5 ms·

As a Seattle SWE, I'd say most of my coworkers do hate all the time-wasting AI stuff being shoved down our throats. There are a few evangelical AI boosters I do

As a Seattle SWE, I'd say most of my coworkers do hate all the time-wasting AI stuff being shoved down our throats. There are a few evangelical AI boosters I do work with, but I keep catching mistakes in their code that they didn't used to make. Large suites of elegant looking unit tests, but the unit tests include large amounts of code duplicating functionality of the test framework for no reason, and I've even seen unit tests that mock the actual function under test. New features that actually already exist with more sane APIs. Code that is a tangled web of spaghetti. These people largely think AI is improving their speed but then their code isn't making it past code review. I worry about teams with less stringent code review cultures, modifying or improving these systems is going to be a major pain.

jfalcon 10mo ago
I see it like the hype of js/node and whatever module tech is glued to it when it was new from the perspective of someone who didn't code js. Sum of F's given is still zero. -206dev
mips_avatar 10mo ago
My hot take is that the evangelical people don't really like AI either they're just scared. I think you have to be outside of big tech to appreciate AI
- elzbardico 10mo ago
  If AI replaces software engineers, people outside tech doesn't have much chance of surviving it too.
  - LPisGood 10mo ago
    Exactly. I think it’s pretty clear that software engineering is an “intelligence complete” problem. If you can automatically solve SWE than you can automatically solve pretty much all knowledge work.
    - elzbardico 10mo ago
      A lot of modern corporate work is bullshit work. I don't think it is too outrageous to believe that LLMs can do a lot of what all those armies of corporate bureaucrats do.
      - int_19h 10mo ago
        The difference is that unlike SWEs, the people doing all that bullshit work are much better at networking, so they will (collectively) find a reason why they shouldn't be replaced with AI and push it through. SWEs could do so as well, if only we were unionized.
        elzbardico 10mo ago
        Gotta agree that you have a point here, a pretty strong one indeed.
psyclobe 10mo ago
> and I've even seen unit tests > that mock the actual function > under test. Yup. Ai is so fickle it’ll do anything to accomplish the task. But ai is just a tool it’s all about what you allow it to do. Can’t blame ai really.
- dpark 10mo ago
  In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake. We had a complete outage in the testing of a product once and a couple of tests were still green. Turns it they tested nothing and never had.
  - sirreal14 10mo ago
    > In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake These were (formerly) not the kinds of humans who regularly made these kinds of mistakes.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
- mehagar 10mo ago
  If a tool makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, then it's not a good tool. See C++.
  - jahsome 10mo ago
    I'm no apologist but this statement doesn't ring for me. It's easy to shock yourself with electricity, is it a bad tool?
    - crabmusket 10mo ago
      Electricity isn't a tool, it's nature. An unenclosed electrical plug which you had to be really careful when handling would be a bad tool, yes. A tool is something designed by humans. We don't get to design electricity, but we do get to design the systems we put in place around it. Gravity isn't a tool, but stairs are, and there are good and bad stairs.
doyougnu 10mo ago
I've interfaced with some AI generated code and after several examples of finding subtle and yet very wrong bugs I now find that I digest code that I suspect coming from AI (or an AI loving coworker) with much much more scrutiny than I used to. I've frankly lost trust in any kind of care for quality or due diligence from some coworkers. I see how the use of AI is useful, but I feel that the practitioners of AI-as-coding-agent are running away from the real work. How can you tell me about the system you say you have created if you don't have the patience to make it or think about it deeply in the first place?
- teej 10mo ago
  Your coworkers were probably writing subtle bugs before AI too.
  - munificent 10mo ago
    Would you rather consume a bowl of soup with a fly in it, or a 50 gallon drum with 1,000 flies in it? In which scenario are you more likely to fish out all the flies before you eat one?
    - teej 10mo ago
      Easier to skim 1000 flies from a single drum than 100 flies from 100 bowls of soup.
      - munificent 10mo ago
        Alas, the flies are not floating on the surface. They are deeply mixed in, almost as if the machine that generated the soup wanted desperately to appear to be doing an excellent job making fly-free soup.
        andrei_says_ 10mo ago
        … while not having a real distinction between flies and non-fly ingredients.
sudoshred 10mo ago
As someone on a team with a less stringent code review culture, AI generated code creates more work when used indiscriminately. Good enough to get approved but full of non-obvious errors that cause expensive rework which only gets prioritized once the shortcomings become painfully obvious (usually) months after the original work was “completed” and once the original author has forgotten the details, or worse, left the team entirely. Not to say AI generated code is not occasionally valuable, just not for anything that is intended to be correct and maintainable indefinitely by other developers. The real challenge is people using AI generated code as a mechanism to avoid fully understanding the problem that needs to be solved.
- arresin 10mo ago
  Exactly it’s the non-obvious errors that are easy to miss—doubly so if you are just scanning the code. Those errors can create very hard to find bugs. So between the debugging and many times you need to reprompt and redo (if you bother at all, but then that adds debugging time) is any time actually saved? I think the dust hasn’t settled yet because no one has shipped mostly AI generated code for a non-trivial application. They couldn’t have with its current state. So it’s still unknown whether building on incredibly shaky ground will actually work in real life (I personally doubt it).
openasocket 10mo ago
Pretty much. Someone on our team put out a code review for some new feature and then bounced for a 2 week vacation. One of our junior engineers approved it. Despite the fact that it was in a section of dead code that wasn’t supposed to even be enabled yet, it managed to break our test environment. Took senior engineers a day to figure out how that was even possible before reverting. We had another couple engineers take a look to see what needs to be done to fix the bug. All of them came away with the conclusion that it was 1,000 lines of pure AI-generated slop with no redeemable value. Trying to fix it would take more work than just re-implenting from scratch.
- justatdotin 10mo ago
  > One of our junior engineers approved it. pretty sure the process I've seen most places is more like: one junior approves, one senior approves, then the owner manually merges. so your process seems inadequate to me, agents or not. also, was it tagged as generated? that seems like an obvious safety feature. As a junior, I might be thinking: 'my senior colleague sure knows lots of this stuff', but all it would take to dispel my illusion is an agent tag on the PR.
  - openasocket 10mo ago
    > pretty sure the process I've seen most places is more like: one junior approves, one senior approves, then the owner manually merges. Yeah that’s what I think we need to enforce. To answer your question, it was not tagged as AI generated. Frankly, I think we should ban AI-generated code outright, though labeling it as such would be a good compromise.
nikkwong 10mo ago
As another Seattle SWE, I'll go against the grain and say that I think AI is going to change the nature of the market for labor for SWE's and my guess would be for the negative. People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here. If you were to just judge by the sentiment on HN, you would think no coder worth their weight was using this in the real world—but my experience on a few teams over the last two years has been exactly the opposite—people are often embarrassed to admit it but they are using it all the time. There are many engineers at Meta that "no longer code" by hand and do literally all of their problem solving with AI. I remember last year or even earlier this year feeling like the models had plateau'd and I was of the mindset that these tools would probably forever just augment SWEs without fully replacing them. But with Opus 4.5, gemini 3, et al., these models are incredibly powerful and more and more SWEs are leaning on them more and more—a trend that may slow down or speed up—but is never going to backslide. I think people that don't generally see this are fooling themselves. Sure, there are problem areas—it misses stuff, there are subtle bugs, it's not good for every codebase, for every language, for every scenario. There is some sloppiness that is hard to catch. But this is true with humans too. Just remember, the ability of the models today is the worst that it will ever be—it's only going to get better. And it doesn't need to be perfect to rapidly change the job market for SWE's—it's good enough to do enough of the tasks for enough mid-level SWEs at enough companies to reshape the market. I'm sure I'll get downvoted to hell for this comment; but I think SWEs (and everyone else for that matter) would best practice some fiscal austerity amongst themselves because I would imagine the chance of many of us being on the losing side of this within the next decade is non-trivial. I mean, they've made all of the progress up to now in essentially the last 5 years and the models are already incredibly capable.
- YZF 10mo ago
  I keep getting blown away by AI (specifically Claude Code with the latest models). What it does is literally science fiction. If you told someone 5 years ago that AI can find and fix a bug in some complex code with almost zero human intervention nobody would believe you, but this is the reality today. It can find bugs, it can fix bugs, it can refactor code, it can write code. Yes, not perfect, but with a well organized code base, and with careful prompting, it rivals humans in many tasks (certainly outperforms them in some aspects). As you're also saying this is the worst it will ever be. There is only one direction, the question is the acceleration/velocity. Where I'm not sure I agree is with the perception this automatically means we're all going to be out of a job. It's possible there would be more software engineering jobs. It's not clear. Someone still has to catch the bad approaches, the big mistakes, etc. There is going to be a lot more software produced with these tools than ever.

jfalcon 10mo ago

I see it like the hype of js/node and whatever module tech is glued to it when it was new from the perspective of someone who didn't code js. Sum of F's given is still zero. -206dev

mips_avatar 10mo ago

My hot take is that the evangelical people don't really like AI either they're just scared. I think you have to be outside of big tech to appreciate AI

elzbardico 10mo ago
If AI replaces software engineers, people outside tech doesn't have much chance of surviving it too.
- LPisGood 10mo ago
  Exactly. I think it’s pretty clear that software engineering is an “intelligence complete” problem. If you can automatically solve SWE than you can automatically solve pretty much all knowledge work.
  - elzbardico 10mo ago
    A lot of modern corporate work is bullshit work. I don't think it is too outrageous to believe that LLMs can do a lot of what all those armies of corporate bureaucrats do.
    - int_19h 10mo ago
      The difference is that unlike SWEs, the people doing all that bullshit work are much better at networking, so they will (collectively) find a reason why they shouldn't be replaced with AI and push it through. SWEs could do so as well, if only we were unionized.
      - elzbardico 10mo ago
        Gotta agree that you have a point here, a pretty strong one indeed.

psyclobe 10mo ago

> and I've even seen unit tests > that mock the actual function > under test. Yup. Ai is so fickle it’ll do anything to accomplish the task. But ai is just a tool it’s all about what you allow it to do. Can’t blame ai really.

dpark 10mo ago
In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake. We had a complete outage in the testing of a product once and a couple of tests were still green. Turns it they tested nothing and never had.
- sirreal14 10mo ago
  > In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake These were (formerly) not the kinds of humans who regularly made these kinds of mistakes.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
mehagar 10mo ago
If a tool makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, then it's not a good tool. See C++.
- jahsome 10mo ago
  I'm no apologist but this statement doesn't ring for me. It's easy to shock yourself with electricity, is it a bad tool?
  - crabmusket 10mo ago
    Electricity isn't a tool, it's nature. An unenclosed electrical plug which you had to be really careful when handling would be a bad tool, yes. A tool is something designed by humans. We don't get to design electricity, but we do get to design the systems we put in place around it. Gravity isn't a tool, but stairs are, and there are good and bad stairs.

doyougnu 10mo ago

I've interfaced with some AI generated code and after several examples of finding subtle and yet very wrong bugs I now find that I digest code that I suspect coming from AI (or an AI loving coworker) with much much more scrutiny than I used to. I've frankly lost trust in any kind of care for quality or due diligence from some coworkers. I see how the use of AI is useful, but I feel that the practitioners of AI-as-coding-agent are running away from the real work. How can you tell me about the system you say you have created if you don't have the patience to make it or think about it deeply in the first place?

teej 10mo ago
Your coworkers were probably writing subtle bugs before AI too.
- munificent 10mo ago
  Would you rather consume a bowl of soup with a fly in it, or a 50 gallon drum with 1,000 flies in it? In which scenario are you more likely to fish out all the flies before you eat one?
  - teej 10mo ago
    Easier to skim 1000 flies from a single drum than 100 flies from 100 bowls of soup.
    - munificent 10mo ago
      Alas, the flies are not floating on the surface. They are deeply mixed in, almost as if the machine that generated the soup wanted desperately to appear to be doing an excellent job making fly-free soup.
      - andrei_says_ 10mo ago
        … while not having a real distinction between flies and non-fly ingredients.

sudoshred 10mo ago

As someone on a team with a less stringent code review culture, AI generated code creates more work when used indiscriminately. Good enough to get approved but full of non-obvious errors that cause expensive rework which only gets prioritized once the shortcomings become painfully obvious (usually) months after the original work was “completed” and once the original author has forgotten the details, or worse, left the team entirely. Not to say AI generated code is not occasionally valuable, just not for anything that is intended to be correct and maintainable indefinitely by other developers. The real challenge is people using AI generated code as a mechanism to avoid fully understanding the problem that needs to be solved.

arresin 10mo ago
Exactly it’s the non-obvious errors that are easy to miss—doubly so if you are just scanning the code. Those errors can create very hard to find bugs. So between the debugging and many times you need to reprompt and redo (if you bother at all, but then that adds debugging time) is any time actually saved? I think the dust hasn’t settled yet because no one has shipped mostly AI generated code for a non-trivial application. They couldn’t have with its current state. So it’s still unknown whether building on incredibly shaky ground will actually work in real life (I personally doubt it).

openasocket 10mo ago

Pretty much. Someone on our team put out a code review for some new feature and then bounced for a 2 week vacation. One of our junior engineers approved it. Despite the fact that it was in a section of dead code that wasn’t supposed to even be enabled yet, it managed to break our test environment. Took senior engineers a day to figure out how that was even possible before reverting. We had another couple engineers take a look to see what needs to be done to fix the bug. All of them came away with the conclusion that it was 1,000 lines of pure AI-generated slop with no redeemable value. Trying to fix it would take more work than just re-implenting from scratch.

justatdotin 10mo ago
> One of our junior engineers approved it. pretty sure the process I've seen most places is more like: one junior approves, one senior approves, then the owner manually merges. so your process seems inadequate to me, agents or not. also, was it tagged as generated? that seems like an obvious safety feature. As a junior, I might be thinking: 'my senior colleague sure knows lots of this stuff', but all it would take to dispel my illusion is an agent tag on the PR.
- openasocket 10mo ago
  > pretty sure the process I've seen most places is more like: one junior approves, one senior approves, then the owner manually merges. Yeah that’s what I think we need to enforce. To answer your question, it was not tagged as AI generated. Frankly, I think we should ban AI-generated code outright, though labeling it as such would be a good compromise.

nikkwong 10mo ago

As another Seattle SWE, I'll go against the grain and say that I think AI is going to change the nature of the market for labor for SWE's and my guess would be for the negative. People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be, and it's only going to improve from here. If you were to just judge by the sentiment on HN, you would think no coder worth their weight was using this in the real world—but my experience on a few teams over the last two years has been exactly the opposite—people are often embarrassed to admit it but they are using it all the time. There are many engineers at Meta that "no longer code" by hand and do literally all of their problem solving with AI. I remember last year or even earlier this year feeling like the models had plateau'd and I was of the mindset that these tools would probably forever just augment SWEs without fully replacing them. But with Opus 4.5, gemini 3, et al., these models are incredibly powerful and more and more SWEs are leaning on them more and more—a trend that may slow down or speed up—but is never going to backslide. I think people that don't generally see this are fooling themselves. Sure, there are problem areas—it misses stuff, there are subtle bugs, it's not good for every codebase, for every language, for every scenario. There is some sloppiness that is hard to catch. But this is true with humans too. Just remember, the ability of the models today is the worst that it will ever be—it's only going to get better. And it doesn't need to be perfect to rapidly change the job market for SWE's—it's good enough to do enough of the tasks for enough mid-level SWEs at enough companies to reshape the market. I'm sure I'll get downvoted to hell for this comment; but I think SWEs (and everyone else for that matter) would best practice some fiscal austerity amongst themselves because I would imagine the chance of many of us being on the losing side of this within the next decade is non-trivial. I mean, they've made all of the progress up to now in essentially the last 5 years and the models are already incredibly capable.

YZF 10mo ago
I keep getting blown away by AI (specifically Claude Code with the latest models). What it does is literally science fiction. If you told someone 5 years ago that AI can find and fix a bug in some complex code with almost zero human intervention nobody would believe you, but this is the reality today. It can find bugs, it can fix bugs, it can refactor code, it can write code. Yes, not perfect, but with a well organized code base, and with careful prompting, it rivals humans in many tasks (certainly outperforms them in some aspects). As you're also saying this is the worst it will ever be. There is only one direction, the question is the acceleration/velocity. Where I'm not sure I agree is with the perception this automatically means we're all going to be out of a job. It's possible there would be more software engineering jobs. It's not clear. Someone still has to catch the bad approaches, the big mistakes, etc. There is going to be a lot more software produced with these tools than ever.