building around the idea of AI agents finding and working with other agents, and it made me question whether we’re approaching agent networks from the wrong direction. ( Moltbook is an interesting experiment, but I’m not convinced agents ultimately need something that looks like a social network) Humans need profiles, followers, feeds and social reputation because we care about identity, attention and relationships. Agents have a different objective: "accomplish a”
“ChatGPT went down today and what surprised me wasn’t just losing the tool. I noticed the absence of the interaction itself. When you use the same ai regularly thereis a rhythm that develops. It knows enough context that you don’t start every conversation from zero.You have certain ways of asking things, ongoing projects, little routines. Obviously the model isn’t sitting there experiencing a relationship with you but from the user side there can still be a real sense of continuity.Then the syste”
“I’m a full-stack developer with nearly six years of experience Since the start of the year, I’ve integrated AI tooling heavily across my day job (Claude Code) and freelance work (Gemini Antigravity). The trade off is clear, I write significantly less code, but I ship significantly more. Taking time off recently gave me the space to reflect and I have realised how I barely write code manually anymore and I’m torn about where the profession is headed. On one hand, this feels like natural career ev”
Yes, exactly! It's a great brainstorming tool to get some ideas going.
“I get it - everyone is using AI now, it has its use cases, but please for the love of God stop sending me the slop. At least read it first before firing it over to your colleagues. Has anyone else's team turned into an absolute back-and-forth slop fest? Manager generates something he thinks is helpful, gigantic multi-page HTML report I need to read. Clearly written by Claude, because who the hell writes reports in HTML. Coworker A: sends messages on slack trying to help solve problems: This”
“Nowadays I frequently land on documentation sites that starting to come with Ask AI chats. (Curious to know how that is for you ) Found myself using these alot to a point where In most cases I stop reading the docs altogether in some cases and just ask what I myself or my agents needs to know. I wanted the same thing on docs that didn’t have it. So I started building LedgeIndex . Which lets crawl and ingest docs on your local machine or sellf hosted ( or the ledgeindex cloud ) Right now with the”
“I've recently started to just dive all in on this, and after getting the basics of godot and some other things I've just being going hard at it. But since I've only learned the basics it can be hard to know what's even possible. and if it is possible what even are the options to do it? So I'll look up things like "what are my options for doing x in godot?", "what's the best way to do y?". I'll get a response and either try to ask more questions to”
“So does that require coding skills or is the prompt part similar to how one would talk to ChatGPT for example? I’m not sure what everyone means by applying ai to daily tasks or at least in what context”
“I definitely agree with the sentiment of this article, give or take. I've seen it at the place a previously worked at and now the place I currently work at: everybody wants AI to make coding faster and more efficient, but nobody is willing to take the risk of changing course and bending the firm's processes around what would actually make the agents more useful. Maybe this is more general than the qualms against "software factories," but it's pretty apparent that agentic development doesn't mesh”
“agree, getting the core flow nailed down first makes everything else so much less painful”
“I've been thinking about how much of the AI-assisted workflow people actually want to keep managing themselves. For people who build with AI regularly, if you could hand one part of your setup to somebody else and never have to maintain it again, what would you choose? Could be anything: prompts and rules, scripts, MCP setup, deployments, testing, keeping the repo organized, fixing broken integrations, managing tools, or something else. What's the part that takes more time or attention t”
“Have you considered that all of these interactions will inform it if it gains agency... ?”
“Dude exhaustively validating hypothesis at scale is literally the sweet spot for Agentic loops. You can throw 100 parallel agents each validating a scenario. Like 10x better and faster not kidding. I literally work building the clouds and you are wrong.”
“I have suffered some stages of mental illness with the AI. There are 4 stages:1. Surprised: the first time I see the AI become valid in the real world. It is the Claude 3 family moment. I am with a god-tool in my hand.2. Oversimulated: Use the god-tool to solve all the problems without thinking.3. Frozen: Realize that the god-tool can solve only a few issues, and my brain is dying.4. Wake-up: Understand that my brain is the main place where the problem-solving happens, not the god-tool. Then cul”
“That's still true if you are an experienced dev and not just writing boilerplate shit. AI is really good, but not as good as solving highly technical issues in specialized areas, which you would be in if you are an experienced dev. For all recent graduates though, I don't know what to say, it's rough for sure.”
“AI is a double edged sword. I don’t like relying on it. But I do like getting answers more directly than just trying to google it. I try and limit it to last resort tasks or doing tasks that are not needing of understanding or documentation. Like analysing shit or making bulk changes to crap I’d otherwise to find and replace on. My only real suggestion is twofold. If you wanna continue using AI don’t get it to do the entirety of the work (like don’t get it to script things or produce a magic fil”
“Anecdotally, whenever I talk to people about their use of well known AI sourcing tools (don't want to rep any names, but you know who they are) in private they say they are ok, but not great, compared to LinkedIn. Kind of like an acceptable substitute but you'd rather have the real thing. Then when I hit my LI feed, it's people saying how awesome their AI sourcing tools are and they don't have a need for expensive and outdated LinkedIn anymore. There seems to be a public percepti”
Bit of a rant/story post because this is ridiculous. I’m like a junior at this AI lab and i’ve been here for 6 months ish. What can I even do in this…
“Hello, a while ago, there was a similar post from me, before anyone questions... however, I see myself diving deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. I came to this company some 4 or so months ago. It is/was in TERRIBLE state. While everything was generally working, there were frequent unexplained and unmonitored outages. The worst thing there was visibility. Why I say was... The company used Icinga2 when I came. I did weigh in implementing a different solution, but kinda liked the idea of havin”
“lol… it’s been a really really long time since ai generates 6 fingers. It’s shocking how good ai has been.”
“With your node and typescript background would not wait for one perfect course to cover everything. Pick a real project and let the missing knowledge shape your roadmap”
“Have a question for yall, i’ve been testing an ai assistant on a hot ticket at work and robin keeps saying it is good enough to patch the issue. The annoying part is it sounds right, but I still dont know if it actually has enough context or if it's just making a confident guess. For stuff like password resets, firewall rules, or weird vpn breaks, what do you look at before you let it touch anything real? I am trying to figure out the point where the ai is just helping vs when it is still mi”
“I'm currently building an AI-powered study platform for students preparing for one of the toughest competitive exams in the world. I'm still working on the feature set and I don't want to limit myself to only things that are easy to build. So I'd love to hear from students, developers, and anyone who's built education-related products: If you could have an ideal AI study platform, what features would you want it to have? It can be literally anything — even if it sounds extrem”
“Our team handles a decent volume of DDQs and I keep seeing tools pitched as the answer to everything. But I'm skeptical. How do you actually trust what the tool generates? Has anyone run into answers that were just wrong or outdated? Curious what real teams are experiencing day to day. submitted by /u/Aamir7275 [link] [comments]”
“I have a genuinely unique idea in my niche (sim-drifting). I built almost all of the code by hand (I'm a software dev by trade). With that being said, im not good at styling and used AI-generated Tailwind. Will I be hurting the success and public sentiment because I didn't fully design and build the front end myself? What do you guys think? submitted by /u/KAID3N [link] [comments]”
“You still have to know how to prompt engineer the base, you have to make skills and context that understands your system how to interact with it. Another one is security. If you have sensitive data in your system you may not want users downloading it and using it in Claude or codex or whatever on their desktop. Also, at least Claude desktop uses code a lot of time, including making word and excel. I am waiting for a supply chain attack to ruin it for everyone and make everyone paranoid.”
“I wonder how many of us are still just...chatting with AI, not coding, not writing, not productivity related tasks. I still do because I have many ideas and doubts that I have no one to talk to, so I turn to AI chatbots. I do coding too of course, but it just seems to me that everyone is so heavily focused on productivity usage of AI. submitted by /u/Mk1028 [link] [comments]”
“Sorry I'm bit slow in adopting AI but I see many use agents to write code. I did it and it can really write whatever I want but then I feel I'm not doing anything. Is it normal to use AI to code now? submitted by /u/Key-Character-5852 [link] [comments]”
“Much broader field than other areas. Adding a button is tech, building AI models is tech and there is a spectrum in between. The more complex the task the harder it is to get in. Bootcampers will be straight reject for the more complex domains.”
“What do you guys use for Ai monitoring software on a corporate level? I want to be able to monitor and track for DLP reasons. Cheers submitted by /u/rarscl [link] [comments]”
“Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.”
“I highly doubt it. I mean my company pays and highly encourages us to use co-pilot for everything. Honestly it's been pretty great now that I got the hang of what it can and can't do. Obviously it can't do complex problems but it's pretty good as far as an assistant goes. Banks in particular seem to use a lot of AI so I wouldn't be worried unless you put sensitive data in there. Just be mindful of the privacy training and you'll be fine.”
Feature Proposal: AI-Mediated Idea Analysis and Human Expertise Routing
“they're going crazy with mentioning AI absolutely everywhere. "Where teams and agents Scale together. Capture context, find answers, and automate tasks with AI built for your team." says absolutely NOTHING and they don't explain their product on the whole frontpage. it's all agents and AI.”
“I think most developers don't actually need more AI tools. They need fewer tools that they actually use. My bookmarks are full of AI websites I tried once and never opened again. submitted by /u/All_Programming_tips [link] [comments]”
“I think most developers don't actually need more AI tools. They need fewer tools that they actually use. My bookmarks are full of AI websites I tried once and never opened again. submitted by /u/All_Programming_tips [link] [comments]”
“I’d start with work where errors are reversible and the result can be measured. Product research, description drafts, support-response drafts, supplier comparisons, review analysis, and unusual-order detection are better early uses than fully automated purchasing or customer promises. Your own product photography is probably the right call for trust. Give each use case one business outcome, such as response time, conversion, returns, or margin. We use SIGNLD internally to connect AI inputs with”
“I have not worked on a team with AI code review yet. How good is AI code review? when does it work and where is it weak? Does code review still take a long time? Is it good for repeated code? It's probably good for logic. Is it good for application architecture? This is the part I imagine it is poor at. I am asking as a developer that got knocked out into unemployment for a little while here, so mods, please give me a little break,I'm trying to connect with the still alive and working. &”
“i like ai the fact is makes coding more efficient but I find it super boring to let it sit there and wait for ai to finish its task then I review. I have multiple tabs opened for claude but it gets very boring. anyone feel the same? submitted by /u/EitherAd5892 [link] [comments]”
“I'm in a scrum team where we had a great tech lead previously who moved to a different team and we got a new tech lead a couple months ago who uses AI for everything. This guy burned through 2K worth of tokens a few days into the month! Usually, the token budget resets every month. He has not built anything at all. Mostly small PRs and config changes. He stopped reviewing PRs and created an Agent to review the team's PRs on his behalf. Keep in mind that we already have a PR bot! Anyway,”
“My bank has pushed us heavily to use AI to assist on our tasks. I am trianing as an underwirter and wrote my first pre-committee memo. AI didn't write it for me, but I did have it help me identify information from the pitch deck that where relevant and important for most sections (I chose what I wanted), then I wrote a draft and AI refined/grammar corrected it (as i am sure you can tell spelling isn't a strength of mine). I'm getting kudos, but I feel like I cheated...I feel like I n”
“I see a lot of zero tolerance for AI on this sub. While I understand the frustration when it's used for all the packaging, scripting, visuals, etc. However, as a viewer, what use cases are justified? submitted by /u/foamy2001 [link] [comments]”
“People think our content is AI-generated just because it looks... good? Has anyone else have the trouble recently? Faced some backlash? Our approach is simple - use AI to speed up code writing, brainstorming, optimisation. But don't affect end users. Experience is everything. But maybe there's something we don't see? Lot of comment to our game are "the painting, pictures and decals look like AI". Some comments got more aggressive "This is a pure AI dog-sh*t".  ”
“How are other orgs dealing with the increasing amount of AI slop being used in docs and chats? I love Claude, it's amazing and has allowed us to develop at record speeds, but I'm not a fan of entire docs written with clearly no actual user input. Same thing with slack messages, users are responding with obvious "That's a great question!...this thing -> that thing -> other thing...Let me know how else I can be of assistance". It's so impersonal but many times techn”
“I think things would take longer to get done (and that’s fine for me tbh).The main usage of AI for me is to do discovery: if I am working on service A that has a dozen other services as dependencies, then I clone all the repos, point the agent at them, and start to ask questions. I double check ofc. But without the agent I would be back to manual grep code and git logs, asking around, etc… that takes longer and you may miss things”