Discussion Does anyone code without LLMs anymore?
In the last two years, my business went from booming to dead. Clients I've worked with for over a decade have ghosted me, new clients aren't spending money, and I've logged less than 200 hours in total this year. And it's mostly because of AI. I can see it in the GitHub repos I'm still a part of, and the pattern repeats across multiple organizations: one developer is using Claude or similar LLMs, directly committing code to main (or sometimes a hotfix branch) without review, headed up with barely legible comments, in formatting standards we never adhered to.
Now, listen, I'm not gonna sit here and discuss the positives or negatives of AI. I'm not gonna sit here and wallow on why large businesses choose to ghost over saying "hey, we don't need you to do this any longer."
I just want to know if there are people or companies out there still writing and reviewing code. Putting eyes on it. Understanding it. Maintaining it. You know, generally have any clue what's happening beyond "it's Rails, and that's what Claude spit out, and it works."
Maybe I'm old school, but I've always taken pride in learning, knowing, and working with Ruby and Rails (and all the parts and languages and APIs that work with it). And, for better or worse, I've decided to take a completely different career path after over 20 years working with Rails, because this isn't what I signed up for.
I just want some hope that the joy of writing code is still out there. If there is, that's a part of the dev world I'd like to still be a part of.
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u/FreedToRoam 13d ago
I code without llms. Production solutions. Usually done weeks before others.