We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering.
New data from China, 26,811 students tracked January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump 20 percent. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments.
Then exam season came. Those same students scored 20 to 40 percent worse when they couldn’t use the tool.
The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming.
We’re doing this in software right now. Vibe coding feels incredible. Features ship fast. Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase.
Commercial pilots fly with autopilot for most of every flight. They’re required to maintain manual flying proficiency regardless. If the system fails mid-air and the pilot can’t take over, people die.
Most teams using AI right now have forgotten how to fly manually. They’ve become passengers in their own systems. The autopilot flies, nobody checks instruments, and the first sign of trouble will be a breach notice or outage.
Three rules:
- Command the mission. Define architecture before prompting. Ambiguity kills in code and in flight. Delegate selectively. Offload mechanical work. Keep design and security reviews human. Verify everything. Audit before production.
- Never trust the automation without checking instruments.
- Quick wins feel good. Sustainable engineering feels boring. Boring keeps systems standing.
Organisations surviving the next two years won’t ship the fastest. They’ll be the ones who remember how to fly without the aids.
people insisting that you actually be skilled, independently of your tools, doesn’t make them Luddites. Rather, being unable to do so makes you a phony.
Off-topic.
Whether or not you can pass an exam barely means anything IRL
Vibe coding at work lets you slack off and then secure your job when shit inevitably hits the fan and you have to untangle the mess. Seems like a win-win to me, assuming you know how to program to do the untangling part. The only bad part is not having any satisfaction in doing the job, but there was enough corporate bullshit in place all along to ensure that regardless.
And the post is written with fucking AI lmao
“AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.” - Cory Doctorow,
Goodluck arguing this with the AI bros
“dude I have an agent of workflow that goes through the entire codebase. the agent is the expert and I am guiding it”
alright man you have fun with that
My co worker is beyond that. He says the AI is smarter than him and he just passes the captchas and interacts with the real world for it
Fucking scary people are so willing to turn off their brain. When shit goes wrong, they will hold you accountable, not the AI.
having ai do your homework for you is not a flex
Finding ways to save effort is smart.
Finding ways to trade quality for convenience isn’t. In the case of education, given its fundamental importance, quality is paramount. A mentor of mine phrased it as “learn to do it right first, then learn where you can get away with being sloppy”. Education is the “learn to do it right” part.
In the case of programming, figuring out where you can be sloppy (and how sloppy) is a matter of experience. A junior developer doesn’t have that experience. A senior developer might, but in my impression they tend to be way less excitable and preachy about using AI.
Offloading a homework during brain development to watch some TikTok
Verify everything. Audit before production.
Yeah, the move fast and break things industry already didn’t do that before AI
“Wow this could potentially be pretty amazing, but also could cause unprecedented, catastrophic, dam–”
“TOO LATE. SHIPPED. SHIPPED TO EVERYONE. WORLDWIDE. Moneymoneymoney weeeeeeee”
I know that when i started using AI i got over blocks much faster. A system from design to implementation that use to take a week now only takes a few hours with most of that is testing and reviewing the code.
I don’t use agents to test and review code btw because i still want to know what’s going on but my colleagues are definitely using agents to build test large codebases. Im sorry but the truth is AI has changed how we build products in the same way intellisense and jet brains did but on a scale i haven’t seen in my lifetime.
Agreed. If you don’t use AI in coding you are not competitive with someone who does. It really is that simple. You won’t be able to keep up, your bosses will see, you will get fired and that’s that.
Even if the quality you deliver without AI is better, quality is not everything. Time is always a factor and AI beates you ten times over. The rest is sane flows with lot’s of testing etc.
Haha, nah. If you’re generally faster with AI assistance it just means you never actually knew how to do your job properly. Sure it can help you get over some hurdles, make docs searches a bit easier if some library has crap docs, but it’s a 5% speed improvement at best and it’s all worse the moment it sends you down some stupid hallucinated rabbithole.
You should give it another go, it has evolved disturbingly since last year. It out performs a junior level software engineer in both design, implementation, testing and debugging.
The hybrid model of a senior engineer using AI to produce code while the rest of the time allocation is spent on reviewing is the new normal.
You get 4 weeks to build x feature, you spend maybe a day with the help of AI then use the rest of the allotted time testing and debugging. What’s happening now is your allotted time is shrinking because managers understand how much faster engineers are working so its a cycle of shorter deadlines which pushes everyone to use AI.
I wouldn’t worry about software engineers going extinct. The role is changing but those core skills are really important to catch mistakes from both humans and AI.
Right now theirs two types of people using AI, software engineers who learned computer science and built software products and Joe MBA who struggles to write a bat file with the latter struggling to build cohesive products
I don’t know whether this is just ragebait, whether you have never tried any advanced AI agent or whether you genuinely think you can work as fast as an AI, but I can asure you that you can’t.
This isn’t One Hour Hot Dog. If you need a big huge fix right the hell yesterday, you fucked up last week. Possibly last year. And what’s gonna prevent that sort of company-liquidating blunder is a layer of crotchety obsessives who can spend a day reading and then commit one line. ‘Hit engine with hammer: $1. Knowing where to hit: $9,999.’
A system that’s pretty good at guessing a hundred places to try hitting has obvious value. Especially when undo is a thing. But this attitude of ‘the future is now, old man!’ is almost as off-base as the folks insisting a magic coding robot won’t help anybody.
I agree with you. I’m not even 100% anti-AI even though a lot of how it is used absolutely reeks.
Of course Big Business is gonna be all about shipping it fast and cheap to the detriment of all else as long as it “works right now.” The ridiculous farce of capitalism as we know it now is that their real goal is to sell off and bail at a profit just before all that vibe-debt comes due and things implode.
It doesn’t mean it’s the best way to create software.
It reminds me of how homes nowadays are thrown together and so ridiculously shoddy because it’s all about speed and holding together just long enough to sell.
I guess exams in school are supposed to represent real life???
Real life is open book. Exams are horseshit.I kinda agree. Although, I think the logic is nuanced. There is value in being able to know your stuff when your advanced tools and reference materials aren’t readily available or have failed.
… But then again I’m sure most of these kids aren’t going to be needing to emergency land a spacecraft by doing complex math from their head, Apollo 13 style… so… :p
But the cynic in me agrees “exams are horseshit.” It feels like they’re often used as a filter to keep the degree/cert/whatever “valuable.”
I agree with everything except for vibe coding feeling great.
Am I the only one who gets incredibly anxious relying on AI to code? I still ask it for code when I really just want to move on from a problem but it always feels like voluntarily putting mold in my floorboards.
I think it sounds really weird, too. I don’t like the sound of that at all. I’m not a pro though.
I’ll admit I enjoy carrying on little tutoring sessions with my GPU though. “How might I approach something like that?” “Can you explain this concept a bit differently?”
But I try to do all the solid brain work myself. Letting the machine write the code for me feels…kinda gross.
I actually think it’s awesome that it understands coding convention and codebases and stuff well enough. Saves a lot of time digging through the wreckage of search engines…
But I don’t appreciate that a lot of its “skill” is pulled from the efforts of uncompensated coders.
I only use it to solve specific problems when I can’t find the solution elsewhere. Then I spend the time to understand and rewrite the code myself.
It’s the same workflow as using Stack Overflow, etc. You can’t just copy/paste solutions.
I try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.
When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.
I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.
The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously. If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is good because you can work in parallel RUNI try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously.If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is goodbecause you can work in parallelRUN~~I try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.
When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.
I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.
The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously.~~ If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is goodbecause you can work in parallelRUN
Nice message, but why use the slop machine to write it? Use your own words!
Linkedin has been writing like this for a decade
I see short/choppy sentences, but not a lot of other slop writing indicators. What are you on about?
Sometimes I take screenshots of this guy’s comments bc he’s like opinionated and funny
But is he opinionated or is the LLM’s training corpus opinionated? Why should I care what an autocomplete has to say about this topic?
This is probably overly pessimistic/optimistic (depending on your outlook) in terms of timing. You won’t forget how to code after 18 months of using AI to do it instead; if you decide to go cold turkey, or OpenAI turns the screws on pricing, or whatever, you’ll be back in the swing of things in no time. The lesson from schools is that junior programmers who are learning now are not going to gain the same ability we did. (Besides that they’re finding it difficult to get hired because the AI can do junior programming fairly OK, that is). So the problem won’t be in 18 months; it’ll be in a few years at least, from that point of view.
There’s the separate question of architecture and code quality; by this point we’ve probably all seen the impenetrable morass that vibe coding leads to. That, I’m guessing, will cause problems much sooner.
That’s not what we’re talking about. Knowing how to program is just one thing. Students who use AI to cheat on theory classes won’t learn the theory. Additionally in programming classes they won’t learn how to program as well as they could
I think it is what the original post is talking about - it literally says “We’re doing this in software now … Nobody’s asking what happens in month 18”!
“Software” is not just knowing how to write code. I know from firsthand experience that experience with how a program runs, and the more technical bits help a shittton.
Uh, yes?
And using “AI” to write code or assignments will hinder a student from learning that in the first place.
But the bit of the post I’m talking about isn’t about students.
This happens with students and professionals all the same. I did miss you specifying professionals in your comment but most of what I said is correct. I’m not a student and I’m still learning more just by forcing myself to do things on my own.
This isn’t programmer humor… post to the right comm like fuck_ai@lemmy.world
The chart they didn’t post showed that time spent on homework correlated well with exam score regardless of AI use.
Turns out using AI to avoid homework (in this scenario, replace work) might be the issue. Using it to improve the quality of work (e.g. when you’re done coding a block, getting an AI to help fuzz your inputs to test that block) is likely to be beneficial.
