this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
608 points (99.0% liked)
Programmer Humor
27631 readers
1552 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Getting ai to do a complex problem correctly takes so much detailed explanation, it's quicker to do it myself
While it's possible to see gains in complex problems through brute force, learning more about prompt engineering is a powerful way to save time, money, tokens and frustration.
I see a lot of people saying, "I tried it and it didn't work," but have they read the guides or just jumped right in?
For example, if you haven't read the claude code guide, you might have never setup mcp servers or taken advantage of slash commands.
Your CLAUDE.md might be trash, and maybe you're using @file wrong and blowing tokens or biasing your context wrong.
LLMs context windows can only scale so far before you start seeing diminishing returns, especially if the model or tools is compacting it.
https://www.promptingguide.ai/
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices
There are community guides that take this even further, but these are some starting references I found very valuable.
So even more work than actual coding.
Yup. It's insanity that this is not immediately obvious to every software engineer. I think we have some implicit tendency to assume we can make any tool work for us, no matter how bad.
Sometimes, the tool is simply bad and not worth using.
Everyone is a senior engineer with an idiot intern now.
Early adopters will be rewarded by having better methodology by the time the tooling catches up.
Too busy trying to dunk on me than understand that you have some really helpful tools already.
While you're right that it's a new technology and not everyone is using it right, if it requires all of that setup and infrastructure to work then are we sure it provides a material benefit. Most projects never get that kind of attention at all, to require it for AI integration means that currently it may be more work than it's worth.
This is why I say some people are going to lose their jobs to engineers using AI correctly, lol.
"If I need to write boilerplate and learn a new skill, is it really worth it?"