Live Coding Exercises in the Age of Generative AI

Here’s a pro-tip: if you are looking for work as a software developer, or you think you might be looking for a job soon, I suggest you turn off any AI-assisted code generation tools and do things as you used to do, at least a couple of weeks ahead.

Almost none of the companies hiring right now allow you to use them during live-coding sessions, and if you have been using such tools for a few months already, there’s a high chance that your muscle memory has deteriorated. You have probably become a bit lazier with typing and increasingly ignorant of the programming languages you are using and their APIs. None of those things will do you any good in situations where you need to demonstrate you’re a seasoned code combatant.

Since there’s a lot of talk (and hype) being built around these tools, from the ones that act as much better auto-completers, to the ones claiming to increase your productivity by 30%, or those hoping to completely take away your job, the fact that these tools promote laziness over learning skills is worrying.

There are too many demos from senior engineers doing AI-supported “coding” in programming languages they are not familiar with, and encouraging “you don’t need to care what these tools produce, as long as the task gets done.” This is quite irresponsible for the younger generations and the whole future of software engineering. As all seasoned software professionals well know, our industry has been trying really hard to build tools, processes, communication, and cultural patterns to create environments where building increasingly reliable software becomes more and more possible.

The key issue here is not the tools themselves, but how we use them. When developers rely too heavily on AI assistance without understanding the underlying concepts, they risk building systems they can’t properly maintain or debug. This creates technical debt that becomes increasingly difficult to manage as projects grow in complexity.

However, there’s still a lot of value in AI-assisted coding tools, especially if used as learning tools. They can be very successfully used for explaining, summarizing, and documenting legacy or some other existing and unfamiliar code. They can also be used to learn how to create a skeleton/POC code in a language/framework you never used before. Imagine having a StackOverflow, but with a use case tailored just for you! You can inquire about distinct features of the used programming language, boilerplate code explanations, or some other, more advanced usage patterns.