5 ms·

Yet you are working on your own replacement, while your colleagues are taking the prudent approach.

nialse 1y ago
Ahh, the “don’t disturb the status quo” argument. See, we are all working on our replacement, newer versions, products, services and knowledge always make the older obsolete. It is wise to work on your replacement, and even wiser to be in charge of and operate the replacement.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  No, nothing fundamentally new is created. Programmers have always been obsessed with "new" tooling and processes to distract from that fact. "AI" is the latest iteration of snake oil that is foisted upon us by management. The problem is not "AI" per se, but the amount of of friction and productivity loss that comes with it. Most of the productivity loss comes from being forced to engage with it and push back against that nonsense. One has to learn the hype language, debunk it, etc. Why do you think IT has gotten better? Amazon had a better and faster website with far better search and products 20 years ago. No amount of "AI" will fix that.
  - nialse 1y ago
    Maybe I would be useful to zoom out a bit. We're in a time of technological change, and change its gonna. Maybe it isn't your job that will change, maybe it is? Maybe it's not even about you or what you do. More likely it's the processes that will change around you. Maybe it's not change for better or worse. Maybe it's just change. But it's gonna change.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > It is wise to work on your replacement... Depends on the context. You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP. Before software engineers go celebrate this tech, they need realize they're going to end up like rust-belt factory workers the day after the plant closed. They're not special, and society won't be any kinder to them. > ...and even wiser to be in charge of and operate the replacement. You'll likely only get to do that if your boss doesn't know about it.
  - nialse 1y ago
    > You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP. We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice.
    - palmotea 1y ago
      > We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice. Those alternatives are going to be worse for you, because if they weren't, why didn't you switch already? And if a flood of your peers are pursing alternatives at the same time, you'll probably experience an even poorer outcome than you expected (e.g. everyone getting laid off and trying to make ends meet driving for Uber at the same time). Then, AI is really properly understood as a "fuck the white-collar middle-class" tech, and it's probably going to fuck up your backup plans at about the same time as it fucks up your status quo. You're also describing a highly individualistic strategy, for someone acting on his own. At this point, the correct strategy is probably collective action, which can at least delay and control the change to something more manageable. But software engineers have been too "special snowflake" about themselves to have laid the groundwork for that, and are acutely vulnerable.
      - nialse 1y ago
        Alternatives need not be better or worse. Just different. Alternatives need not be doing the same thing somewhere else, it might be seeking out something else to do where you are. It might be selling all your stuff and live on an island in the sun for all I know. I do concur it is an individualistic strategy, and as you mentioned unionization might have helped. But, then again it might not. Developers are partially unionized where I live, and I'm not so sure it's going to help. It might absorb some of the impact. Let's see in a couple of years.
Jolter 1y ago
Here’s the deal: if you won’t write your replacement, a competitor will do it and outprice your employer. Either way you’re out of a job. May be more prudent to adapt to the new tools and master them rather than be left behind? Do you want to be a jobless weaver, or an engineer building mechanical looms for a higher pay than the weaver got?
- allturtles 1y ago
  I think it's the wrong analogy. The prompt engineer who uses the AI to make code maps to the poorly-paid, low-skill power loom machine tender. The "engineer" is the person who created the model. But it's also not totally clear to me that we'll need humans for that either, in the near future.
  - 91bananas 1y ago
    Not all engineering is creating models though, sometimes there are simpler problems to solve.
  - ori_b 1y ago
    At some point, we'll probably have these things write their own prompts, too.
  - Jolter 1y ago
    Still, the loom tending engineer got paid better than the weaver. Well, my prejudice says he did, don’t actually have the historical facts.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  I want to be neither. I either want to continue being a software engineer who doesn't need a tricycle for the mind, or move to law or medicine; two professions that have successfully defended themselves against extreme versions of the kind of anxiety, obedience and self hate that is so prevalent among software engineers.
  - empath75 1y ago
npteljes 1y ago
Carteling doesn't work bottom-up. When changes begin (like this one with AI), one of the things an individual can do is to change course as fast as they can. There are other strategies as well, not evolving is also one, but some strategies yield better results than others. Not keeping up just worsens the chances, I have found.
- asdff 1y ago
  It does when it is called unionizing, however for some reason software developers have a mental block towards the concept.
  - BlackSwanMan 1y ago
    [dead]
  - twodave 1y ago
    I would be much more in favor of them as a software developer if I felt the qualifications of other software developers were reliable. But they never have been, and today it’s worse than ever. So I think it’s important to weed some of that out before we start talking about making it harder to fire people.
    - sumeno 1y ago
      You're doing your boss's job for them by making this an engineer vs engineer thing instead of an engineer vs management thing.
      - twodave 1y ago
        No, today I can tell my manager when someone sucks at their job, and if enough other people are saying the same thing then that engineer will either be given help so they stop sucking or be fired so they don’t subtract from the team. Because this happens fairly often I wouldn’t want to add a lot of friction to that process. Idk, maybe you can protect people from being laid off without also complicating performance-based firings.
JeremyNT 1y ago
I don't think that this should be downvoted because it raises a really important issue. I hate AI code assistants, not because they suck, but because they work. The writing is on the wall. If we aren't working on our own replacements, we'll be the ones replaced by somebody else's vibe code, and we have no labor unions that could plausibly fight back against this. So become a Vibe Coder and keep working, or take the "prudent" approach you mention - and become unemployed.
- realusername 1y ago
  Personally I used them for a while and then just stopped using them because actually no, unfortunately those assistants don't work. They appear to work at first glance but there's so much babysitting needed that it's just not worth it. This "vibe coding" seems just another way to say that people spend more time refining the output of these tools over and over again that what they would normally code.
  - JeremyNT 1y ago
    I'm in this camp... today. But there's going to be an inflection point - soon - as things continue to improve. The industry is going to change rapidly. Now is the time to either get ready for that - by being ahead of the curve, at least by being familiar with the tooling - or switch careers and cede your job to somebody who will play ball. I don't like any of this, but I see it as inevitable.
    - suddenlybananas 1y ago
      You just said they worked one comment ago and now you agree that they don't?
      - JeremyNT 1y ago
        I'm in the same camp in that I don't use them because they don't work well enough for my own tastes. But I know what I'm doing, and I'm picky. Clearly they do work in a general sense. People who don't want to code are making things that work this way right now! This isn't yet replacing me, but I'm certain it will relatively soon be the standard for how software is developed.
dughnut 1y ago
Do you want to work with LLMs or H1Bs and interns… choose wisely. Personally I’m thrilled that I can get trivial, one-off programs developed for a few cents and the cost of a clear written description of the problem. Engaging internal developers or consulting developers to do anything at all is a horrible experience. I would waste weeks on politics, get no guarantees, and waste thousands of dollars and still hear nonsense like, “you want a form input added to a web page? Aw shucks, that’s going to take at least another month” or “we expect to spend a few days a month maintaining a completely static code base” from some clown billing me $200/hr.
- rsyring 1y ago
  You can work with consulting oriented engineers who get shit done with relatively little stress and significant productivity. Productivity enhanced by AI but not replaced by it. If interested, reach out to me.

Ahh, the “don’t disturb the status quo” argument. See, we are all working on our replacement, newer versions, products, services and knowledge always make the older obsolete. It is wise to work on your replacement, and even wiser to be in charge of and operate the replacement.

bgwalter 1y ago
No, nothing fundamentally new is created. Programmers have always been obsessed with "new" tooling and processes to distract from that fact. "AI" is the latest iteration of snake oil that is foisted upon us by management. The problem is not "AI" per se, but the amount of of friction and productivity loss that comes with it. Most of the productivity loss comes from being forced to engage with it and push back against that nonsense. One has to learn the hype language, debunk it, etc. Why do you think IT has gotten better? Amazon had a better and faster website with far better search and products 20 years ago. No amount of "AI" will fix that.
- nialse 1y ago
  Maybe I would be useful to zoom out a bit. We're in a time of technological change, and change its gonna. Maybe it isn't your job that will change, maybe it is? Maybe it's not even about you or what you do. More likely it's the processes that will change around you. Maybe it's not change for better or worse. Maybe it's just change. But it's gonna change.
palmotea 1y ago
> It is wise to work on your replacement... Depends on the context. You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP. Before software engineers go celebrate this tech, they need realize they're going to end up like rust-belt factory workers the day after the plant closed. They're not special, and society won't be any kinder to them. > ...and even wiser to be in charge of and operate the replacement. You'll likely only get to do that if your boss doesn't know about it.
- nialse 1y ago
  > You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP. We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice.
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice. Those alternatives are going to be worse for you, because if they weren't, why didn't you switch already? And if a flood of your peers are pursing alternatives at the same time, you'll probably experience an even poorer outcome than you expected (e.g. everyone getting laid off and trying to make ends meet driving for Uber at the same time). Then, AI is really properly understood as a "fuck the white-collar middle-class" tech, and it's probably going to fuck up your backup plans at about the same time as it fucks up your status quo. You're also describing a highly individualistic strategy, for someone acting on his own. At this point, the correct strategy is probably collective action, which can at least delay and control the change to something more manageable. But software engineers have been too "special snowflake" about themselves to have laid the groundwork for that, and are acutely vulnerable.
    - nialse 1y ago
      Alternatives need not be better or worse. Just different. Alternatives need not be doing the same thing somewhere else, it might be seeking out something else to do where you are. It might be selling all your stuff and live on an island in the sun for all I know. I do concur it is an individualistic strategy, and as you mentioned unionization might have helped. But, then again it might not. Developers are partially unionized where I live, and I'm not so sure it's going to help. It might absorb some of the impact. Let's see in a couple of years.

Jolter 1y ago

Here’s the deal: if you won’t write your replacement, a competitor will do it and outprice your employer. Either way you’re out of a job. May be more prudent to adapt to the new tools and master them rather than be left behind? Do you want to be a jobless weaver, or an engineer building mechanical looms for a higher pay than the weaver got?

allturtles 1y ago
I think it's the wrong analogy. The prompt engineer who uses the AI to make code maps to the poorly-paid, low-skill power loom machine tender. The "engineer" is the person who created the model. But it's also not totally clear to me that we'll need humans for that either, in the near future.
- 91bananas 1y ago
  Not all engineering is creating models though, sometimes there are simpler problems to solve.
- ori_b 1y ago
  At some point, we'll probably have these things write their own prompts, too.
- Jolter 1y ago
  Still, the loom tending engineer got paid better than the weaver. Well, my prejudice says he did, don’t actually have the historical facts.
bgwalter 1y ago
I want to be neither. I either want to continue being a software engineer who doesn't need a tricycle for the mind, or move to law or medicine; two professions that have successfully defended themselves against extreme versions of the kind of anxiety, obedience and self hate that is so prevalent among software engineers.
- empath75 1y ago

npteljes 1y ago

Carteling doesn't work bottom-up. When changes begin (like this one with AI), one of the things an individual can do is to change course as fast as they can. There are other strategies as well, not evolving is also one, but some strategies yield better results than others. Not keeping up just worsens the chances, I have found.

asdff 1y ago
It does when it is called unionizing, however for some reason software developers have a mental block towards the concept.
- BlackSwanMan 1y ago
  [dead]
- twodave 1y ago
  I would be much more in favor of them as a software developer if I felt the qualifications of other software developers were reliable. But they never have been, and today it’s worse than ever. So I think it’s important to weed some of that out before we start talking about making it harder to fire people.
  - sumeno 1y ago
    You're doing your boss's job for them by making this an engineer vs engineer thing instead of an engineer vs management thing.
    - twodave 1y ago
      No, today I can tell my manager when someone sucks at their job, and if enough other people are saying the same thing then that engineer will either be given help so they stop sucking or be fired so they don’t subtract from the team. Because this happens fairly often I wouldn’t want to add a lot of friction to that process. Idk, maybe you can protect people from being laid off without also complicating performance-based firings.

JeremyNT 1y ago

I don't think that this should be downvoted because it raises a really important issue. I hate AI code assistants, not because they suck, but because they work. The writing is on the wall. If we aren't working on our own replacements, we'll be the ones replaced by somebody else's vibe code, and we have no labor unions that could plausibly fight back against this. So become a Vibe Coder and keep working, or take the "prudent" approach you mention - and become unemployed.

realusername 1y ago
Personally I used them for a while and then just stopped using them because actually no, unfortunately those assistants don't work. They appear to work at first glance but there's so much babysitting needed that it's just not worth it. This "vibe coding" seems just another way to say that people spend more time refining the output of these tools over and over again that what they would normally code.
- JeremyNT 1y ago
  I'm in this camp... today. But there's going to be an inflection point - soon - as things continue to improve. The industry is going to change rapidly. Now is the time to either get ready for that - by being ahead of the curve, at least by being familiar with the tooling - or switch careers and cede your job to somebody who will play ball. I don't like any of this, but I see it as inevitable.
  - suddenlybananas 1y ago
    You just said they worked one comment ago and now you agree that they don't?
    - JeremyNT 1y ago
      I'm in the same camp in that I don't use them because they don't work well enough for my own tastes. But I know what I'm doing, and I'm picky. Clearly they do work in a general sense. People who don't want to code are making things that work this way right now! This isn't yet replacing me, but I'm certain it will relatively soon be the standard for how software is developed.

dughnut 1y ago

Do you want to work with LLMs or H1Bs and interns… choose wisely. Personally I’m thrilled that I can get trivial, one-off programs developed for a few cents and the cost of a clear written description of the problem. Engaging internal developers or consulting developers to do anything at all is a horrible experience. I would waste weeks on politics, get no guarantees, and waste thousands of dollars and still hear nonsense like, “you want a form input added to a web page? Aw shucks, that’s going to take at least another month” or “we expect to spend a few days a month maintaining a completely static code base” from some clown billing me $200/hr.

rsyring 1y ago
You can work with consulting oriented engineers who get shit done with relatively little stress and significant productivity. Productivity enhanced by AI but not replaced by it. If interested, reach out to me.