{"id":585135,"date":"2026-04-04T14:22:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T14:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/585135\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T14:22:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T14:22:15","slug":"i-started-to-lose-my-ability-to-code-developers-grapple-with-the-real-cost-of-ai-programming-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/585135\/","title":{"rendered":"“I started to lose my ability to code”: Developers grapple with the real cost of AI programming tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe it started in February, when programmer and entrepreneur Paul Ford, 51, wrote a guest essay for The New York Times<\/a> gushing that \u201cthe A.I. disruption has arrived.\u201d AI coding tools are getting stronger \u2014 and so are the hopes and fears of the programmers they\u2019re displacing. Online, a messy, real-time reckoning is already underway.<\/p>\n

In his essay, Ford applauds the possibilities unlocked by faster, cheaper vibecoding: \u201cIt\u2019s fun to see old ideas come to life,\u201d he writes, revisiting long-abandoned projects on the subway.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

And in mid-March, tech author Clive Thompson saw his interviews with more than 70 software developers at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and start-ups published in the Times\u2018 magazine. The consensus was \u201cmost were\u00a0weirdly jazzed about their new powers<\/a>. I was surprised by how many software developers told me they were happy to no longer write code by hand. Most said they still feel the jolt of success, even with A.I. writing the lines.\u201d<\/p>\n

But others continued expressing deeper concerns. Pia Torain, a software engineer for Point Health A.I., told Thompson that after four months of issuing hundreds of prompts a day, she\u2019d \u201cstarted to lose my ability to code.\u201d Torain now makes a conscious effort to slow down and absorb the program\u2019s entire architecture and flow, warning that this may be the ultimate danger of outsourcing too much of our programming to AI. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t use it, you\u2019re going to lose it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t use it, you\u2019re going to lose it,\u201d Torain told Thompson. And this creates an even bigger dilemma for junior developers, as captured succinctly by a recent comment on Hacker News<\/a>. \u201cIf nobody\u2019s hiring junior devs because LLMs can do junior work faster and cheaper, how is anyone going to become an expert?\u201d<\/p>\n

See also: Microsoft execs warn agentic AI is hollowing out the junior developer pipeline<\/a><\/p>\n

That concern is playing out in multiple ways. \u201cAt one point, I thought when I got older it might be nice to teach,\u201d muses a commenter<\/a> in a Hacker News thread. \u201cStudents have infinite teachers on YouTube, and now they have Gemini\/Claude\/ChatGPT, which are amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Already, it feels like there\u2019s not much left for a human teacher to contribute, they believed, and with the rate at which tools are improving, that could drop to zero within two years.<\/p>\n

Coding faster brings its own problems \u2014 including concerns about code quality and questions about whether expertise will be more or less valuable now in a world filled with powerful AI programming agents \u2014 as well as a heightened risk of developer burnout. <\/p>\n

As new tools transform our world, those conversations are getting louder, with top publications and online discussions capturing disruptions from multiple perspectives, showing an industry now reckoning with new AI coding tools and the transformations they bring \u2014 both the bad consequences and the good.<\/p>\n

Passion and speed vs. quality and expertise<\/p>\n

The discussion erupted in full force earlier this month on Hacker News when a 60-year-old programmer posted that Claude Code had \u201cre-ignited a passion<\/a>.\u201d That thread drew 1,086 upvotes \u2014 and 989 comments with more stories and anecdotes, but also some debate and concern. \u00a0(Days later, a kind of rebuttal was posted, arguing that Claude Code had \u201ckilled a passion<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In the last few months, more powerful AI tools have clearly boosted the output of some programmers \u2014 especially those later in their careers. Among the 989 commenters was programmer John Calhoun, describing himself as an old Macintosh shareware author, who started at Apple in 1995, and admitting he\u2019d \u201cvibe-coded a website that I would not have otherwise attempted\u2026 And I have already queued up a couple of my abandoned projects\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n

The resurrection of abandoned projects seems to be happening around the world. In Dresden, 62-year-old programmer Reini Urban said<\/a> LLM coding agents \u201cignited my passion again.\u00a0 I\u2019ll soon unarchive older projects that were too hard to continue. With Opus, this will finally be doable. \u201d And 51-year-old Boston electrical engineer\/entrepreneur John Reine<\/a> posted that \u201cIt\u2019s given me the guts to be a solo-founder.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But among those 70 software developers interviewed by Thompson was also a passionate minority who, he said, now \u201cactively avoid\u201d AI tools, including an anonymous Apple engineer who still wanted to do all of their own coding. \u201cI believe that it can be fun and fulfilling and engaging, and having the computer do it for you strips you of that,\u201d they\u2019d said, insisting they didn\u2019t want to \u201coutsource\u201d their passion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are also concerns about code quality. As one Hacker News commenter put it, \u201cLLMs are quite good at coding, but terrible at software engineering\u2026 At the moment, I am trying to fix a Vibe-coded application, and while each individual function is ok, the overall application is a dog\u2019s breakfast of spaghetti, which is causing many problems.\u201d <\/p>\n

And one of the coders commenting was Joel Dare, a 50-year-old software engineer in Utah, who complained that after 40 years in this industry, \u201cI\u2019ve developed a low tolerance for architectural decay.\u201d\u00a0 So when he\u2019d forgotten to tell Claude not to use frameworks for a Node project, he\u2019d ended up with 89 dependencies.\u00a0 \u201cIn a world where we prioritize \u2018velocity\u2019 over maintenance, this is the status quo. For me, it\u2019s unacceptable. I\u2019ll try again, but we NEED to expertly drive these tools, at least right now\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several commenters said in the end, AI tools are simply making their expertise more valuable, with one principal SWE believing AI \u201cmagnifies the thing I do well\u201d \u2014 architecture, debugging, and \u201cmaking good technical decisions.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n

And 63-year-old Chris Marshall, who\u2019s been coding since 1983, said, \u201cI do feel as if my experience\u2026 is crucial to using the LLM to develop something that can be shipped. I\u2019ve had to learn how to work with an LLM, but I think I\u2019ve found my stride.\u201d <\/p>\n

There was an interesting analysis from software engineer\/founder Juan Reyero<\/a>, who\u2019s been programming for 40 years, and sees this debate diverging into two camps.\u00a0\u201cI think that the biggest difference is between people who mostly enjoy the act of programming (carefully craft beautiful code\u2026.), vs the people who enjoy having the code done, well structured and working, and mostly see the act of writing it as an annoying distraction.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n

As Dare put it, AI coding \u201cstill requires our expertise to guide it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although he\u2019d also added, \u201cI\u2019m not sure if that will be the case in a year, but it is today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good news, bad news<\/p>\n

Perhaps no one typifies the mixed responses to AI coding tools like 57-year-old software engineer Steve Yegge, who commemorated the new enthusiasm that seemed to be spreading as he approached his 57th birthday in January marveling on Medium that he\u2019s \u201ccranking out thousands of lines of production code per day\u2026 and generally having an absolute blast.\u201d\u00a0 (In the Times\u2018 article Yegge says he\u2019s now 10x, 20x, \u201ceven 100 times as productive as I\u2019ve ever been in my career\u2026 It\u2019s like we\u2019ve been walking our whole lives.\u201d)\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Yegge\u2019s LinkedIn profile<\/a> now gives his occupation as \u201cAI babysitter,\u201d as he savors his abilities increasing exponentially thanks to powerful swarms of AI agents and orchestrators.<\/p>\n

But for Yegge, the thrill of all this productivity is that it even has unintended side effects. Yegge and two of his co-workers decided that \u201cHigh-end vibe coding is fucking with our sleep cycles,\u201d Yegge writes.\u00a0 (\u201cThis wasn\u2019t happening last year. It wasn\u2019t until we\u2019d started working with a dozen or more agents at once and doing swarming of large piles of work\u2026\u201d)\u00a0 <\/p>\n

At his startup\u2019s new AI agent platform Gas Town, \u201cOur hypothesis is that we\u2019re operating at such a high level of decision-making that we\u2019re exhausting some internal buffers, and need to grab some gradient-descent time before we can continue.\u201d But \u201cTo me it feels like \u2026 We\u2019re finding it to be exhausting<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

A boon for seniors?<\/p>\n

Maybe this newfound ability is especially meaningful to senior programmers. Kent Beck, a 64-year-old programming guru, even told Thompson he\u2019d mostly stopped coding 10 years ago, frustrated with languages and tools, but LLMs got him programming again.\u00a0 (Acknowledging that sense of fun,\u00a0Beck said AI\u2019s unpredictability \u201cis addictive, in a slot-machine way.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Chris Marshall, 63, even sees it addressing a silent ageism. \u201cThe thing that most upset me, since retirement, has been the lack of folks willing to work with me,\u201d Marshall posted in the online discussion<\/a>. \u201cI spent my entire career working in teams, and being forced to work alone reduced my scope. I feel as if LLMs have allowed me to dream big, again.\u201d While he remains a retired coder, he writes, \u201cI\u2019m enjoying having an LLM pair partner.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the comments piled up on Hacker News, some senior coders even went into specifics<\/a> on what draws them to AI-assisted coding. Douglas Tarr, 52, writes that coding \u201cmanually\u201d brings back memories of 12-hour days and \u201cmakes me tired just thinking about it\u2026 I\u2019m too old for that now, my back hurts if I sit too long, and occasionally I get migraines if I look at a screen too much\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n

But most heartening of all was the response from Minnesota-based programmer TQ White<\/a>, who posted that he\u2019d written his first program in 1967 \u2014 and that AI coding tools addressed his biggest issue<\/a>. \u201cThe isolation of being a retired programmer is a real bitch\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

White joked that \u201cI\u2019m not allowed to feel like AI is an adequate replacement for fear that the critics will tell me I\u2019m not healthy\u2026\u201d\u00a0 But then he added that \u201cbetween you and me, as much as I miss the camaraderie of real humans, being able to brainstorm with an entity that knows pretty much everything and is able to execute my will without complaint is not bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd, it\u2019s nice to have someone, something, to talk to about technical ideas. It\u2019s a great time to be alive\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDavid Cassel is a proud resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, where he’s been covering technology news for more than two decades. Over the years his articles have appeared everywhere from CNN, MSNBC, and the Wall Street Journal Interactive…\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

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