4 ms·

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality

I get that some people want to be intellectually "pure". Artisans crafting high-quality software, made with love, and all that stuff. But one emerging reality for everyone should be that businesses are swallowing the AI-hype raw. You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever. If your org is blindly data/metric driven, it is probably just a mater of time until managers start asking why everyone else is producing so much, while you're slow?

zwnow 11mo ago
> You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. If it doesn't, yay refactoring prompts instead of tackling the actual problem. Also I can write code for free, LLMs coding assistants aren't free. I can fit business problems amd edge cases into my brain given some time, a LLM is unaware about edge cases, legal requirements, decoupled dependencies, potential refactors or the occasional call of boss asking for something to be sneaked into the code right now. If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into.
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  > I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. You don’t have to let the LLM write code for you. They’re very useful as a smart search engine for your code base, a smart refactoring tool, a suggestion generator, and many other ways. I rarely have LLMs write code for me from scratch that I have to review, but I do give them specific instructions to do what I want to the codebase. They can do it much faster than I can search around the codebase and type out myself. There are so many ways to make LLMs useful without having them do all the work while you sit back and judge. I think some people are determined to get no value out of the LLM because they feel compelled to be anti-hype, so they’re missing out on all the different little ways they can be used to help. Even just using it as a smarter search engine (in the modes where they can search and find the right sections of right articles or even GitHub issues for you) has been very helpful. But you have to actually learn how to use them. > If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into. Okay, good luck with your hut in the forest. The rest of us will move on using these tools how we see fit, which for many of us doesn’t actually include this idea where the LLM is the author of the code and you just ask nicely and reject edits until it produces the exact code you want. The tools are useful in many ways and you don’t have to stop writing your own code. In fact, anyone who believes they can have the LLM do all the coding is in for a bad surprise when they realize that specific hype is a lie.
  - zwnow 11mo ago
    > But you have to actually learn how to use them. This probably is the issue for me, I am simply not willing to do so. To me the whole AI thing is extremely dystopian so even on a professional level I feel repulsed by it. We had an AWS and a Cloudflare outage recently, which has shown that maybe it isn't a great idea to rely on a few companies for a single _thing_. Integrating LLMs and using all these tools is just another bridge people depend on at some point. I want to write software that works, preferably even offline. I want tools that do not spy on me (referring to that new Google editor, forgot the name). Call me once these tools work offline on my 8GB RAM laptop with a crusty CPU and I might put in the effort to learn them.
    - Aurornis 11mo ago
      > This probably is the issue for me, I am simply not willing to do so. Thanks for being honest at least. So many HN arguments start as a desire to hate something and then try to bridge that into something that feels like a takedown of the merits of that thing. I think a lot of the HN LLM hate comes from people who simply want to hate LLMs. > We had an AWS and a Cloudflare outage recently, which has shown that maybe it isn't a great idea to rely on a few companies for a single _thing_. Integrating LLMs and using all these tools is just another bridge people depend on at some point. For an experienced dev using LLMs as another tool, an LLM outage isn’t a problem. You just continue coding. It’s on the level of Google going down so you have to use another search engine or try to remember the URL for something yourself. The main LLM players are also easy to switch between. I jump between Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI almost month to month to try things out. I could have subscriptions to all 3 at the same time and it would still be cheap. I think this point is overblown. It’s not a true team dependency like when GitHub stop working a few days back.
    - lxgr 11mo ago
      > We had an AWS and a Cloudflare outage recently, which has shown that maybe it isn't a great idea to rely on a few companies for a single _thing_. I share that concern about massive, unforced centralization. If there were any evidence for the hypothesis that LLM inference would always remain viable in datacenters only, I'd be extremely concerned about their use too. But from all I've seen, it seems overwhelmingly likely that we'll have very powerful ones in our phones in at most a few years, and definitely in midrange laptops and above.
fileeditview 11mo ago
The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over. The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse. edit: sentence fixed.
- lxgr 11mo ago
  > The era of software mass production has begun. We've been in that era for at least two decades now. We just only now invented the steam engine. > I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. At least one such artifact of craft and beauty already literally crashed two airplanes. Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - knollimar 11mo ago
    There's a buge difference between possible and likely. Maybe I'm pessimistic but I at least feel like there's a world of difference between a practice that encourages bugs and one that allows them through when there is negligence. The accountability problem needs to be addressed before we say it's like self driving cars outperforming humans. On a errors per line basis, I don't think LLMs are on par with humans yet
    - lxgr 11mo ago
      Knowing your system components’ various error rates and compensating for them has always been the job. This includes both the software itself and the engineers working on it. The only difference is that there is now a new high-throughput, high-error (at least for now) component editing the software.
      - 11mo ago
davidmurdoch 11mo ago
This just happened to me this week. I work on the platform everyone builds on top of. A change here can subtlety break any feature, no matter how distant. AI just can't cope with this yet. So my team has been told that we are too slow. Meanwhile, earlier this week we halted a roll out because if a bug introduced by AI, as it worked around a privacy feature by just allow listing the behavior it wanted, instead of changing the code to address to policy. It wasn't caught in review because the file that was changed didn't require my teams review (because we ship more slowly, they removed us as code owners for many files recently).
- BarryMilo 11mo ago
  As it was foretold since the beginning, IA use is breaking security wantonly.
- rho4 11mo ago
  Ouch, so painful to read.
- grayhatter 11mo ago
  > It wasn't caught in review because the file that was changed didn't require my teams review (because we ship more slowly, they removed us as code owners for many files recently). I've lost your fight, but won mine before, you can sell this as risk reduction to your boss. I've never seen eng win this argument on quality grounds. Quality is rarely something that can be understood by company leadership. But having a risk reduction team that moves a bit slower and protects the company from extreme exposures like this, is much harder to cut from the process. "Imagine the law suits missing something like this would cause." and "we don't move slower, we do more than the other teams, the code is more visible, but the elimination of mistakes that will be very expensive legally and reputationally is what we're the best at"
- miningape 11mo ago
  Fuck it - let them reap the consequences. Ideally wait until there's something particularly destructive, then do the post-mortem as publicly as possible - call out the structures and practises that enabled that commit to get into production.
AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
> If your org is blindly data/metric driven Are there for profit companies (not non profits, research institutes etc…) that are not metric driven?
- intothemild 11mo ago
  Most early stage startups I've been in weren't metric driven. It's impossible when everyone is just working as hard as they can to get it built, to suddenly slow down and start measuring everyone's output. It's not until later. When it's gotten to a larger size, do you have the resources to be metric driven.
  - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
    Every early stage startup is absolutely metric driven: keeping the business alive based on Runway
- layer8 11mo ago
  “Blindly” is the operative word here.
  - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
    That’s almost an oxymoron You can’t be data driven and also blind to the data You might be optimizing for the wrong thing, but it’s not blind, it’s just a bad “model”
    - DoughnutHole 11mo ago
      The blindness is to reality and nuance. If you stare at your GPS and don’t pay attention to what’s in the real world outside your windshield until you careen off a cliff that would be “blindly” following your GPS. You had data but you didn’t sufficiently hedge against your data being incomplete. Likewise sticking dogmatically to your metrics while ignoring nuance or the human factor is blindly following your metrics.
    - 11mo ago
syllogism 11mo ago
I think LLMs are net helpful if used well, but there's also a big problem with them in workplaces that needs to be called out. It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. If all your coworkers use LLMs and you don't you're gonna get eaten alive. LLMs are unreasonably effective at generating large volumes of stuff that resembles diligent work on the surface. The other thing is, tools change trade-offs. If you're in a team that's decided to lean into static analysis, and you don't use type checking in your editor, you're getting all the costs and less of the benefits. Or if you're in a team that's decided to go dynamic, writing good types for just your module is mostly a waste of time. LLMs are like this too. If you're using a very different workflow from everyone else on your team, you're going to end up constantly arguing for different trade-offs, and ultimately you're going to cause a bunch of pointless friction. If you don't want to work the same way as the rest of the team just join a different team, it's really better for everyone.
- arscan 11mo ago
  > It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. This is my biggest gripe with LLM use in practice.
- acedTrex 11mo ago
  > It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. This is so incredibly true.
  - evnp 11mo ago
    I'm interested in this. Code review, most egregiously where the "author" neglected to review the LLM output themselves, seems like a clear instance. What are some other examples? Something that should go in a "survival guide" for devs that still prefer to code themselves.
    - acedTrex 11mo ago
      I'm currently really feeling the pain the side bar stuff. The non "application" code/config. Scripts, cicd, documentation etc. The stuff that gets a PR but doesn't REALLY get the same level of review because its not really production code. But when you need to go tweak the thing it does a few months or years later... its so dense and undecipherable you spend more time figuring out how the llm wrote the damn thing than doing it all over yourself. Should you probably review it a little harsher in the moment? sure, but thats not always feasible with things that are at the time "not important" and only later become the root of other things. I have lost several hours this week to several such occurences.
Aurornis 11mo ago
> Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever. Honestly I think you’re swallowing some of the hype here. I think the biggest advantages of LLMs go to the experienced coders who know how to leverage them in their workflows. That may not even include having the LLM write the code directly. The non-coders producing apps meme is all over social media, but the real world results aren’t there. All over Twitter there were “build in public” indie non-tech developers using LLMs to write their apps and the hype didn’t match reality. Some people could get minimal apps out the door that kind of talked to a back end, but even those people were running into issues not breaking everything on update or managing software lifecycle. The top complaint in all of the social circles I have about LLMs is with juniors submitting LLM junk PRs and then blaming the LLM. It’s just not true that juniors are expertly solving tasks with LLMs faster than seniors. I think LLMs are helpful and anyone senior isn’t learning how to use them to their advantage (which doesn’t mean telling the LLM what to write and hoping for the best) is missing out. I think people swallowing the hype about non-tech people and juniors doing senior work is getting misled about the actual ways to use these tools effectively.
- jvanderbot 11mo ago
  It's not just "juniors". It's people who should know better turning out LLM junk outside their actual experience areas because "They are experienced enough to use LLMs". There are just some things that need lots of extra scrutiny in a system, and the experienced ones know where that is. An LLM rarely seems to, especially for systems of anywhere near real world production size.
- intended 11mo ago
  I didnt read the parent comment as celebrating this state. More like they were decrying it, and the blindness of people who just run on metrics.
- stocksinsmocks 11mo ago
  I’m a garage coder and the kind of engineer that has a license. I had the capacity with my kids to make a usable application for my work about once every 6 months. Now it’s once a weekend or so. You don’t have to believe it.
atleastoptimal 11mo ago
Many people actually are becoming more productive. I know you're using quotes around productive to insulate yourself from the indignity of admitting that AI actually is useful in specific domains.
- bluefirebrand 11mo ago
  If AI is making you more productive, then I doubt you were very productive pre-AI
  - cyral 11mo ago
    The denial/cope here is insane
    - fireflash38 11mo ago
      My experience with using AI is that it's a glorified stack overflow copy paster. It'll even glue a handful of SO answers together! But then you run into classic SO problems... Like the first solution doesn't work. Nor the second one. And the third one introduces a completely different coding style. The last one is implemented in pure sh/GNU utils. One thing it is absolutely amazing at: digesting things that have bad documentation, like openssl C api. Even then you still gotta be on the watch for hallucinations, and audit it very thoroughly.
  - atleastoptimal 11mo ago
    I had a software engineering job before AI. I still do, but I can write much more code. I avoid AI in more mission-critical domains and areas where it is more important that I understand the details intimately, but a lot of coding is repetitive busywork, looking for "needles in haystacks", porting libraries, etc. which AI makes 10x easier.
- grayhatter 11mo ago
  > Many people actually are becoming more productive. I know you're using quotes around productive to insulate yourself from the indignity of admitting that AI actually is useful in specific domains. Equally, my read is you're fixating on the syntax used in their comment to insulate yourself from actually engaging with their idea and point. You refuse to try to understand the parts of the system that negate the surface level popularity, eer productivity gains. People who enjoy the productivity boost of AI are right, you can absolutely, without question build a house faster with AI. The people who claim there's not really any reasonable productivity gains from AI are also right, because using AI to build a multistory anything, requires you to waste all that time starting with a house, to then raze it to the ground and rebuild a usable foundation. yes, "but its useful in specific domains" is technically correct statement, but whataboutism is rarely a useful conversational response.
SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
> If your org is blindly data/metric driven, it is probably just a mater of time until managers start asking why everyone else is producing so much, while you're slow? It’s a reasonable question, and my response is that I’ve encountered multiple specific examples now of a project being delayed a week because some junior tried to “save” a day by having AI write bad code. Good managers generally understand the concept of a misleading productivity metric that fails to reflect real value. There’s a reason, after all, why most of us don’t get promoted based on lines of code delivered. I understand why people who don’t trust their managers to get this would round it off to artisanship for its own sake.
sambuccid 11mo ago
In my experience I saw the complete opposite of "juniors looking like savants", there are a few pieces of code made by some juniors and som mid engineers in my company(one also involving a senior) that were clearly made with AI, and they are such a mess that they haven't been touched ever since because it's just impossible to understand, and this wasn't caught in the PR because the size of it was so large that people didn't actually bother reading it. I did see a few good senior engineers using AI and producing good code, but for junior and mid engineers I have witnessed the complete opposite.

zwnow 11mo ago

> You really need a competent and understanding boss to not be labeled a luddite, because let's be real - LLMs have made everyone more "productive" on paper. I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. If it doesn't, yay refactoring prompts instead of tackling the actual problem. Also I can write code for free, LLMs coding assistants aren't free. I can fit business problems amd edge cases into my brain given some time, a LLM is unaware about edge cases, legal requirements, decoupled dependencies, potential refactors or the occasional call of boss asking for something to be sneaked into the code right now. If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into.

Aurornis 11mo ago
> I am actually less productive when using LLMs because now I have to read another entities code and be able to judge wether this fits my current business problem or not. You don’t have to let the LLM write code for you. They’re very useful as a smart search engine for your code base, a smart refactoring tool, a suggestion generator, and many other ways. I rarely have LLMs write code for me from scratch that I have to review, but I do give them specific instructions to do what I want to the codebase. They can do it much faster than I can search around the codebase and type out myself. There are so many ways to make LLMs useful without having them do all the work while you sit back and judge. I think some people are determined to get no value out of the LLM because they feel compelled to be anti-hype, so they’re missing out on all the different little ways they can be used to help. Even just using it as a smarter search engine (in the modes where they can search and find the right sections of right articles or even GitHub issues for you) has been very helpful. But you have to actually learn how to use them. > If my job forced me to use these tools, congrats, I'll update my address to some hut in a forrest eating cold canned ravioli for the rest of my life because I for sure dont wanna work in a world where I am forced to use dystopian big tech machines I cant look into. Okay, good luck with your hut in the forest. The rest of us will move on using these tools how we see fit, which for many of us doesn’t actually include this idea where the LLM is the author of the code and you just ask nicely and reject edits until it produces the exact code you want. The tools are useful in many ways and you don’t have to stop writing your own code. In fact, anyone who believes they can have the LLM do all the coding is in for a bad surprise when they realize that specific hype is a lie.
- zwnow 11mo ago
  > But you have to actually learn how to use them. This probably is the issue for me, I am simply not willing to do so. To me the whole AI thing is extremely dystopian so even on a professional level I feel repulsed by it. We had an AWS and a Cloudflare outage recently, which has shown that maybe it isn't a great idea to rely on a few companies for a single _thing_. Integrating LLMs and using all these tools is just another bridge people depend on at some point. I want to write software that works, preferably even offline. I want tools that do not spy on me (referring to that new Google editor, forgot the name). Call me once these tools work offline on my 8GB RAM laptop with a crusty CPU and I might put in the effort to learn them.
  - Aurornis 11mo ago
    > This probably is the issue for me, I am simply not willing to do so. Thanks for being honest at least. So many HN arguments start as a desire to hate something and then try to bridge that into something that feels like a takedown of the merits of that thing. I think a lot of the HN LLM hate comes from people who simply want to hate LLMs. > We had an AWS and a Cloudflare outage recently, which has shown that maybe it isn't a great idea to rely on a few companies for a single _thing_. Integrating LLMs and using all these tools is just another bridge people depend on at some point. For an experienced dev using LLMs as another tool, an LLM outage isn’t a problem. You just continue coding. It’s on the level of Google going down so you have to use another search engine or try to remember the URL for something yourself. The main LLM players are also easy to switch between. I jump between Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI almost month to month to try things out. I could have subscriptions to all 3 at the same time and it would still be cheap. I think this point is overblown. It’s not a true team dependency like when GitHub stop working a few days back.
  - lxgr 11mo ago
    > We had an AWS and a Cloudflare outage recently, which has shown that maybe it isn't a great idea to rely on a few companies for a single _thing_. I share that concern about massive, unforced centralization. If there were any evidence for the hypothesis that LLM inference would always remain viable in datacenters only, I'd be extremely concerned about their use too. But from all I've seen, it seems overwhelmingly likely that we'll have very powerful ones in our phones in at most a few years, and definitely in midrange laptops and above.

fileeditview 11mo ago

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over. The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse. edit: sentence fixed.

lxgr 11mo ago
> The era of software mass production has begun. We've been in that era for at least two decades now. We just only now invented the steam engine. > I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. At least one such artifact of craft and beauty already literally crashed two airplanes. Bad engineering is possible with and without LLMs.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- knollimar 11mo ago
  There's a buge difference between possible and likely. Maybe I'm pessimistic but I at least feel like there's a world of difference between a practice that encourages bugs and one that allows them through when there is negligence. The accountability problem needs to be addressed before we say it's like self driving cars outperforming humans. On a errors per line basis, I don't think LLMs are on par with humans yet
  - lxgr 11mo ago
    Knowing your system components’ various error rates and compensating for them has always been the job. This includes both the software itself and the engineers working on it. The only difference is that there is now a new high-throughput, high-error (at least for now) component editing the software.
    - 11mo ago

davidmurdoch 11mo ago

This just happened to me this week. I work on the platform everyone builds on top of. A change here can subtlety break any feature, no matter how distant. AI just can't cope with this yet. So my team has been told that we are too slow. Meanwhile, earlier this week we halted a roll out because if a bug introduced by AI, as it worked around a privacy feature by just allow listing the behavior it wanted, instead of changing the code to address to policy. It wasn't caught in review because the file that was changed didn't require my teams review (because we ship more slowly, they removed us as code owners for many files recently).

BarryMilo 11mo ago
As it was foretold since the beginning, IA use is breaking security wantonly.
rho4 11mo ago
Ouch, so painful to read.
grayhatter 11mo ago
> It wasn't caught in review because the file that was changed didn't require my teams review (because we ship more slowly, they removed us as code owners for many files recently). I've lost your fight, but won mine before, you can sell this as risk reduction to your boss. I've never seen eng win this argument on quality grounds. Quality is rarely something that can be understood by company leadership. But having a risk reduction team that moves a bit slower and protects the company from extreme exposures like this, is much harder to cut from the process. "Imagine the law suits missing something like this would cause." and "we don't move slower, we do more than the other teams, the code is more visible, but the elimination of mistakes that will be very expensive legally and reputationally is what we're the best at"
miningape 11mo ago
Fuck it - let them reap the consequences. Ideally wait until there's something particularly destructive, then do the post-mortem as publicly as possible - call out the structures and practises that enabled that commit to get into production.

AndrewKemendo 11mo ago

> If your org is blindly data/metric driven Are there for profit companies (not non profits, research institutes etc…) that are not metric driven?

intothemild 11mo ago
Most early stage startups I've been in weren't metric driven. It's impossible when everyone is just working as hard as they can to get it built, to suddenly slow down and start measuring everyone's output. It's not until later. When it's gotten to a larger size, do you have the resources to be metric driven.
- AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
  Every early stage startup is absolutely metric driven: keeping the business alive based on Runway
layer8 11mo ago
“Blindly” is the operative word here.
- AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
  That’s almost an oxymoron You can’t be data driven and also blind to the data You might be optimizing for the wrong thing, but it’s not blind, it’s just a bad “model”
  - DoughnutHole 11mo ago
    The blindness is to reality and nuance. If you stare at your GPS and don’t pay attention to what’s in the real world outside your windshield until you careen off a cliff that would be “blindly” following your GPS. You had data but you didn’t sufficiently hedge against your data being incomplete. Likewise sticking dogmatically to your metrics while ignoring nuance or the human factor is blindly following your metrics.
  - 11mo ago

syllogism 11mo ago

I think LLMs are net helpful if used well, but there's also a big problem with them in workplaces that needs to be called out. It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. If all your coworkers use LLMs and you don't you're gonna get eaten alive. LLMs are unreasonably effective at generating large volumes of stuff that resembles diligent work on the surface. The other thing is, tools change trade-offs. If you're in a team that's decided to lean into static analysis, and you don't use type checking in your editor, you're getting all the costs and less of the benefits. Or if you're in a team that's decided to go dynamic, writing good types for just your module is mostly a waste of time. LLMs are like this too. If you're using a very different workflow from everyone else on your team, you're going to end up constantly arguing for different trade-offs, and ultimately you're going to cause a bunch of pointless friction. If you don't want to work the same way as the rest of the team just join a different team, it's really better for everyone.

arscan 11mo ago
> It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. This is my biggest gripe with LLM use in practice.
acedTrex 11mo ago
> It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people. This is so incredibly true.
- evnp 11mo ago
  I'm interested in this. Code review, most egregiously where the "author" neglected to review the LLM output themselves, seems like a clear instance. What are some other examples? Something that should go in a "survival guide" for devs that still prefer to code themselves.
  - acedTrex 11mo ago
    I'm currently really feeling the pain the side bar stuff. The non "application" code/config. Scripts, cicd, documentation etc. The stuff that gets a PR but doesn't REALLY get the same level of review because its not really production code. But when you need to go tweak the thing it does a few months or years later... its so dense and undecipherable you spend more time figuring out how the llm wrote the damn thing than doing it all over yourself. Should you probably review it a little harsher in the moment? sure, but thats not always feasible with things that are at the time "not important" and only later become the root of other things. I have lost several hours this week to several such occurences.

Aurornis 11mo ago

> Non-coders are churning out small apps in record pace, juniors are looking like savants with the amount of code and tasks they finish, where probably 90% of the code is done by Claude or whatever. Honestly I think you’re swallowing some of the hype here. I think the biggest advantages of LLMs go to the experienced coders who know how to leverage them in their workflows. That may not even include having the LLM write the code directly. The non-coders producing apps meme is all over social media, but the real world results aren’t there. All over Twitter there were “build in public” indie non-tech developers using LLMs to write their apps and the hype didn’t match reality. Some people could get minimal apps out the door that kind of talked to a back end, but even those people were running into issues not breaking everything on update or managing software lifecycle. The top complaint in all of the social circles I have about LLMs is with juniors submitting LLM junk PRs and then blaming the LLM. It’s just not true that juniors are expertly solving tasks with LLMs faster than seniors. I think LLMs are helpful and anyone senior isn’t learning how to use them to their advantage (which doesn’t mean telling the LLM what to write and hoping for the best) is missing out. I think people swallowing the hype about non-tech people and juniors doing senior work is getting misled about the actual ways to use these tools effectively.

jvanderbot 11mo ago
It's not just "juniors". It's people who should know better turning out LLM junk outside their actual experience areas because "They are experienced enough to use LLMs". There are just some things that need lots of extra scrutiny in a system, and the experienced ones know where that is. An LLM rarely seems to, especially for systems of anywhere near real world production size.
intended 11mo ago
I didnt read the parent comment as celebrating this state. More like they were decrying it, and the blindness of people who just run on metrics.
stocksinsmocks 11mo ago
I’m a garage coder and the kind of engineer that has a license. I had the capacity with my kids to make a usable application for my work about once every 6 months. Now it’s once a weekend or so. You don’t have to believe it.

atleastoptimal 11mo ago

Many people actually are becoming more productive. I know you're using quotes around productive to insulate yourself from the indignity of admitting that AI actually is useful in specific domains.

bluefirebrand 11mo ago
If AI is making you more productive, then I doubt you were very productive pre-AI
- cyral 11mo ago
  The denial/cope here is insane
  - fireflash38 11mo ago
    My experience with using AI is that it's a glorified stack overflow copy paster. It'll even glue a handful of SO answers together! But then you run into classic SO problems... Like the first solution doesn't work. Nor the second one. And the third one introduces a completely different coding style. The last one is implemented in pure sh/GNU utils. One thing it is absolutely amazing at: digesting things that have bad documentation, like openssl C api. Even then you still gotta be on the watch for hallucinations, and audit it very thoroughly.
- atleastoptimal 11mo ago
  I had a software engineering job before AI. I still do, but I can write much more code. I avoid AI in more mission-critical domains and areas where it is more important that I understand the details intimately, but a lot of coding is repetitive busywork, looking for "needles in haystacks", porting libraries, etc. which AI makes 10x easier.
grayhatter 11mo ago
> Many people actually are becoming more productive. I know you're using quotes around productive to insulate yourself from the indignity of admitting that AI actually is useful in specific domains. Equally, my read is you're fixating on the syntax used in their comment to insulate yourself from actually engaging with their idea and point. You refuse to try to understand the parts of the system that negate the surface level popularity, eer productivity gains. People who enjoy the productivity boost of AI are right, you can absolutely, without question build a house faster with AI. The people who claim there's not really any reasonable productivity gains from AI are also right, because using AI to build a multistory anything, requires you to waste all that time starting with a house, to then raze it to the ground and rebuild a usable foundation. yes, "but its useful in specific domains" is technically correct statement, but whataboutism is rarely a useful conversational response.

SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago

> If your org is blindly data/metric driven, it is probably just a mater of time until managers start asking why everyone else is producing so much, while you're slow? It’s a reasonable question, and my response is that I’ve encountered multiple specific examples now of a project being delayed a week because some junior tried to “save” a day by having AI write bad code. Good managers generally understand the concept of a misleading productivity metric that fails to reflect real value. There’s a reason, after all, why most of us don’t get promoted based on lines of code delivered. I understand why people who don’t trust their managers to get this would round it off to artisanship for its own sake.

sambuccid 11mo ago

In my experience I saw the complete opposite of "juniors looking like savants", there are a few pieces of code made by some juniors and som mid engineers in my company(one also involving a senior) that were clearly made with AI, and they are such a mess that they haven't been touched ever since because it's just impossible to understand, and this wasn't caught in the PR because the size of it was so large that people didn't actually bother reading it. I did see a few good senior engineers using AI and producing good code, but for junior and mid engineers I have witnessed the complete opposite.