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AI coding mandates are driving developers to the brink
- franktankbank 2y agoManagement should not be telling dev the tools to use. Tell me why I'm wrong.
- amiantos 2y agoI mean, ideally, management should not be telling me anything and should let me do my job in splendid, peaceful isolation. In practice, however, management tells me how to do all sorts of things, all the time, and they're responsible for me continuing to get paid, so I have to listen.
- tartoran 2y agoYou're also responsible if they get paid so if the product sinks it's game over. So they have to listen too.
- bluefirebrand 2y agoCouldn't agree more, but when the company is paying big money for a tool you can bet they're going to make sure people are using it
- javcasas 2y agoIs that the RTO mandates because we have so many unused 5 year office leases? I see, it's part deux.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago"We made a poor investment and now we're making it our employees problem" is absolutely a common outcome from business leaders yeah The only thing that trickles down is bullshit unfortunately
- tmpz22 2y ago[flagged]
- c0redump 2y agoUnionization is not possible while there are hundreds of millions of eager scab workers in other countries.
- hooverd 2y agoMaybe we could tariff offshore code?
- franktankbank 2y agoHey now but then we couldn't have all the crypto scams and increasingly complex and insecure software layers at bottom dollar! Forgot to mention all the spyware! How are the executives supposed to get their illegal kickbacks? Won't somebody think of the nepobabies!?
- itishappy 2y agoDoes this imply US salaries aren't possible either?
- UtopiaPunk 2y agoNAFTA wasn't inevitable. Globalization has largely been about (some) people making money as we all race to the bottom, and that has meant a steady supply of desperate people willing to sell their labor for less than the current crop of workers. Arguably one motivation for Trump's tariffs is to onshore jobs. It's an incredibly brutish and stupid way to go about it, though. A much better way would have been to oppose NAFTA and similar global a marketplace policies, as Bernie Sanders has done for decades now (and has largely been in a pretty lonely position).
- mfitton 2y agoYou're answering a question that wasn't asked so you can bring your view on unionization into the conversation. The implicit question is whether management should, not whether they can.
- charcircuit 2y agoThere is organizational efficiency around everyone using the same tools. Management can pick a set of tools to focus on. Not all developers know how to use all tools. Management providing education on tools can increase their efficiency. Developers do not stay up to date with all available tools that exist. Management providing better tools can make people more efficient.
- zdragnar 2y agoThat justifies using common tools and standards, but not why management in particular should be doing the selection. Everywhere mature that I've worked, management delegated the task of choosing common tools to the senior / staff engineers, as well as decisions around when to make changes or exceptions. The places that didn't do this were engineer-founded, or were dysfunctional enough that managers could splurge on massive contracts and then force people to use the paid-for tools to justify the contract post-hoc. Every one of these were examples of what not to do.
- hooverd 2y ago/can/ is doing some heavy lifting here. Management is just as capable of forcing tools that look good in 15 minute demos but suck for power users on developers.
- hnthrow90348765 2y agoIf you have lazy devs, sometimes you need to convince (or coerce, or force) them to get them out of their comfort zone and try something new. But typically this is done because management wants more while giving nothing in return which is why no one tolerates these suggestions. The other reason, which has been used to prevent devs from fixing bad code, is that making money is more important and sometimes that means moving away from costlier tools, or choosing tools because of specific business arrangements.
- itishappy 2y agoStandardization is valuable. An extreme example of your position would be a shop where everyone uses a different language. That's obviously untenable. A more reasonable example might be choice of editor. I'm of the opinion that management should provide everyone a standard editor, then not mandate it's use. This means anyone can hop onto any device and know how to use it, even if the device owner has a super-customized vim setup. Folks who become familiar with the standard editor are also better positioned to help their colleagues troubleshoot their setups. I don't see how this applies to AI assistants much if at all. It feels like mandating devs run all their ideas by a particular intern. If said intern isn't an architect then there's no value in having a single point of contact.
- nlawalker 2y agoNot that you're wrong, but here's the argument from the other side: - AI is supposed to be a great productivity booster, but no one has figured out a way of actually measuring developer productivity, so we'll just use the proxy of measuring whether they're using AI. - Developers won't want to use AI because it's threatening to them, so we'll mandate it. - Consistency and fungibility of human resources is incredibly valuable. 0.5x developers can use AI to get them up to at least 1x. And 10x developers? We're actually better off if the AI "slows them down" and makes their work output look more like everyone else's. 10x developers are actually a liability, because it can be hard to quantify and measure their contributions, and so when things become worse when they end up leaving, it feels intangible and impossible to fix.
- tikhonj 2y agoThis pattern is maybe 20% about AI specifically and 80% about low-trust leadership.
- justonceokay 2y agoIt’s about the “We can’t allow a mineshaft gap!” mentality displayed at the end of Dr Strangelove. If we aren’t using AI then how will we get developers interested in the cutting edge? When we are hiring new recruits they will know we are behind the times. We can’t allow other companies to outpace us in this space. Without an AI-first mindset we will be losing mindshare before our project has even left the planning stage! The arms race is just as much about keeping up with the Jones’ as it is about company security.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoYC has a big role to play in this mess. Gary Tan really needs to step down. This is what happens when you put a non hacker in charge of building tech.
- viccis 2y agoJust anecdotally, I recognize and dread working with AI code nowadays. In the past when I see something stupid being done, my thought was "I wonder if there's a good reason they did it this way" but now it's increasingly "I wonder what other AI written problems are in this module". Being forced to use AI would be a nightmare, as it means I would have to turn that same distrust onto my own code. It's one thing to use AI to basically just customize a scaffold like people do when using it to bootstrap some Next.js website or something. It's a completely different matter to have it writing code in huge and data driven existing codebases.
- eghAds 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- develoopest 2y agoMy company decided to fire all junior developers because "With AI seniors don't need them anymore", honestly I'm on the verge of quitting, deciding to cut devs on a software company while keeping agile coaches and product owners that basically hinder development has to be one of the dumbest decisions I have seen. Sorry for the rant.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoSnake eats itself too as doing so closed the pipeline to get more of their necessary seniors. Never mind that the people who made that call will be retired when the talent issue rears its head in 10-15 years.
- mywittyname 2y ago> Sorry for the rant. Part of what makes this community great is that people share their personal experiences. It helps the rest of us understand what's going on in our industry, because most of us can't at several different places at once.
- poisonborz 2y agoWhat? Which company thinks juniors are just "little helpers that seniors need"?
- grafmax 2y agoTheir stated rationale is obviously BS. They’re just trying to extract more from fewer workers by intensifying your working conditions. That’s why the managers are retained but not the juniors. Sure seems like they view you guys as adversaries not partners.
- tfandango 2y agoWe get to check a box on what AI we use when we close a ticket. I used to select "none" because most of the time that was the case, sometimes I would pick one if I used it to build some scaffolding or explore some performance issue. But then we started having AI demos with the CTO where the presenters would say things like "I don't know how to code in python but now I don't need to! yay!" and the C level people would be very excited about this. That's when I realized that these poor developers who just want to brown nose and show off to big cheese are instead making an argument for their own demise. Meanwhile I asked AI to make me a test and it mocked out everything I wanted to test, testing nothing, but passing. I wonder how much of these kinds of tests we have now...
- bluefirebrand 2y ago> Meanwhile I asked AI to make me a test and it mocked out everything I wanted to test, testing nothing, but passing. I wonder how much of these kinds of tests we have now This sort of thing is what I'm most worried about with programmers who are very bullish on AI. I don't think it's too controversial to say that most developers are much worse at reviewing code than they are at writing code AI generated code is a code review exercise. If you accept my premise that most devs are worse at reviewing code than writing it, this should ring some alarm bells
- icedchai 2y agoYou're spot on about developers being worse at reviewing code. With generated code, you still need to understand it if you want to maintain it. I had another person send me some AI generated code that was close to 90% working. It was missing something simple (something like appending to an array instead of overwriting it...) The original developer could not understand or debug it. I'm afraid of the crap we're going to see over the next few years.
- tfandango 2y agoThis is a great point. This mocked test, easy to literally click a button, look like you did something good, but potentially add massive negative value when the code fails but the tests all pass. It can be a very helpful tool, but you need to understand the code it produces, and it seems like people are missing that point.
- normanthreep 2y agoit's a tool that increases efficiency if you know how to use it. learn how to do it and it'll make your job easier and you become more productive. fight or ignore it and you'll be replaced because you're not doing your job properly don't listen to ignorant luddite technophobes on the internet, they are like all -phobes intolerant, full of hate and fearful of things they don't understand
- somanyphotons 2y ago> if you know how to use it. This is the problem though, too many people are too trusting of the output.
- simonw 2y agoRight, and those people really need to learn not to do that.
- bluefirebrand 2y agoThis reminds me of an old post somewhere "Everyone will not just" If your solution to any problem includes the phrase "If everyone would just X" then you don't have a real solution, because there is no future where "everyone will just X" "Everyone just needs to learn not to trust the AI so readily" That isn't a real solution. Everyone will not just become more skeptical and better at critical thinking
- simonw 2y agoI don't think those are the same problem. "If only everyone would just do X" where X is a thing that has a positive benefit is unrealistic. "If only people would learn not to do Y" where Y is a thing which actively hurts them and which they can learn the negative consequences over time feels a whole lot less impossible to me. If your co-worker pulls this crap, tell them not to. Complain about it in performance reviews. Replace them with someone who writes good code.
- noident 2y agoThat's funny, there isn't any mandate for using LLMs at my company. Everybody has just quietly added them to their workflows without being told. LLMs are like chainsaws. In the right hands, they can help you do the same job faster. In the wrong hands, it could cut off a limb. If someone drops a thousand line PR of total slop, it's not an AI failure, it's a human failure. Personally, I use LLMs for fill-in-the-middle jobs and boosting test coverage. It's a modest benefit, but I am definitely shipping higher quality software in a shorter period of time compared to before. They're not bad as starting points for learning new things, either. I've learned a number of new frameworks and libraries by using LLMs as a "better Google". Now I'm using it to learn Rust. As long as you use your knowledge and experience to evaluate the output, LLMs can only help. I would posit that people committing garbage from LLMs will have no problem writing insecure and buggy code without assistance. I caveat all this with the totally valid security and privacy concerns around sending code and data to 3rd parties that haven't been vetted rigorously. That said, local LLMs solve that problem handily and are good enough most of the time.
- tfandango 2y agoI think that's a good analogy. We use on-prem co-pilot and it works pretty good. I find it more useful exploring problems or debugging than I do at using it to make code.
- srvaroa 2y ago"When AI is able to deliver coding tasks based on a prompt, there won’t be enough copies of the Mythical Man Month to dissuade business folks from trying to accelerate road maps and product strategies by provisioning fleets of AI coding agents." Submitted yesterday, but no luck :D https://varoa.net/2025/04/07/ai-generated-code.html https://varoa.net/2025/04/07/ai-generated-code.html
- lokar 2y agoI think a lot of confusion and frustration about this is the assumption that all programming is the same thing. I have seen areas with just tons of boilerplate, straight forward UI stuff, basic test skeletons, etc that I guess could work with AI. But personally, in 30 years I’ve just never done much of that kind of work. Probably because I find it boring. I go look for hard or novel problems, or data structures and APIs that are causing problems (overgrown and hard to use, buggy, etc). A lot of the time is just figuring out what the authors expected the code to do, and anticipating what we will need for the next few years. I don’t see AI helping much with that.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago> I have seen areas with just tons of boilerplate, straight forward UI stuff, basic test skeletons, etc that I guess could work with AI The problem is that even this basic straightforward boilerplate CRUD stuff, AI is only "kind of ok" at doing
- lokar 2y agoI’m probably just old, but IMO the main problem I see with Jr devs is a lack of “taste” I don’t see AI helping
- bakuninsbart 2y agoCan that "taste" be measured in Dollarinos?
- pseudalopex 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago>I’m probably just old, but IMO the main problem I see with Jr devs is a lack of “taste” No wonder the most ardent users of AI are NextJS and Javascript devs
- writeslowly 2y agoOne thing I suspect is that leadership at tech companies that would have previously been working off of direct experience with technical processes, even if they no longer work directly on their own codebases, is pretty clueless about AI coding because it's so new. All they have to go with is what they read, or sales pitches, or their experience dabbling with Cursor to build simple python utilities (which AI tools work pretty well for most of the time), and they don't see what it can and can't do on a real codebase.
- franktankbank 2y agoThese are people who are stock market shook. I'd be looking at reducing your impact from index funds or if you were stupid enough to invest in tech stocks directly cash out now.
- tfandango 2y agoprediction: Prompt engineering will get so complicated. There will be a movement towards somehow telling the computer exactly what to do using a logical language of some sort.
- gyudin 2y agoWe should also acknowledge that most modern developers aren’t as skilled or knowledgeable as they believe. The majority don’t even meet the standard of being called true engineers. Many lack experience with distributed, high-load systems, fail to write code that meets cybersecurity requirements, and have no background in system design. On top of that, most have never worked in environments where backend and frontend are properly separated. I’ve seen so many posts like, "How is it even possible that landing a good junior job requires 1–3 years of experience? When after 3 years of coding blogs running on Wordpress you can already be a mid on a way to senior!"
- bluefirebrand 2y ago> We should also acknowledge that most modern developers aren’t as skilled or knowledgeable as they believe. I think this is probably true. I suspect that most people think they are above average, but of course it is impossible for most people to be above average AI tools will definitely allow below average programmers to get themselves into situations where their reach has exceeded their grasp, and the everyone else will pay for that
- mistrial9 2y agoI see a future where there are things like US law firms, which can be big or small, but include tight rules for their members, and market power through hard negotiations. Due to the nature of tech stacks (versus The Law) I doubt that there will be very many of these firms, relatively speaking. Certainly race to the bottom cheap and exploitative coding shops will continue, sometimes based around gambling districts in various places.
- jasonthorsness 2y agoLLMs require comparatively little training to use, and in fact training (like how to optimize prompts etc.) is probably a waste of time because the model behavior and interfaces change so frequently. This puts them in the class of tools where the benefit is obvious once there is actually a real benefit (and not, say, the foreshadowing of some future benefit). This sort of tool doesn't require a mandate to gain adoption. So, in the subdomains of software development where the LLMs are already useful, developers will naturally pick them up, assuming the business has secured the policy support and funding. In the areas where they aren't useful, businesses should trust developers and not waste their time with mandates. And I say this as someone who uses LLMs all day every day for Python, Go, Bash, C/C++, pretty much everything. But as an active user I see the limitations constantly and wouldn't mandate their use upon anyone.
- OnionBlender 2y agoHas anyone else found that these AI tools are worse at C++ than other languages? My boss keeps pestering me to get people to use these tools. I find they demo nicely for other languages, but aren't very good at non-trivial C++. Besides, our department's problems aren't from writing C++ too slowly. Our problems are a flaky build system, tightly coupled code, and teams that depend on one another spread across US, Europe, and South Asia.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago> I find they demo nicely for other languages, but aren't very good at non-trivial C++ I haven't found they are terribly good at non-trivial anything They will produce a 80-90% solution that then takes me longer to find and fix that 10-20% than it would have taken me to build it from scratch myself My suspicion is that people get so wowed by the instant and effortless 90% correct solution that they wind up downplaying how much time and effort that remaining 10% winds up taking
- wduquette 2y agoThe folks who made buggy whips were suspicious of the horseless carriage; and eventually had to go into another line of work. Question is, is AI-coding a new horseless carriage or a new brand of snake oil? My guess is that something of lasting worth will grow out of it; and that vibe coding will prove to be snake oil, at least for production code. In the meanwhile, I'm just glad I'm approaching retirement age--and that I don't work for a short-sighted corporation.
- fragmede 2y agoit's not snake oil, there's clearly something there, if you haven't vibecoded a thing or watched a video of someone doing it, you owe it to yourself to do at least that much. the question is how will the economy adapt to this and is it inflationary or deflationary? was developer time really the bottleneck on business development? the question of build va buy just got a giant weight in favor of build I was lambasted last week for claiming I could vibecode a credible threat to any SaaS company in a week, but I'm not alone in thinking that sort of capability. Chamath Palihapitiya claims: > Tell us what enterprise software you use and my team and I will build you an 80% feature complete version at a 90% discount. https://www.8090.inc/ https://www.8090.inc/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38960001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38960001
- bluefirebrand 2y ago> I was lambasted last week for claiming I could vibecode a credible threat to any SaaS company in a week, but I'm not alone in thinking that sort of capability Then do it If it is such a small investment, do it. Let us know how it goes
- fragmede 2y agoyou're not listening. okay, so let's say I've built an Eventbrite clone. how do I get people to use it? I'm not a salesperson, I don't have the businesses connections or acumen to make that happen. writing a bit of code is a tiny part of running a successful business.
- eestrada 2y agoI tried AI code completion via Amazon Q. I quickly turned it off; half the suggestions were noise that took more time to review than actually writing it myself. The one good use I have found is using it to tighten up my writing in design documents. I tend to use too many words to describe things. I use an LLM as a type of prose compressor on my documents. I need to re-read it afterward and make minor corrections, but it still saves me time since summarising my own writing takes much more time and energy. That is the only net win I've had with LLMs so far.
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoI've never been more excited to be a software engineer. Fight with your org to keep the guardrails. Code coverage, tests, CI. Nothing merged without human review by someone other than yourself. AI commentary on the PR helps speed this along, but there must be accountability. Now go have fun! If you're typing 100% the code, you are missing out! Yesterday with Cursor and a roadmap of bullet point features, I wrote ~15,500 lines of code and deleted ~3,890 lines before lunch. I didn't blindly accept any code; I vetted everything. I read and approved every line of code - think of it like reviewing the code as it appears. It was not perfect - but whose code is? It is my job to get it into shape once it's been generated. For example. Occasionally it made duplicate components or classes or even files! To that: "hey, looks like there are two FrobWidget classes now, can you take a look?" and it refactored and combined them without disturbing my flow, updating all the call sites too. When I said "can you make some tests?" it listed out bullet points of names for tests it thought relevant and generated multiple 250+ line test files while I sipped coffee. Because I'd seen the code go in, I could reason about how thorough it was being. At some point I'll ask it to add code coverage. And this is only guiding one copy of Cursor - imagine a future in which models don't trip up. One engineer can lead a whole fleet. We aren't paid for how much code we write; we never were. You can use this insane output multiplier to add so much value you make people gasp.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago> I vetted everything. I read and approve every line of code I do not for a second believe that you read and fully understood the impact of 15k lines of code added and 4k lines of code removed in less than four hours ("before lunch") This is the kind of overconfident BS that is going to run us all into the ground
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoIt helped that I worked from a clear roadmap. After the first feature I was on a roll so I just keep chugging! It'd be rare to write this much on a single day - after lunch I was exhausted. This codebase is on a mature stack - in particular, postgres and mature DB migration frameworks like alembic. I've learned through this process that as long as you get the data modeling basically right, everything else can be fixed as you proceed through testing your own work, from checking each little UI feature does what the code claims, all the way to end-to-end. Imagine you can do massive refactors just by asking the model a few questions, what does that unlock?
- fmxsh 2y ago> While 75% of company leaders thought their AI rollout over the past 12 months has been successful, only 45% of employees said the same. The term "rollout" implies a ready-made and well thought-through implementation, but isn't AI itself too new of a technology for that? A rollout indicates to me possible wrong assumptions about the thing. "Successive evaluation and adoption" would be a better strategy. Perhaps the framing of the relationship with AI as "rollout" reflects how decision-makers think of "AI"—through a vague imagination of efficiency that seems self-evident, but actually is not.