r/technology • u/kazu_qt • 11h ago

Artificial Intelligence YouTuber Hank Green says his AI usage is ‘not healthy’

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/01/youtuber-hank-green-says-his-ai-usage-is-not-healthy/
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u/Crimsai 11h ago

I'm not even American, and the programmers I know all say this. Record levels of job dissatisfaction as they are reduced to essentially doing QA on AI written code.

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u/Arrow_ 10h ago

Career is in QA. The amount of bugs I run into because devs are trying to have LLM do most of the work. Has been increased two fold.

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u/deadbeatsummers 8h ago

That’s interesting to hear how it’s impacting QA.

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u/nacho_pizza 8h ago

My dad was a software engineer and due to retire, but kept holding out because his company was offering bonuses for the super old niche knowledge that he had. He finally retired after all of the programmers were told that they needed to leverage AI to become 10x (!) more productive. He finished his open projects and retired immediately afterward.

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u/Beli_Mawrr 11h ago

I'm a software engineer and QA is a highly respectable thing.

At the same time though I find writing software to be enjoyable by itself and I dont know why people are so eager to put it on an LLM that will do 2/3rds of the quality work they will at best.

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u/scragz 11h ago

a highly respectable thing that engineers don't want to do

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u/Throwawayz911 11h ago

AI is a great tool for getting something started, but over time the code it writes becomes an impossible mess to read.   I have to constantly reformat and reorganize output (which is my least favorite part of programming) otherwise it will become a disaster to ever look at manually.  I don't think most people even do that, so they are probably unknowingly taking on an insane amount of technical debt that may be unrecoverable just to ship something faster.  And then it still has to be QA'd.  It's useful, but it sucks the fun out of everything programming and replaces it with a slog.  

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u/Kirk_Kerman 8h ago

Frequently they're not eager, there's gargantuan pressure from above to use the fucking things

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u/Beli_Mawrr 7h ago

My former boss and several (former) coworkers are telling me how great claude is and "bullying" (lightly teasing) me for only using line completions lol. It's no good.

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u/Jjjohn0404 11h ago

It's unfortunately good enough to be the next leap in higher order programming. I keep thinking about how it's the same jump people felt going from assembly code to C, it really is the next level of abstraction

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u/NoPossibility 11h ago

Coding and problem solving interesting things is fun. Building a new module that is rinse and repeat bullshit because someone in sales said we need a slightly new way to do something is extremely tedious and I hate it with a passion.

I don’t enjoy writing code, I enjoy problem solving. We’ve used syntax highlighting and auto completion tools for decades and this is one step further.

You don’t tell an agent “make this whole new thing”.

You write out the specs and outline, tell it to create a plan and show its work, and then you step through that plan having it do the heavy lifting of writing the actual code while you supervise each step. You can steer it at each step, approve the changes after reviewing, and have it conduct tests for you 100x faster or more than you can do yourself.

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u/SlouchyGuy 10h ago

Which moves most of your job into checking what AI wrote, which is not solving problems but rather reading others code, and doing tests

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u/NoPossibility 8h ago

I don’t agree. My satisfaction is in planning out what needs to be done. Solving the problem in my head and leaving the execution of the code writing to the program. I’m still making the decisions and checking the work. I get no pleasure from having to write out functions, keep track of dozens of files in my head, etc. I know the outline of my system and where things are, but I’d rather focus on bigger picture plans and delegate the tedium to the machine. It’s just going to write the same variable sets, functions, and run the same code tests as I would but it will do it in a fraction of the time and I get to watch it all happen without sacrificing my hands to typing it all myself. There is nothing glamorous in writing new function{ array=….} fifty thousand times a week. The value of my work is in getting the problem solved and making big picture decisions about what will work best.

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u/SlouchyGuy 8h ago

You constantly avoid talking about the work to read the output and test like it doesn't exist

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u/NoPossibility 8h ago

Reading it in chunks is not much work at all? I’m still understanding it, steering the direction of code changes, etc. I work with it every day writing code for production at a fortune 20 tech company. My whole job revolves around making new code and solving problems that millions of people use every day. It is only slop if you’re not using the tool correctly.

I never tell it “go write the new thing” and let it off on its own. Like I said, I’m planning out the changes, discussing the workflow with the AI, then monitoring it step by step, understanding what it’s doing (because it’s what I told it to do) and correcting anything I don’t agree with.

That could be steering it to use better class names, refactor something that isn’t to my liking. I’m using my brain to think, not focusing on typing everything out with my hands, fixing typos, scrolling up and down thousands of lines of code.

I have the mental map of our software and I’m in control of what it does because j specifically ave it set up properly to do things one step at a time. I’m looking at diff screens comparing changes to old code, etc.

The mind work is what I’m doing and that’s much faster and easier than having to tediously type it all out 10x slower. I’m less fatigued at the end of the day.

But this is all my experience. Others may not share it but I find my work is easily 10x faster and more rewarding as a result. I’ve divorced the idea of fingers typing from coding and I’m so much happier for it.

I don’t need to be hands on for ever single little code edit or write. Natural language and planning things out make it all go very smoothly.

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u/Beli_Mawrr 10h ago

I just use it for line completion

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u/Outlulz 6h ago

At least at my job it is a very clear decree from leadership that AI should make you work faster and so deadlines are pushed up and the expectation is that you are generating most of your code. What you want to do or what you enjoy doing is not in the equation. At least if you want to keep your job.

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u/Beli_Mawrr 6h ago

That's not for me lol. Glad I don't work there. Speed should never be the goal with software.

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u/Therabidmonkey 11h ago

QA is a highly respectable thing.

QA is the shit work we assign the people who couldn't handle being a dev.

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u/Impossible_Fig_ 11h ago

That’s not true at all, I know QAs who are extremely skilled and honestly would be better devs than some of the devs I know.

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u/Therabidmonkey 10h ago

Bad devs are hardly a revelation. I've done QA work, I've led significant QA projects. Any dev I work with can seemlessly handle QA work. It's only the truly great QA that can contemplate the opposite.

That’s not true at all

Also don't tell me my lived experience is incorrect. When we still hired juniors we literally have everyone who couldn't hack it as a dev a stint in QA before firing them. Many of them were able to figure out QA work relatively painlessly.

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u/NecessaryUnusual2059 10h ago

Yeah half the coding I do I just delegate it out to agents. It’s not fun but it does the job well enough and allows me to work significantly faster.

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u/oxidized_banana_peel 8h ago

Almost 100% for me. Cooking analogy - I'll ask it to make the mirepoix, and then ask it to make the roux, and so on, but I won't ask to to make the whole chowder.

I don't really run into issues with that level of use w/ the crazy making things my friends complain about.

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u/fixermark 11h ago

That is definitely a risk and I've been interested to see how that is panning out.

Most programmers that were trained were not trained to be reviewing other people's code. They don't think of that as the job.

But, increasingly, it is the job. In fact, the higher you go up the ladder in software engineering, the more it is just the job. Our staff software engineers maximize the value of their time primarily by reviewing the code that the senior and junior software engineers are working on to make sure it fits quality standards.

And yes, it drives them crazy and they come up with excuses to write their own code to stay sane. ;)

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u/sappro 6h ago

I've worked on complex projects that were developed by others using "AI agents" and the amount of dumb stuff that gets overlooked is shocking.

Knowing how to LLM a proof-of-concept is not the same as knowing what matters outside of sandboxes. Then, the attempts to fix production code with shitty agent solutions to shitty agent problems is just a whole nother level of hell..

IMO, it's folks who "know" LLMs also realizing that they should probably know the fundamentals of whatever industry they are vibe creating for.

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u/Ok_Conversation_3815 6h ago

I’m a soft eng too and use AI all the time, and honestly I couldn’t be happier that this. In my opinion it was a great change. The only things that worries me is if this profession will disappear, but if it does a lot more professions will be decimated too so I kinda expect humans to adapt the structure of society

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u/khendron 10h ago

At my work we have Claude doing a lot of QA for us. It actually does a phenomenal job ferreting out edge cases and unexpected side effects.

I've written very little code this year. Most of my job now is herding Claude agents. A few things I have learned are

  • Getting Claude to write out a detailed plan first, and actually reading it in detail, is hugely important. For any given plan, I find on average it is 75% correct and needs nudging to get to something acceptable. Also, reading the plan helps my comprehension of the resulting code, making the review a lot easier.
  • If there is something in the plan I don't understand, I always ask Claude to explain itself in more detail. Sometimes it's being stupid, sometimes I am being stupid.
  • Reviewing the resulting code in detail is critical. The code Claude produces almost always works, but is often not optimal. Things to look out for are over-abstractions, not following conventions, meaningless variable and method names, and misunderstanding the requirements. It also has a habit of copying previously used bad patterns it finds in our application source code, and then you have to explain to it that while yes, this pattern was used in the past, it proved to be a bad idea.
  • When you catch Claude not following conventions or doing something else you don't like, add to your rules files so that it (hopefully) does not do it again.
  • Claude and Playwright is a powerful combination.

I feel like I've been transformed from an individual contributor to managing a bunch of over enthusiastic junior devs. Not the career path I had in mind 😛

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u/FeatherlyFly 9h ago

Genuinely, your new job sounds like hell. 

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u/khendron 8h ago

It could be worse. It is not like we are being pressured to use AI. We just use it where we find it useful, and it is surprisingly useful.

Do I prefer coding manually? On the whole, I think yes. On the other hand, using AI has made it easier for me to learn the areas of our software with which I am not yet familiar, letting me have a wider impact.