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I will not use Jr developers for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of a Jr..... You don't have to outsource your thinking to find value i

I will not use Jr developers for engineering work and never will, because doing the work of a Jr..... You don't have to outsource your thinking to find value in AI tools you just have to find the right tasks for them. The same as you would with any developer jr to you. I'm not going to use AI to engineer some new complex feature of my system but you can bet I'm going to use it to help with refactoring or test writing or a second opinion on possible problems with a module. > unlikely to have a future in this industry as they are so easily replaceable. The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. Same as the productivity difference between a developer with a good LSP and one without or a good IDE or a good search engine. When I was a kid I had a text editor and a book and it worked. But now that better tools are around I'm certainly going to make use of them.

satisfice 1y ago
FFS stop it with the “it’s just the same as a human” BS. It’s not just like working with a junior engineer! Please spend 60 seconds genuinely reflecting on that argument before letting it escape like drool from the lips of your writing fingers. We work with junior engineers because we are investing in them. We will get a return on that investment. We also work with other humans because they are accountable for their actions. AI does not learn and grow anything like the satisfying way that our fellow humans do, and it cannot be held responsible for its actions. As the OP said, AI is not on the team. You have ignored the OP’s point, which is not that AI is a useless tool, but that merely being an AI jockey has no future. Of course we must learn to use tools effectively. No one is arguing with that. You fanboys drive me nuts.
- sanswork 1y ago
  I'm not saying it's the same as working with a jr developer. I'm saying that not using something less skilled than yourself for less skilled tasks is stupid and self defeating. Yes, when someone builds a straw man you ignore it. There is a huge canyon between never use AI in engineer(op proposal) and only use AI for all your engineering(op complaint).
  - tensility 1y ago
    There's a very good argument for not using tools vended by folks who habitually lie as much as the AI vendors (and their tools). I don't want their fingers anywhere in my engineering org, quite honestly. Given their ethics around intellectual property in general, I must assume that my company's IP is being stolen every time a junior engineer lazily uses one of these tools.
    - deaux 1y ago
      I'm sure you never use any Google or Microsoft products at all, such as Google Search, Maps or Android, and none of the companies and engineering teams you've ever worked with have used such products, given how habitually they lie (and the fact that they're two major AI vendors). If so, congratulations for being old or belonging to the 0.01%. Good luck finding a first job where that holds in 2025.
lrvick 1y ago
> The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. If you looked me or my work up, I think you would likely feel embarrassed by this statement. I have a number of world firsts under my belt that AI would have been unable to meaningfully help with. It is also unlikely I would have every developed the skill to do any of that aside from doing everything the hard way.
- sanswork 1y ago
  I just looked and I'm not sure what I'm meant to be seeing that would cause me to feel embarrassed but congrats on whatever it is. How much more could you have developed or achieved if you didn't limit yourself? Do you do all your coding in ed or are you already using technology to offload brain power and memory requirements in your coding?
  - lrvick 1y ago
    AI would have been near useless when I was creating https://stagex.tools https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex, for instance. Also I use VIM. Any FOSS tools with predictable deterministic behavior I can fully control are fine.
    - sanswork 1y ago
      I don't know, just a quick glance at that repo and I feel like AI could have written your shell scripts which took up several tries from multiple people to get right about as well as the humans did. So your ok with using tools to offload thinking and memory as long as they are FOSS?
      - lrvick 1y ago
        Take this one for example https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compat.sh https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compa... It took some iteration and hands on testing to get that right across multiple operating systems. Also to pass shellcheck, etc. Even if an LLM -could- do that sort of thing as well as my team and I can, we would lose a lot of the arcane knowledge required to debug things, and spot sneaky bugs, and do code review, if we did not always do this stuff by hand. It is kind of like how writing things down helps commit them to memory. Typing to a lesser extent does the same. Regardless those scripts are like <1% of the repo and took a few hours to write by hand. The rest of the repo requires extensive knowledge of linux internals, compiler internals, full source bootstrapping, brand new features in Docker and the OCI specs, etc. Absolutely 0 chance an LLM could have helped with bootstrapping a primitive c toolchain from 180 bytes of x86 machine code like this: https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/bootstrap/stage0/Containerfile https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/... That took a lot of reasoning from humans to get right, in spite of the actual code being just a bunch of shell commands. There are just no significant shortcuts for that stuff, and again if there were, taking them is likely to rob me of building enough cache in my brain to solve the edge cases. Also yes, I only use FOSS tools with deterministic behavior I can modify, improve, and rely on to be there year after year, and thus any time spent mastering them is never wasted.
tensility 1y ago
Not at all true, though. You see, I expect the Jr will grow and learn from those off-loaded tasks in such a way that they will eventually become another Sr in the atelier. That development of the society of engineers is precisely what I do not wish to ever outsource to some oligarch's rental fleet of bullshit machines.
- whattheheckheck 1y ago
  But happily serve other the collective oligarchs by training their next generation of knights...
  - tensility 1y ago
    I'm far more fond of knights than kings. So, yes, I would much more happily train another wave of humans at my craft than salt the earth behind me.

satisfice 1y ago

FFS stop it with the “it’s just the same as a human” BS. It’s not just like working with a junior engineer! Please spend 60 seconds genuinely reflecting on that argument before letting it escape like drool from the lips of your writing fingers. We work with junior engineers because we are investing in them. We will get a return on that investment. We also work with other humans because they are accountable for their actions. AI does not learn and grow anything like the satisfying way that our fellow humans do, and it cannot be held responsible for its actions. As the OP said, AI is not on the team. You have ignored the OP’s point, which is not that AI is a useless tool, but that merely being an AI jockey has no future. Of course we must learn to use tools effectively. No one is arguing with that. You fanboys drive me nuts.

sanswork 1y ago
I'm not saying it's the same as working with a jr developer. I'm saying that not using something less skilled than yourself for less skilled tasks is stupid and self defeating. Yes, when someone builds a straw man you ignore it. There is a huge canyon between never use AI in engineer(op proposal) and only use AI for all your engineering(op complaint).
- tensility 1y ago
  There's a very good argument for not using tools vended by folks who habitually lie as much as the AI vendors (and their tools). I don't want their fingers anywhere in my engineering org, quite honestly. Given their ethics around intellectual property in general, I must assume that my company's IP is being stolen every time a junior engineer lazily uses one of these tools.
  - deaux 1y ago
    I'm sure you never use any Google or Microsoft products at all, such as Google Search, Maps or Android, and none of the companies and engineering teams you've ever worked with have used such products, given how habitually they lie (and the fact that they're two major AI vendors). If so, congratulations for being old or belonging to the 0.01%. Good luck finding a first job where that holds in 2025.

lrvick 1y ago

> The reality is that you will be unlikely to compete with people who use these tools effectively. If you looked me or my work up, I think you would likely feel embarrassed by this statement. I have a number of world firsts under my belt that AI would have been unable to meaningfully help with. It is also unlikely I would have every developed the skill to do any of that aside from doing everything the hard way.

sanswork 1y ago
I just looked and I'm not sure what I'm meant to be seeing that would cause me to feel embarrassed but congrats on whatever it is. How much more could you have developed or achieved if you didn't limit yourself? Do you do all your coding in ed or are you already using technology to offload brain power and memory requirements in your coding?
- lrvick 1y ago
  AI would have been near useless when I was creating https://stagex.tools https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex, for instance. Also I use VIM. Any FOSS tools with predictable deterministic behavior I can fully control are fine.
  - sanswork 1y ago
    I don't know, just a quick glance at that repo and I feel like AI could have written your shell scripts which took up several tries from multiple people to get right about as well as the humans did. So your ok with using tools to offload thinking and memory as long as they are FOSS?
    - lrvick 1y ago
      Take this one for example https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compat.sh https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compa... It took some iteration and hands on testing to get that right across multiple operating systems. Also to pass shellcheck, etc. Even if an LLM -could- do that sort of thing as well as my team and I can, we would lose a lot of the arcane knowledge required to debug things, and spot sneaky bugs, and do code review, if we did not always do this stuff by hand. It is kind of like how writing things down helps commit them to memory. Typing to a lesser extent does the same. Regardless those scripts are like <1% of the repo and took a few hours to write by hand. The rest of the repo requires extensive knowledge of linux internals, compiler internals, full source bootstrapping, brand new features in Docker and the OCI specs, etc. Absolutely 0 chance an LLM could have helped with bootstrapping a primitive c toolchain from 180 bytes of x86 machine code like this: https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/bootstrap/stage0/Containerfile https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/... That took a lot of reasoning from humans to get right, in spite of the actual code being just a bunch of shell commands. There are just no significant shortcuts for that stuff, and again if there were, taking them is likely to rob me of building enough cache in my brain to solve the edge cases. Also yes, I only use FOSS tools with deterministic behavior I can modify, improve, and rely on to be there year after year, and thus any time spent mastering them is never wasted.

tensility 1y ago

Not at all true, though. You see, I expect the Jr will grow and learn from those off-loaded tasks in such a way that they will eventually become another Sr in the atelier. That development of the society of engineers is precisely what I do not wish to ever outsource to some oligarch's rental fleet of bullshit machines.

whattheheckheck 1y ago
But happily serve other the collective oligarchs by training their next generation of knights...
- tensility 1y ago
  I'm far more fond of knights than kings. So, yes, I would much more happily train another wave of humans at my craft than salt the earth behind me.