9 ms·

What is going on right now?

• yanis_t 1y ago
  Here’s an experiment for you: stop using the word "AI". Let's just all call it LLM models, which they are. It's just a tool, that increase your productivity when used right.
• dartharva 1y ago
  What's going on is that your org's management is filled with morons. This is not in your control, and there is nothing you can do about it other than moving out.
  • SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
    Sadly, this time the nonsense is colonising orgs that were too sensible to fall for the last round of tech-scamming (Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, NTFs etc). I don't want to move again and it's a terrible time to try, partly because of this nonsense. So where we are.
  • jcgrillo 1y ago
    ^^ This right here. The reason this is happening is your senior leadership has decided this is how they want it to be. Vote with your feet.
• therobots927 1y ago
  LLMs are already unleashing more chaos within tech companies than a vigilante hacker ever could.
• stanrivers 1y ago
  I’m scared for what happens ten years from now when none of the junior folk ever learned to write code themselves and now think they are senior engineers…
  • 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 1y ago
    Dude, you're basically describing my career - no LLMs necessary!
  • pydry 1y ago
    Hopefully theyll all become plumbers or schoolteachers or something. There's a glut of junior dev talent and not enough real problems out there which a junior can apply themselves to. This means that most of them simply arent able to get the kind of experience which will push them into the next skill bracket. It used to be that you could use them to build cheap proofs of concept or self contained scripting but those are things AI doesnt actually suck too badly at. Even back then there were too many juniors and not enough roles though.
    • bigfishrunning 1y ago
      There's a glut of "talent", but most of them are attracted by the inflated paycheck and aren't actually talented. In the past, they would either get promoted to middle management where they can't do any damage, or burn out and find another career. Now they can fake it long enough to sink your company, and then move on (with experience on their resume!) to their next victim. Things are gonna be really ugly in 10 years.
      • slipperydippery 1y ago
        I'm fairly confident there's going to be no shortage of work for programmers who actually halfway know what they're doing for the remainder of my career (another 20ish years, probably), at least. So that's nice. Though cleaning up garbage fires isn't exactly fun. Gonna need to raise my rates.
        • blooalien 1y ago
          > Though cleaning up garbage fires isn't exactly fun. Gonna need to raise my rates. This is what I did way back when I was a professional web designer. Cleaning up nasty "tag-soup" DreamWeaver and MS Word websites for folks cost extra compared to my normal rates for just building them a fresh "from-scratch" website.
• patrickwalton 1y ago
  I worked with an accounting firm that assigned me a new controller. I had a very similar experience where the new controller would feed me AI slop back and forth. I called them out, asked them to stop, and was treated with a brief period of what seemed to be terse, resentful responses before they went back to AI responses. We found another accounting firm after that.
• aeon_ai 1y ago
  AI is a change management problem. Using it well requires a competent team, working together with trust and transparency, to build processes that are designed to effectively balance human guidance/expertise with what LLM's are good at. Small teams are doing very big things with it. Most organizations, especially large organizations, are so far away from a healthy culture that AI is amplifying the impact of that toxicity. Executives who interpret "Story Points" as "how much time is that going to take" are asking why everything isn't half a point now. They're so far removed from the process of building maintainable and effective software that they're simply looking for AI to serve as a simple pass through to the bottom line. The recent study showing that 95% of AI pilots failed to deliver ROI is a case study in the ineffectiveness of modern management to actually do their jobs.
  • grey-area 1y ago
    Or maybe it's just not as good as it's been sold to be. I haven't seen any small teams doing very big things with it, which ones are you thinking of?
    • sim7c00 1y ago
      you are not wrong. the only 'sane' approaches ive seen with vibe coding is making a PoC to see if some concept works. then rewrite it entirely to make sure its sound. besides just weird or broken code, anything exposed to user input is usually severly lacking sanity checks etc. llms are not useless for coding. but imho letting llms do the coding will not yield production grade code.
      • actinium226 1y ago
        For a second I thought PoC meant Piece of Crap XD
      • b112 1y ago
        Koko the gorilla understood language, but most others of her ilk simlpy make signs because a thing will happen. Move hand this way and a human will give a banana. LLMs have no understanding at all of the underlying language, they've just seen that a billion times a task looks like such and such, so have these tokens after them.
• rickreynoldssf 1y ago
  I think a lot of the impressions of AI generating slop is a case of garbage in/garbage out. You need to learn HOW to ask for things. Just asking "write code to do X" is wrong in most cases. You have to provide some specifications and expectations just like working with a junior engineer. You also can't ask "write me a module that does X". You need to design the module yourself and maybe ask AI for help with each specific individual endpoint. These juniors you're complaining about are going to get better in making these requests of AI and blow right past all the seniors who yell at clouds running AI.
  • thunderbong 1y ago
    Reminds me of the early Google days when everyone was finding ways to search better!
  • ptsneves 1y ago
    > These juniors you're complaining about are going to get better in making these requests of AI and blow right past all the seniors who yell at clouds running AI. I agree with your comment up to a point, but this is pretty similar to pilots and autopilots. At the end of the day you still need a pilot to figure out non standard issues and make judgement calls. The junior blowing past is as good as how long he will take to fix this issue that all the credits/prompts in the world are not solving. If the impact is long and costs enough your vibe coders will have good instantaneous speed but never reach the end. I am optimist about AI usage as a tool to enhance productivity, but the workflows are still being worked out. It currently is neither fire all devs, nor No LLM allowed. It is definitely an exciting time to be a senior though :)
  • jon-wood 1y ago
    How will these juniors get better at making those requests when it sounds like they're not interested in understanding what's happening and the implications of it? That requires a degree of introspection which doesn't appear to be taking place if they're just copy/pasting stuff back and forth to LLMs.
  • ElatedOwl 1y ago
    This will get written off as victim blaming, but there’s some truth here. I don’t use Claude code for everything. I’ve fallen off the bike enough times to know when I’ll be better off writing the changes myself. Even in these cases, though, I still plan with Claude, rubber duck, have it review, have it brainstorm ideas (“I need to do x, I’m thinking about doing it such and such way, can you brainstorm a few more options?”)
• OutOfHere 1y ago
  Although some of the author's concerns are valid, the author seems completely biased against LLMs, which makes their arguments trashworthy. The author is not seeking any sensible middle ground, only a luddite ground.
  • citizenkeen 1y ago
    This person understands the future of microwaves.
  • bccdee 1y ago
    The author is giving an account of his experience with LLMs. If those experiences were enough to thoroughly bias him against them, then that's hardly his fault. "Sensible middle ground" is what people appeal to when they are uncomfortable engaging with stark realities. If someone told me that their Tesla's autopilot swerved them into a brick wall and they nearly died, I'm not going to say, "your newfound luddite bias is preventing you from seeking sensible middle ground. Surely there is no serious issue here." I'm going to say, "wow, that's fucked up. Maybe there's something deeply wrong with Tesla autopilot."
    • mexicocitinluez 1y ago
      > If someone told me that their Tesla's autopilot swerved them into a brick wall and they nearly died, I'm not going to say, "your newfound luddite bias is preventing you from seeking sensible middle ground. Surely there is no serious issue here." I'm going to say, "wow, that's fucked up. Maybe there's something deeply wrong with Tesla autopilot." What a horrible metaphor for a tool that can translate pdfs to text. lol. The anti-AI arguments are just as, if not more, absurd than the "AI can do everything" arguments.
      • bccdee 1y ago
        Per the original post, it's a tool that will waste massive amounts of your time on slop. Don't pretend that there are no negative consequences to the proliferation of AI tools.
• mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Not being a programmer, I have a question. Can any program be broken down into functions and functions of functions that have inputs and outputs so that they can be verified if they are working?
  • cyberpunk 1y ago
    Pretty much, yes. But what i think you’re talking about (formal verification of code) is a bit of a dark art and barely makes it out of very specialised stuff like warhead guidance computers and maybe some medical stuff etc.
    • timschmidt 1y ago
      Most people don't bother with formal verification because it costs extra labor and time. LLMs address both. I've been enjoying working with an LLM on Rust projects, especially for writing tests, which aren't the same as formal verification, but it's in the same ballpark.
      • cryptonym 1y ago
        Vibe-coding tests is nowhere near formal verification.
        • timschmidt 1y ago
          When typewriters spread in the late 19th century, clerks who used them were sometimes called “mechanical scribblers” or accused of doing “machine work” rather than proper clerical labor. When adding machines and calculators appeared in offices, detractors claimed they would weaken the mind. In the mid-20th century, some educators derided calculator users as “button pushers” rather than “real mathematicians.” In the 1980s, early adopters of personal computers and word processors were sometimes called “typists with toys.” Secretaries who mastered word processors were sometimes derided as “not real secretaries” because they lacked shorthand or dictation skills. Architects and engineers who switched from drafting tables to CAD in the 1970s–80s faced accusations that CAD work was “cookie-cutter” and lacked craftsmanship. Traditional draftsmen argued that “real” design required hand drawing, while CAD users were seen as letting the machine think for them. Across history, the insults usually follow the same structure: - Suggesting the new tool makes the work too easy, therefore less valuable. - Positioning users as “operators” rather than “thinkers.” - Romanticizing the older skill as more “authentic” or “serious.”
• grey-area 1y ago
  The heart of the article is this conclusion, which I think is correct from first-hand experience with these tools and teams trying to use them: So what good are these tools? Do they have any value whatsoever? Objectively, it would seem the answer is no.
  • potsandpans 1y ago
    I don't think you understand what the word "objectively" means.
    • boesboes 1y ago
      It's from the post. And I agree, the author has no clue what objectively means. Just another old-man-shouting-at-cloud blog post. you company culture sucks and the juniors need to be managed better. Don't blame the tools.
      • catskull 1y ago
        FWIW I’m 34 :)
        • danielbln 1y ago
          Take it from a 40 year old, to someone <30, 34 is old. To someone <20 you're basically walking dead.
        • allknowingfrog 1y ago
          I became an old man well before I reached my 30's. :)
    • DrillShopper 1y ago
      Objectively is like literally - they both also mean their own opposites (subjectively and figuratively) due to how people actually use them in real life writing and communication as opposed to literature
  • 1y ago
• donperignon 1y ago
  this is a symptom of larger issue. some people are just proxies to other entities. before it was stackoverflow, now they channel the responses from the LLM. this people will be the ones losing their jobs, they are simply not adding any value, for me is not that developers will suffer, but this type of developer will be gone soon, and let me tell you, if i want to ask chatgpt i go to openai, i dont need anyone to type for me and act as a human but replying with a bullet point list full of emojis.
• bfrog 1y ago
  AI is hot garbage being used as if its a hammer and everything is a nail. The sooner this house of cards collapses the sooner real value can be gained from it by using it as a tool to appropriately assist. But we're in the mega hype phase still (1998/1999) and haven't quite crested over to the reality phase.
  • danielbln 1y ago
    If the dotcom bubble is the playbook, then we'll see a burst soon, and in 10-15 years a proliferation that absolutely dwarfs anything we're seeing today.
• bfrog 1y ago
  The question to ask is... why have the junior be a chatgpt interface if this is the case.
  • jerf 1y ago
    That's a question every current junior should be asking themselves. If you want to be well-paid, you need to be able to distinguish yourself in some economically-useful manner from other people. That was true before AI and AI isn't going to make it go away. It may even in some sense sharpen it. In another few years there's going to be large numbers of people who can be plopped down in front of a code base and just start firing prompts at an AI. If you're just another one of the crowd, you're going to get mediocre career results, potentially including not having a career at all. However, here in 2025 I'm not sure what that "standing out in the crowd" will be. It could well be "exceptional skill in prompting". It could be that deeper understanding of what the code is really doing. It could be the ability to debug deeply yourself with an old-school debugger when something goes wrong and the AI just can't work. It could be non-coding skills entirely. In reality it'll be more than just one thing anyhow and the results will vary. I don't know what to tell you juniors except to keep your eyes peeled for whatever this will be, and when you think you have an idea, don't let the cognitively-lazy appeal of just letting the AI do everything stop you from pursuing it. I don't know specifically what this will be, but you don't have to be right the first time, you have time to get several licks at this. But I do know that we aren't going to need very many people who are only capable of firing prompts at an AI and blindly saying "yes" to whatever it says, not because of the level of utility that may or may not have, but because that's not going to distinguish you at all. If all you are is a proxy to AI, I don't need you. I've got an AI of my own, and I've got lower latency and higher bandwidth to it. Correspondingly, if you detect that you are falling into the pattern of being on the junior programmer end of what this article is complaining about, where you interact with your coworkers as nothing but an AI proxy, you need to course correct and you need to course correct now. Unfortunately, again, I don't have a recipe for that correction. Ask me in 2030. "Just a proxy to an AI" may lead to great things for the AI but it isn't going to lead you anywhere good!
• RyanOD 1y ago
  For me, AI is just a tool. I'm not a high-level developer, but when I'm coding out a personal project and I'm stuck. I present my ideas to AI and ask it for feedback. Then, I take that feedback and move forward. What I do NOT do is ask AI to write code for me. Again, these are my own projects so I can develop them any way I like. Having AI write code for me (other than maybe simple boilerplate stuff) goes entirely against why I write code in the first place which is the joy of problem solving, building things, and learning. Edit: Typo
  • busssard 1y ago
    for my last project i could not have finished it without AI doing coding. it set up the entire repo for me, it wrote bad code and the PoC worked. I dont have experience in Django JS or webdev. now i have a working thing that i can slowly go through, improve and understand.
    • RyanOD 1y ago
      That's one way. The approach I take is more of a "Hey, AI, here is what I'm trying to accomplish and here is the approach I plan to take. What do you think of this approach? Does it support my broader goals? Etc." But, much of what I spend my time on are already solved problems (building retro video game clones) so AI has a LOT of high-quality content to draw upon. I'm not trying to create new, original products.
• jchip303 1y ago
  [dead]
• esafak 1y ago
  There is an attribution problem because we don't see the interaction the engineer had with the AI before submitting the work. Maybe the prompt was good, and there was a back-and-forth as the user found mistakes and asked for corrections. Maybe not. We are left to guess. A user who does not steer the AI adds no value at best, and likely makes things worse by creating work for others. There is a product opportunity here for coding agents to check in this work with something like `git notes`. This helps users claim the value they add.
• shusson 1y ago
  The majority of software engineers today, (mostly in big tech) are not interested in software engineering. They studied it to make money. This happened before LLMs. Add the fact that software development isn’t deterministic. And you have a perfect storm of chaos. But our discipline has been through similar disruptions in the past. I think give it a few years then maybe we’ll settle on something sane again. I do think the shift is permanent though. Either you adapt to use these LLMs well or you will struggle to be competitive (in general)
  • suddenlybananas 1y ago
    >I do think the shift is permanent though. Either you adapt to use these LLMs well or you will struggle to be competitive (in general) That certainly isn't true if what this article suggests is true.
• anymouse123456 1y ago
  AI has been great for UX prototypes. Get something stood up quickly to react to. It's not complete, it's not correct, it's not maintainable. But it's literal minutes to go from a blank page to seeing something clickable-ish. We do that for a few rounds, set a direction and then throw it in the trash and start building. In that sense, AI can be incredibly powerful, useful and has saved tons of time developing the wrong thing. I can't see the future, but it's definitely not generating useful applications out of whole cloth at this point in time.
  • cck9672 1y ago
    Can you elaborate on your process and tools here? This use case may actually be valuable for me and my team.
    • waterproof 1y ago
      Tools that can build you a quick clickable prototype are everywhere. Replit, claude code, cursor, ChatGPT Pro, v0.app, they're all totally capable. From there it's the important part: discussing, documenting, and making sure you're on the same page about what to actually build. Ideally, get input from your actual customers on the mockup (or multiple mockups) so you know what resonates and what doesn't.
  • criddell 1y ago
    For me it's useful in those areas I don't venture into very often. For example I needed a powershell script recently that would create a little report of some registry settings. Claude banged out something that worked perfectly for me and saved me an hour of messing around.
    • humpty-d 1y ago
      It’s useful for almost any one-off script I write. It can do the work much faster than me and produce nicer looking output than I’d ever bother to spend time to write myself. It can also generate cli args and docs I’d never "waste time" on myself, which I’d later waste even more time fumbling without They’re insanely useful. I don’t get why people pretend otherwise, just because they aren't fulfilling the prophesies of blowhards and salesmen
• mexicocitinluez 1y ago
  > So what good are these tools? Do they have any value whatsoever? > Objectively, it would seem the answer is no. But at least they make a lot of money, right? Wait, what? Does the author know what the word "objectively" means? I'd kill for someone to tell me how feeding a pdf into Claude and asking it to provide a print-friendly version for a templating language has "objectively" no value? What about yesterday when I asked Claude to look write some reflection-heavy code for me to traverse a bunch of classes and register them in DI? Or the hundreds (maybe thousands) of times I've thrown a TS error and it explained it in English to me? I'm so over devs thinking they can categorically tell everyone else what is and isn't helpful in a field as big as this. Also, and this really, really needs repeated: When you say "AI" and don't specify exactly what you mean you sound like a moron. "AI", that insanely general phrase, happens to cover a wide, wide array of different things you personally use day to day. Anytime you do speech-to-text you're relying on "AI".
  • morkalork 1y ago
    I feel that even though I'm getting older, LLMs make me feel younger. There's things I learned in university 10 years ago that I only hazily remember but I can easily interrogate an AI and refresh myself way faster than opening old books. Just as a device for recall alone that's been trained on every power point slide that's been uploaded on lecturers websites, it's useful.
• OtherShrezzing 1y ago
  I call this "flood the zone driven development".
• ascendantlogic 1y ago
  > Here’s the thing - we want to help. We want to build good things. Things that work well, that make people’s lives easier. We want to teach people how to do software engineering! This is not what companies want. Companies want "value" that customers will pay for as quickly and cheaply as possible. As entities they don't care about craftsmanship or anything like that. Just deliver the value quickly and cheaply. Its this fundamental mismatch between what engineers want to do (build elegant, well functioning tools) and what businesses want to do (the bare minimum to get someone to give them as much money as possible) that is driving this sort of pulling-our-hair-out sentiment on the engineering side.
  • gjsman-1000 1y ago
    Right; I discovered at the new company I joined, they want velocity more than anything. The sloppy code, risk of mistakes, it’s all priced in to the risk assessment of not gaining ground first. So… I’m shooting out AI-written code left and right and that’s what they want. My performance? Excellent. Will it be a problem in the future? Well, either the startup fails, or AI might be able to rewrite it in the future. It’s not what I want… but at the same time, how many of our jobs do what we want? I could easily end up being the garbage man. I’m doing what I’m paid to do and I’m paid well to do it.
  • armada651 1y ago
    While this is true, the push-pull between sales and engineering resulted in software that is built well enough to last without being over-engineered. However if both sales and the engineers start chasing quick short term gains over long term viability that'll result in a new wave of shitty low-quality software being released. AI isn't good enough yet to generate the same quality of software as human engineers. But since AI is cheaper we'll gladly lower the quality bar so long as the user is still willing to put up with it. Soon all our digital products will be cheap AI slop that's barely fit for purpose, it's a future I dread.
    • gjsman-1000 1y ago
      Well, in such a future, when people have been burned by countless vibecoded projects, congratulations - FAANG wins again! Who is going to risk one penny on your rapidly assembled startup? Any startup that can come to the table saying “All human engineers; SOC 2 Type 2 certified; dedicated Q/A department” will inherit the earth.
• jmclnx 1y ago
  To me, it this whole vibe/LLM/AI thing looks like yet another method pushed by MBAs to speed up development, save money and make things "easier". But in reality slows things down to a crawl. Over the decades I have seen many of these things, this iteration seems to me a push on steroids. I stopped paying attention around the mid 90s and did things "my way". The sad thing is, seems these days a developer cannot hide in the shadows.
• justlikereddit 1y ago
  Young coders have finally simply adopted the mentality of the corporate and political leadership. Congratulations everyone, you finally got what you deserve instead of what you need.
• xnorswap 1y ago
  I won't say too much, but I recently had an experience where it was clear that when talking with a colleague, I was getting back chat GPT output. I felt sick, like this just isn't how it should be. I'd rather have been ignored. It didn't help that the LLM was confidently incorrect. The smallest things can throw off an LLM, such as a difference in naming between configuration and implementation. In the human world, you can with legacy stuff get in a situation where "everyone knows" that the foo setting is actually the setting for Frob, but with an LLM it'll happily try to configure Frob or worse, try to implement Foo from scratch. I'd always rather deal with bad human code than bad LLM code, because you can get into the mind of the person who wrote the bad human code. You can try to understand their misunderstanding. You can reason their faulty reasoning. With bad LLM code, you're dealing with a soul-crushing machine that cannot (yet) and will not (yet) learn from its mistakes, because it does not believe it makes mistakes ( no matter how apologetic it gets ).
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • BitwiseFool 1y ago
    >"It didn't help that the LLM was confidently incorrect." Has anyone else ever dealt with a somewhat charismatic know-it-all who knows just enough to give authoritative answers? LLM output often reminds me of such people.
    • bigfishrunning 1y ago
      If those people are wrong enough times, they are either removed from the organization or they scare anyone competent away from the organization, which then dies. LLMs seem to be getting a managerial pass (because the cost is subsidized by mountains of VC money and thus very low (for now)) so only the latter outcome is likely.
    • XxiXx 1y ago
      There's even a name for such person: Manager
    • 1y ago
• popcorncowboy 1y ago
  This ends in Idiocracy. The graybeards will phase out, the juniors will become staff level, except.. software will just be "more difficult". No-one really understands how it works, how could they? More importantly WHY should they? The Machine does the code. If The Machine gets it wrong it's not my fault. The TRUE takeaway here is that as of about 12 months ago, spending time investing in becoming a god-mode dev is not the optimal path for the next phase of whatever we're moving into.
  • probably_wrong 1y ago
    I think that's only true if you assume that the AI bubble will never burst. Bitcoin didn't replace cash, Blockchain didn't replace databases and NoSQL didn't make SQL obsolete. And while I have been wrong before, I'm optimistic that AI will only replace programmers the same way copy-pasting from StackOverflow replaced programmers back in the day.
    • 1970-01-01 1y ago
      We've already seen the plateau forming[1]. GPT4.X vs GPT5 isn't exactly a revolution. It will become much cheaper, much faster, but not much better. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44979107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44979107
      • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
        I think this is mostly true, but when it gets cheaper and faster, it will be able to complete much larger tasks unsupervised. larger != more complex The widespread adoption of cheap agentic AI will absolutely be an economic revolution. Millions of customer support jobs will be completely eliminated in the next few years, and that's just the beginning. Soon it'll be easy to give an AI all the same things you give a new employee: an email address, a slack username, a web browser, access to the company intranet, a GitHub account, a virtual machine with mouse and keyboard control, etc. and you'll be able to swap it out one-for-one with pretty much any low-level employee.
  • 1y ago
• SeasonalEnnui 1y ago
  Good blog post, I recognise much of that. The positions of both evangelists and luddites seems mad to me, there's too much emotion involved in those positions for what amounts to another tool in the toolbox that should only be used in appropriate situations.
• ifyoubuildit 1y ago
  It's simple: it's just a multiplier, like power tools or heavy equipment. You can use a giant excavator to do a ton of work quickly. You can also knock the house over by accident. People probably said the same things when the first steam shovels came around. I for one like things that make me have to shovel less shit. But you'd also have the same problems if you put every person in the company behind the controls of a steam shovel.
• fidotron 1y ago
  About 15 years ago I was introduced to an environment where approximately a hundred developers spent their lives coaxing a classic style expert system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system ) into controlling a build process to adjust the output for thousands of different output targets. I famously described the whole process as "brain damaging", demonstrated why [1], and got promoted for it. People that spend their lives trying to get the LLMs to actually write the code will find it initially exhilarating, but in the long run they will hate it, learn nothing, and end up doing something stupid like outputting thousands of different output targets when you only need about 30. If you use them wisely though they really can act as multipliers. People persist in the madness because of the management dream of making all the humans replaceable. [1] All that had happened was the devs had learned how to recognize very simple patterns in the esoteric error messages and how to correct them. It was nearly trivial to write a program that outperformed them at this.
• roncesvalles 1y ago
  I love how OP doesn't reach the most obvious conclusion that (record scratch, freeze frame) he just landed himself at a trash-tier company. The only thing LLMs are doing here is surfacing the fact that your company hired really bad talent. And no, basing your team in Arkansas or Tbilisi or whatever, not doing Leetcode interviews, and pinky-promising you're the Good Guys™ (unlike evil Meta and Google *hmmphh*) doesn't exempt you from the competitive forces of the labor market that drive SWE salaries well into the mid six figures, because tbh most people don't really mind grinding Leetcode, and most people don't really mind moving to the Bay Area, and most people don't really mind driving in to work 5 days a week, and they definitely don't give a shit whether their company's mission is to harvest every newborn's DNA to serve them retina-projected cigarette ads from the age of 10, or if it's singing privacy-respecting kumbaya around the FOSS bonfire. You only get what you pay for, not a lick more. LLMs are going to put these shitty companies in a really bad state while the spade-sellers laugh their way to the bank. I predict within 24 months you're going to see at least one company say they're enforcing a total ban on LLM-generated code within their codebase.
• boesboes 1y ago
  What is going on? We are blaming poor management and coaching/training on a tool again. It doesn't work, just as much as tools are never the answer to cultural problems. But blaming (or fixing) the tech is easy, that's why devops never really became more then increasingly complex shell scripting instead of having a real discussion on collaboration, shared goals and culture. But it's a natural part of the cycle i think. Assembly language, compilers, scripting languages, application development frameworks... All lead to a new generation of programmers that "dont' understand anything!" and "it's just useful for the lazy!".. I call BS. This is 100% a culture and management problem. I'd even go so far as to say, it is our responsibility as seniors to coach this new generation into producing quality and value with the tools they have. Don't get me wrong, I love shouting at clouds; i even mumble angrily at people in the streets sometimes and managers are mostly idiots; but we are the only ones that can guide them to the light so to speak. Don't blame the tool, fix the people.
  • jcgrillo 1y ago
    > it is our responsibility as seniors to coach this new generation into producing quality and value with the tools they have That's one option.. Another is to just skip them and focus on the next one. It could be that the "pandemic generation" (to which juniors entering the workforce now belong) are just beyond repair. There seems to be a dramatic shift in attitude towards arrogance, not asking questions, reliance on lazy crutches like LLMs, etc. Maybe it's better to just abandon them, wait 5 years, and hope the next crop does better. To be clear I hope we don't have to do that but sometimes I wonder.
• yanis_t 1y ago
  Hypothetically, AI is going to move us from development to validation. Think about writing more unit tests, integration tests, e2e tests. Spend more time verifying, really carefully reading these pull requests. Development is moving towards quality assurance. Because that's what matter eventually. You have a product that works reliably and fast, and you can quickly get it to the market. You don't really care how the code is written. Of course some people will continue to write "better software" than AI, more readable, or more elegant, bringing some diminishing marginal value to the table, the market doesn't really care about. I don't think AI is there yet, but realistically speaking, it's gonna get there in 5 to 10 years. Some of us will adjust, some not. Reaction is real.
  • xtracto 1y ago
    When LLMs write 100% of the code and we humans are only tasked with validating and verifying its function, programming languages won't be needed (prog langs are for people). I wonder if at some point we will have an LLM that basically understands English and say, Java bytecode or V8 bytecode. So in goes English descriptions and comments and out goes program bytecode implementing the required functionality. Also for LRMs.. why use English for the reasoning part? Could there be a more succinct representation? Like Prolog?
    • calvinmorrison 1y ago
      disagree. Programming languages are useful at minimizing context for humans as well as AI. Much easier to call preg_replace rather than implement a regex engine.
    • const_cast 1y ago
      The next evolution is you don't need applications at all. Applications are for automation speed, nothing else. Prior to computers, processes were completed by human to human communication. Hard to scale, impossible to automate. So then we had applications, which force fairly strict processes into a funnel. But they're extremely restrictive and hard to make. If you already have God AI, you just don't need an application. I don't go to an airlines website and book a flight. No, I ask my assistant to book me a flight, and then I have a flight. The assistant might talk to the airline, or maybe hundreds of other AI. But it gets it done instantly, and I don't have to interface with a webpage. The AI have a standard language amongst themselves. It might be English, it might not be.
• franciscop 1y ago
  This is probably why I love using Zed for my hobby dev, it doesn't try to be too clever about AI. It's still there and when I do want some AI stuff it can be seamlessly prompted, but for normal day-to-day the AI steps back and I can just code. In contrast, using AI at work with VSCode I feel like the tools get too much in the way, particularly in 2 categories: - Fragile interaction. There's popups on VSCode everywhere, and they are clickable. Too often I try to hover on a particular place and end up clicking on one of those. The AI autocomplete also feels way too intrusive, press the wrong key combination and BAM I get a huge amount of code I didn't intend to get. - Train of thought disruption. Since some times the AI long auto-complete is useful (~1/3th of times), I do end up reading it and getting distracted from my original "building up" thinking and now change to "explore thinking", which kind of dismantles the abstraction castle. I haven't seen either of those issues on Zed. It really brought me back the joy of programming on my free time. I also think both of these issues are about the implementation more than the actual feature.
  • blooalien 1y ago
    Yeah, I'ma have to agree with you 100% on Zed. I was previously hardcore into JupyterLab for playing with code, and Kate (KDE default text editor) for writing code until I tried Zed. I love how it's first and foremost an IDE / Editor and all the other features (AI, Jupyter kernels, etc) are just there to enhance it's main purpose when the user wants them, but those features rarely (if ever) seem to "get in the way" of that primary mission of editing code / text. They're just quietly waiting there for when you need them. So far the Zed team has really hit the balance just right.
• twodave 1y ago
  Ironically, this post reads like it was written with an LLM.
  • arnorhs 1y ago
    Not at all, imo
• blibble 1y ago
  > In a recent company town-hall, I watched as a team of junior engineers demoed their latest work > Championing their “success”, a senior manager goaded them into bragging about their use of “AI” tools to which they responded “This is four thousand lines of code written by Claude”. Applause all around. this is no different to applauding yourself for outsourcing your own role to a low cost location wonder if they'll still be clapping come layoffs
• stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y ago
  An AI tool like CC requires lots of experience to be used effectively. With today’s technology it still & also requires a lot of old fashioned coding experience. In the hands of a power user it can give a big productivity boost. That said, I wonder how many dormant bugs get introduced at this moment by the less talented. Just a matter of time…
• deleted 1y ago
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• thomgo 1y ago
  > Engineers are burning out. Orgs expect their senior engineering staff to be able to review and contribute to “vibe-coded” features that don’t work. It’s not just engineering folks that are being asked to do more vibe-coding with AI. Designers, product folks, project managers, marketers, content writers are all being asked to vibe code prototypes, marketing websites, internal tools, repros, etc. I’m seeing it first hand at the company I work at and many others. Normal expectations of job responsibilities have been thrown out of the window. Teams are stretched thin as a result, because every company is thinking that if you’re not sprinting towards AI you’ll be left behind. And the truth is that these folks actually deliver impact through their AI usage.
  • slipperydippery 1y ago
    My wife's seen this at multiple non-tech companies, and it's a disaster every single time. Most (like... 95+% of) folks can't use these things very well, being forced to use them kills morale because they're frustrating as fuck (and managers largely have no idea what they're actually capable of doing productively, so expectations are all over the place and often fantastical) and dealing with the output of co-workers who can't use them well is even more frustrating than the LLMs themselves are. It's sometimes coupled with attempts to realize the increased "efficiency" before it's even proven it exists, by firing significant chunks of staff at the same time as adopting "AI processes", further stressing out remaining employees and ruining ability to actually get things done. It's trashing whole departments. The come-down from this high (which high is being experienced pretty much only by the C-suite and investors) is gonna be rough.
• tschellenbach 1y ago
  AI is currently a very effective army of junior/senior engineers. It requires the oversight of a staff level engineer with some product understanding. When properly applied it can speed up development pace ~100-200x. Things that help achieve this outcome: staff engineer reviewing, typed language (it is so much better at Go compared to Python for instance), well structured project/code, solid testing best practices. It sounds like the author's company doesn't have this setup well. If you use AI wrong you get AI slop :)
• chiliada 1y ago
  I have to admit it comes across as deeply ironic to see a SWE complain of feeling 'violated' when they reach out expecting human help/interaction and are instead met with some thoughtless automation which actually wastes more of their time. The very abominations SWEs have helped inflict on customers everywhere for decades. Maybe things are just coming full circle ;)
  • chasd00 1y ago
    heh it is pretty funny, SWEs created their own "torment nexus".
• enraged_camel 1y ago
  Why was the title changed, and the word "hell" removed?
• littlecranky67 1y ago
  Feel like inventing my own programming language and have AI built a compiler for it, so that in every new project we have a new programming language that the AI knows shit about.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  > So what good are these tools? Do they have any value whatsoever? In my case, yes, but I think I use it differently from the way that most do. First, for context, I'm a pretty senior developer, and I've been doing code since 1983, but I'm currently retired, and most of my work is alone (I've found that most young folks don't want to work with people my age, so I've calibrated my workflow to account for that). I have tried a number of tools, and have settled on basically just using ChatGPT and Perplexity. I don't let them write code directly, but I often take the code they give me, and use it as a starting point for implementation. Sometimes, I use it wholesale, but usually, I do a lot of modification (often completely rewriting). I have found that they can get into "death spirals," where their suggestions keep getting worse and worse. I've learned to just walk away, and try something else, when that happens. I shudder to think of junior engineers, implementing the code that comes from these. The biggest value, to me, is that I can use them as an "instant turnaround" StackOverflow, without the demeaning sneers. I can ask the "stupidest" question; one that I could easily look up, myself, but it's faster to use ChatGPT, and I'll usually get a serviceable answer, almost instantly. That's extremely valuable, to me. I recently spent a few weeks, learning about implementing PassKeys in iOS. I started off "cold," with very little knowledge of PKs, in general, and used what ChatGPT gave me (server and client) verbatim, then walked through the code, as I learned. That's usually how I learn new tech. It's messy, but I come out of it, with a really solid understanding. The code I have now, is almost unrecognizable, from what I started with.
  • DrillShopper 1y ago
    Your use case is one that I have been gently leaning into for small projects at work and personal projects - the LLM is used to give me an initial ideal and code. In a sense, the LLM writes "the one I throw away", and by exploring the limitations of what it produces I both get a better idea of the problem domain and more confidence in actually implementing something useful.
    • clutchdude 1y ago
      It helps provide a launching point or springboard. We know, going in, this isn't the final product but enough to get boilerplate and momentum.
• TuringNYC 1y ago
  I read your post nodding in agreement at times. Keep assured the market takes care of these things. In the medium term, productive uses allow winners to win in the marketplace. Unproductive uses cause losers to lose money and fall behind.
• josefritzishere 1y ago
  I was recently told that a team intended to use automated AI to update user documentation in tandem with code updates. I am terrified of how badly that is going to go after seeing how bandly AI writes code.
• tossandthrow 1y ago
  If I go into a PR that requires a lot of feedback, I will usually stop after 5 - 10 pieces of feedback and let the author know that it is not ready for review, and needs to be further developed. I am OK with the author using AI heavily. But if I continue to see slop, I will continue to review less and send it back. In the end, if the engineer is fiddling around for too long, they don't get any work in, which is a performance issue. I am always available to help out the colleague to write understand the system and write code. For me, the key is to not accept to review AI slop just like I do not accept reviewing other types of slop. If something is recognized as slop, it is not ready to be reviews. This puts an upwards pressure on developers to deliver better code.
• jackdoe 1y ago
  > Here’s an experiment for you: stop using “AI”. Try it for a day. For a week. For a month. I did that, now I have at least 2-3 days a week where I dont use any AI, and its much better there is something very strange when using AI a lot, and it is affecting me a lot and I cant quite put my finger on it I wrote https://punkx.org/jackdoe/misery.html https://punkx.org/jackdoe/misery.html some time ago to try to explain it, but honestly recently I relized that I really hate reading tokens.
• wiseowise 1y ago
  > I’m not sure why, but I felt violated. It felt wrong. I usually avoid this, but what a snowflake. So many people get their knickers in a twist over nothing. Here’s a simple flowchart: Junior gives you ai slop and ignores your remarks? a) ignore them b) send their manager a message If neither works -> leave. Also, get a life.
• donatj 1y ago
  I was reviewing a coworkers code recently. It was this convoluted multidimensional array manipulation that was shuffling, sorting, and filtering all at the same time. It had a totally generic name like "prepareData". I asked for an explanation of what the function was doing and he snapped back that I should ask an LLM instead of wasting his time. It's been a couple weeks, but I am still irritated. I am asking you, the person who supposedly wrote this, what it does. When you submit your code for review, that's among the most basic questions you should be prepared to answer.
  • tossandthrow 1y ago
    Ask the LLM, attribute the LLMs response to him, and just post the feedback you have after 20 messages back and forth on the PR. When he gets back and don't understand the feedback, then you can conveniently ask him to ask an LLM and not waste your time.
• KronisLV 1y ago
  > Here’s an experiment for you: stop using “AI”. Try it for a day. For a week. For a month. Sooner or later, this will be akin to asking people to stop be able to do their job, the same way how I might not recall how to work with a Java enterprise codebase purely through the CLI, because all of the run profiles in JetBrains IDEs have rotten my own brain, except apply it to developing any software at all. Maybe not the best analogy because running things isn't too hard when you can reference a Dockerfile, but definitely stuff around running tests and passing the plethora of parameters that are needed to just stand the damned thing up correctly with the right profiles and so on. That's also like asking people to stop using Google for a while, upon which I bet most of us are reliant to a pretty large degree. Or StackOverflow, for finding things that people wouldn't be able to discover themselves (whether due to a lack of skills, or enough time). I think the reliance on AI tools will only go upwards. Here's my own little rant about it from a bit back: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-artisans-and-brainrot https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-artisans-and-brainrot
• PaulHoule 1y ago
  It's kinda funny that my experience is the opposite but then again I'm senior and working at a different scale. I don't think my LLM-assisted programming is much faster than my unassisted programming but I think I write higher quality code. What I find is that my assistant sometimes sees a simple solution that I miss. Going back and forth with an assistant I am likely to think things through in more detail than I would otherwise. I like to load projects I depend on into IntelliJ IDEA and use Junie to have a conversation with the code that helps me get a more thorough and complete understanding of it than I would get looking at it myself more quickly. As a pro maintenance programmer there is always a certain amount of "let sleeping dogs lie", if something works but you don't understand it you may decide to leave it alone. With an assistant I feel empowered to put more effort into really understanding things that I can get away without understanding, fix minor problems I wouldn't have fixed otherwise, etc. One bit of advice is that as the context grows assistants seem to break bad. Often I ask Junie to write something, then give it some feedback about things it got wrong, and early in the session I'm blown away. You might think you should keep the session going so it will remember the history but actually it doesn't have the ability to realize some of the history is stale because it is about the way the code was before [1] and the result is eventually it starts going in loops. It makes sense then to start a new session and possibly feed it some documentation about the last session that tells it what it needs to know going forward. [1] a huge problem with "the old AI", ordinary propositional logic sees the world from a "god's eye" point of view where everything happens at once, in our temporal world we need temporal if not bitemporal logic -- which is a whole can of worms. On top of that there is modal logic ("it is possible that X is true", "it is necessary that X is true") and modeling other people's belief "John thinks that Mary thinks that X is true") It's possible to create a logic which can solve specific problems but a general-purpose commonsense logic is still beyond state of the art.
• pxtail 1y ago
  I think what's going on is a paradigm shift to treat code as completely throwaway piece, not meticulously analyzed, inspected and manually reviewed but completely replaceable without caring too much about internals - if outputs are correct for set of inputs, perf is ok then its passed as "good enough". This approach is still evolving but some developers are already picking it up, and since students and new developers are learning to work like this then future for new generation of coders in inevitable - new position is coming to life: vibe coding engineer
• deleted 1y ago
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• alexpotato 1y ago
  Recent fascinating experience with hiring and AI. - DevOps role - Technical test involves logging into a server (via sadservers.com who are awesome) - We tell the candidates: "The goal is to see if you can work through a problem on a Linux based system. It's expected you'll see some things you may never have seen before. Using Google and ChatGPT etc is fine if you get stuck. We just ask that you share your screen so we can see your search and thought processes." - Candidate proceeds to just use ChatGPT for EVERY SINGLE STEP. "How do I list running processes?", "How do I see hidden files?", copy and pasted every error message into ChatGPT etc Now, I had several thought about this: 1. Is this common? 2. As one coworker joked "I knew the robots were coming, just not today" 3. We got essentially zero signal on his Linux related debugging skills 4. What signal was he trying to send by doing this? e.g. I would assume he would realize "oh, they are hiring for people who are well versed in Linux and troubleshooting" 5. I know some people might say "well, he probably eventually got to the answer" but the point is that ChatGPT doesn't always have the answer.
  • tryauuum 1y ago
    by the way, did he solve the issue with this approach?
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  LLMs are the duct tape of the world. A little here and there does help and works great as a short term solution, but using it everywhere or for a permanent fix is a recipe for disaster.
• mikewarot 1y ago
  It's all about bullshitting. So I'm reading the article which initially appears to be a story about an engineering organization and I'm wondering where they came up with someone silly enough to trust an LLM with people's lives. Then it dawned on me that it wasn't an engineering organization at all, just a bunch of programmers with title inflation. It follows as a consequence that since they and their management don't respect the title and skillset of an Engineer, they likely wouldn't respect or appreciate their programming staff either. The meta of this is that an audience comfortable with giving the title Engineer to programmers shouldn't really be surprised by this outcome. >We can say our prayers that Moore’s Law will come back from the dead and save us. I'm working on that very problem. I expect results with 2 years.
• yencabulator 1y ago
  If you, a human, copy-paste me an LLM response without any "cover letter" about the content, I will not talk to you after that and instead ask the LLM directly. In my mind, anyone willing to opt out of providing value is welcome to do so.
• mikewarot 1y ago
  >We can say our prayers that Moore’s Law will come back from the dead and save us. Let's say that happens, how would it actually help? What's the mechanism?
• hartator 1y ago
  I think the key here is no-one wants to read someone else ChatGPT. Even when it’s been vetted by another engineer via actual tests, there is something that in my flesh not me want to read that output?
• karthikeayan 1y ago
  > I can’t know for sure, but I’d be willing to put money down that my exact question and the commit were fed directly into an LLM which was then copy and pasted back to me. I’m not sure why, but I felt violated. It felt wrong. I don't know from where you are but I am from India, exactly same as your age and exactly dealing with problem! Its really, annoying!
• actinium226 1y ago
  About 2 weeks ago I turned off all AI tools. I've been much more productive since then. I may allow a small amount of AI back in, like predict the next 5-12 tokens, but that's it. Even "Next Edit Suggestion" takes me out of flow while programming.
• bigrobinson 1y ago
  LLM's are very good at answering technical questions and suggesting new approaches to coding something (whether it's right or not, there is much out there to learn). If you're a noob, it doesn't judge you and stonewall your attempts to pose questions like stackoverflow does. Copilot can accelerate coding with its autocomplete on steroids, doing things like writing out formatted docstrings and completing lines of code according to the logic of the surrounding code. You can easily inspect these small contributions. Trying to get an LLM to code something with any complexity results in mass confusion. I tried it, and it was a learning experience, and a debugging festival. If you're a junior and you rely on LLM's right out of the chute, you're going to be a mushbrain coder I bet.
• persedes 1y ago
  The rise of the prompstitudes. Had a colleague (supposedly they weren't at the junior level), send me a chat gpt response "guessing what your coworker was saying". Can definitely relate to the article about feeling violated lol. My take is that these people are not necessarily incompetent, but just so addicted to the llms that they turn into those sad seniors at the casino that endlessly pull the slot machines.