What Coding Feels Like in the Age of AI | The Comments - Reviewing Code

So, this is the comment section where we take a look at what you have to say. Uh, let us know what you think about anything you hear down in the comments and we might just read it out. The first comment is about AI coding is making me hate programming. And this comment, I 100% agree with this. Reviewing code is not nearly as fun as designing and writing it yourself. And if AI ends up turning you into a full-time reviewer, then that's not coding anymore. It's not really fun. I feel like this is what I'm also starting to do. I'm not much of a coder. I'm prompting, but I see that I have to I'm just managing. And I'm not sure if it's the most fun part of the the job. Maybe maybe the fun is in the making it and not into just necessarily managing whether it's people or a few AI agents doing it. So what do you think of this? Because you are essentially a full-time reviewer. You're not re writing a lot of code but you're reviewing it, right? If even if you Yeah. Well, so the way I interpret this like there's no right or wrong, you know, there's no um people some people enjoy coding and some people enjoy managing, right? A lot of a lot of you know, that's how you progress up in the career ladder to to inevitably manage a team of people and this and that, right? It's it's a skill that not everyone wants to um possess. So yeah, it's fine to feel this way. I would say and I think I mentioned this last week is that one thing I am enjoying is that coding like I'm now able to delegate the coding aspect and then I can take the the responsibility of yes I manage those coding people but also I'm able to absorb and use the app more click around test for bugs try and think of user journeys that doesn't work in like a team of people I totally understand that that only really works as a solo dev um with some element of creative control. However, I'm finding my responsibilities are, you know, more in a place where I enjoy I still like coding. Don't get me wrong. I'll dust off the old fingers every now and again and do some hand coding. I did some hand coding today. But I can totally understand why people just don't like they don't care. A lot of developers like famously don't care about anything that exists outside of their code editor. Different strokes for different folks in it really. Yeah. But I I do see myself not enjoying prompting a lot. So I I do prompt. I get whatever I'm building to a point and then very quickly I add controls on some UI so I can start like fine-tuning things myself because that that's what I enjoy. I enjoy like crafting it. So whether it's writing the code or adding some UI to fine-tune the the code that you are writing, [snorts] I enjoy that level of control and not necessarily like tell the AI to add something and just see how it did it. That is fun to build like some of the fundamentals but at some other parts not as much. Uh but yeah, I'm also doing some hand coding like I have multiple agents and multiple instances of cursor like multiple windows. I don't know if people do this. I don't know if that's normal, but I do it that way. So I have multiple projects essentially. In one project I'm building like a tool. I'm prompting because I don't understand even like a small portion of the code because how complex it is. I'm building a tool and trying to do it MVP or whatever. And in another I'm building like a mini tool and I'm trying to learn it. So I'm like literally hand coding every piece and uh just using the ask mode strictly to ask not even to copy paste the uh the syntax but like very generic questions. to like compare it similar to searching can I use or something like this um at most but I try to even reduce that because I I want to build up that understanding before I go too much into the the building so I can see how the things work uh together. So yeah, I I do enjoy that and and there's no, you know, everyone's and we were talking about this before the show as well is that there is so many ways you can use AI to to categorically say AI is good or AI is bad because of the way that you use it for the things that you're using it for is it doesn't matter like you you've got your own experience and and that's fine for you to feel like way but it's not it's not the end of coding because it's very bad at coding. It's do [snorts] you know what I mean? Like it's it's fine to not enjoy the coding aspect and it's fine to use AI to to question and query and and learn so you can inevitably code it. Just just use it forever wherever you feel like it gives you strengths. If it slows you down, stop using it. If it makes you worse, stop using it. If it makes you better, you know, we Yeah. And we will see that we will see how that pans out with uh AI. like everybody can create images but you're we have only this much time to you know enjoy the best right um and and we will collectively as society uh we'll do that this is part of a larger conversation on my show command AI which we stream live every single week we discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web catch us next week and join in the banter