It Pros Weigh In On Ai’s Role In Coding: Doing More Of What They Hate The Most

Instead of writing code, programmers complain they now have to proof one written by artificial intelligence (AI). As the New York Times aptly put it, many feel like bystanders to their own job. I decided to run a quick vox populi to see what coders actually think about the so-called vibe coding. Funnily enough, those developers who use AI almost every time to write code were the same ones whose answers I couldn’t use because they were written by AI. Having rejected those, I was left with a dozen decent answers, and this article is based on my correspondence with experienced developers who leverages AI in everyday tasks, and seemingly have strong opinions about doing so. How often do developers have to check AI-written code? Every developer quoted in this article deals with AI-written code. The scope of it differs, but all of them agree you need to stay sharp when using AI if you don’t want to end up cleaning its messes later. “Nowadays, I’m more of a code editor than a coder myself. I review AI-generated code daily as if reviewing someone else’s pull request,” Holger Sindbaek, Founder and Developer at World of Card Games, told Cybernews. While most developers say they always check the AI-written code as it is “too risky” to trust AI output, some seemingly don’t bother. And here’s why. “I generally only need to proofread AI-generated code when it throws errors. That is very rare these days, usually for very recent API changes that the model isn’t trained on yet. It’s amazing how rapidly AI has evolved to need much less oversight and correction,” Derrek Coleman, Developer Relations Lead at Recall Labs, said. Cursor, the AI code editor, is one of the tools that came up a lot. Developers also mentioned GitHub Copilot, and some custom GPTs they use to vibe-code. Do developers prefer code-proofing to code-writing?  To read what Ilia Badeev, Head of Data Science at Trevolution Group, shared with Cybernews, click here.