AI as it exists today is only effective if used sparingly and cautiously by someone with domain knowledge who can identify the tasks (usually menial ones) that don't need a human touch.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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This 1000x. I am a PHP developer, I found out about two months ago that the AI assistant is included in my Jetbrains subscription (All pack, it was a separate thing before). And recently found about Junie, their AI agent that has deep thinking (or whatever the hell it is called). I tried it the same day to refactor part of my test that had to migrated to stop using a deprecated function call.
To my surprise, it required only very minor changes, but what would've taken me about 3 hours was done in half an hour. What I also liked was that it actually asked if it can run a terminal command to verify thr test results and it went back and fixed a broken test or two.
Finally I have faith in AI being useful to programmers.
For a test, I took our dev exam (for potential candidates) and just sent it to see what it does just based on the document, and besides a few mistakes it even used modern tools and not some 5 year old stuff (like PSR standards) and implemented core systems by itself using well known interfaces (from said PSRs). I asked it to change Dependency Injection to use Symfony DI instead of the self-made thing, and it worked flawlessly.
Of course, the code has to be reviewed or heavily specified to make sure it does what it is told to, but all in all it doesn't look like just a gimmick anymore.
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AI: The new outsourcing?
Companies with stupid leaders deserve to fail.
Well what ends up happening is some company will have a CEO.
He'll make all the stupid decisions. But they're only stupid from everybody ELSES perspective.
From his perspective, he uses AI, tanks the companies future in the chase of large short term stock gains. Then he gives himself a huge bonus, leaves the company, gets hired somewhere else, and gets to say "See how that company is failing without me? That's because I bring value to the brand."
So he gets hired at the neeeext place, meanwhile that first company is failing because of the actions of a CEO no longer employed there, and whom bailed because he knew what was coming.
These actions aren't stupid. They're plotted corruption for the benefit of one.
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McNamara fallacy at its finest. They hear figures and potential savings and then jump into the hype without considering the context. It is the same when they heard of lean manufacturing or Toyota way. Companies thought it is cost saving rather than process improvement.
And no doubt struggling to blame their bad decisions on each other and preserve their salary bonuses.
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Oh noes, who could have seen this coming
What these companies didn't take the time to understand is, A.I. is a tool to make employees more efficient, not to replace them. Sadly the vast majority of these companies will also fail to learn this lesson now and will get rid of A.I. systems altogether rather than use them properly.
When I write a document for my employer I use A.I. as a research and planning assistant, not as the writer. I still put in the work writing the document, I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.
My daughter has used AI a lot to write grant proposals, which she cleans up and rewords before submitting. In her prompts she tells it to ask her questions and incorporate her answers into the result, which she says works very well, produces high quality writing, and saves her a ton of time. She's actually a very competent writer herself, so when she compliments the quality I know it means something.
That's a good way to use the tool. I generally use the OpenAI option to set up a custom gpt and tell it to become an expert on the subject I'm writing about, then set the parameters. Then once I've tested it on a piece of the subject matter I already understand and confirm it's working properly, I begin asking it questions. When I'm out of questions or just need a break, I go back and check the citations for each answer just to make sure I'm not getting bad data.
Once I've run out of questions and all the data is verified, I have it create an outline with a brief summary of each section. Then I take that outline and use that to guide me as I write. Also it seems like the A.I. always puts at least one section in the wrong place so that's just another reason I like to write it myself and just use an A.I. summary outline.
I just use A.I. to simplify the tedious data gathering and organizing.
If you're conscientious, you check AI's output the same way a conscientious licensed professional checks the work of an assistant before signing their name to it.
If you're more typical... you're at even greater risk trusting AI than you are when trusting an assistant who is trying to convince your bosses that they can do your job better than you.
Oh I check the citations. I'm fully aware of A.I. hallucinations.
yes, 100%, do not use an LLM for anything you’re not prepared to vet and verify all of. The longer an LLM’s response the higher the odds it loses context and starts repeating or stating total gibberish or makes up data to keep going. If that’s what you want (like a list of fake addresses and phone numbers to prototype an app), great, but that’s about all it’s going to really do.
As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I've been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.
A lot of is pretty bad. It's a mess. But like I said I've been at it for awhile and I've seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn't learn anything. It's literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it's AI pretty much stating the same shit.
I've been getting so many requests for gigs I've been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I've burned through all my contacts that now I'm just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.
yes it's that bad (well bad for companies, it's fantastic for developers.)
EDIT: Since my comment has gained a lot of traction I've marked down peoples user names and portfolios/emails to my dev list. If something more comes up (and trust me, it will) I'll shoot you an email or msg on here. Currently I've already shoved off a bunch of stuff to others and have nothing as of now but I imagine that will change by next week so if more stuff comes up I'll shoot you an email or DM.
Sounds like you need to start a company and per diem staff.
They learned that by the time all of their shitty decisions ruin everything, they'll be able to bail with their golden parachute while everyone else has to deal with the fallout.
Throw us some work if you like, although I already work as software engineer but wouldn’t turn down a side gig cleaning up after LLMs.
I imagine you aren't talking about large companies that just let ai loose in their code base. Are these like companies that fired half their staff and realized llms couldn't make up for the difference, or small companies that tried to make new apps without a proper team and came up short?
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Retired dev here, I'm curious about the nature of "the mess". Is it buggy AI-generated code that got into production? I know an active dev who uses ChatGTP every day, says it saves him a hell of a lot of work. What he does sounds like "vibe coding". If you're using AI for grunt work and keep a human is in the workflow to verify the code, I don't see how it would differ from junior devs working under a senior. Have some companies been using poorly managed all-AI tools or what? Sorry for the long question.
Think of AI as a hard working, arrogant, knowledgeable, unimaginative junior intern.
The vibe coding is great for small, self contained tasks. It doesn't scale to a codebase (yet?).
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Would you happen to be willing to throw work to random out-of-work devs who aren't in your city? I may know a couple over here in England...
Sometimes it is a bunch of Indian guys pretending to be AI!
We've hired a bunch of Indian guys who are using AI to do their work... the results are marginally better than either approach independently.
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Ah so AI does create jobs, it’s the Zorg logic
Jean-Baptiste
Emmanuel
Zorg
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