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Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out.

Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out. Some models are better at some tasks, some tools are better at finding the right text and connecting it to the right actions, some tools provide a better wrapper around the text-generation process. Certain jobs are very easy for AI to do, others are impossible (but the AI lies about them). A lot of us tried it and just said, "huh, that's interesting" and then went back to work. We hear AI advocates say that their workflow is amazing, but we watch videos of their workflow, and it doesn't look that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next release is about to change everything!", but this knowledge isn't actionable or even accurate. There's just not much value in chasing the endless AI news cycle, constantly believing that I'll fall behind if I don't read the latest details of Gemini 3.1 and ChatGPT 6.Y (Game Of The Year Edition). The engineers I know who use AI don't seem to have any particular insights about it aside from an encyclopedic knowledge of product details, all of which are changing on a monthly basis anyway. New products that use gen AI are — by default — uninteresting to me because I know that under the hood, they're just sending text and getting text back, and the thing they're sending to is the same thing that everyone is sending to. Sure, the wrapper is nice, but I'm not paying an overhead fee for that.

SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
This isn’t “unfair”, but you are intentionally underselling it. If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech. I’m not making any case for anything, but it’s just not that hard to get excited for something that sure does seem like magic sometimes. Edit: lol this forum :)
- ggerni 10mo ago
  [flagged]
- rconti 10mo ago
  > If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech. Or your job isn't what AI is good at? AI seems really good at greenfield projects in well known languages or adding features. It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of complex codebases.
  - perardi 10mo ago
    > It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of complex codebases. This is precisely my experience. Having the AI work on a large mono repo with a front-end that uses a fairly obscure templating system? Not great. Spinning up a greenfield React/Vite/ShadCN proof-of-concept for a sales demo? Magic.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  - Aeolun 10mo ago
    > It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages Well, there’s your problem. You should have selected React while you had the chance.
- nosianu 10mo ago
  > If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right I AM very impressed, and I DO use it and enjoy the results. The problem is the inconsistency. When it works it works great, but it is very noticeable that it is just a machine from how it behaves. Again, I am VERY impressed by what was achieved. I even enjoy Google AI summaries to some of the questions I now enter instead of search terms. This is definitely a huge step up in tier compared to pre-AI. But I'm already done getting used to what is possible now. Changes after that have been incremental, nice to have and I take them. I found a place for the tool, but if it wanted to match the hype another equally large step in actual intelligence is necessary, for the tool to truly be able to replace humans. So, I think the reason you don't see more glowing reviews and praise is that the technical people have found out what it can do and can't, and are already using it where appropriate. It's just a tool though. One that has to be watched over when you use it, requiring attention. And it does not learn - I can teach a newbie and they will learn and improve, I can only tweak the AI with prompts, with varying success. I think that by now I have developed a pretty good feel for what is possible. Changing my entire workflow to using it is simply not useful. I am actually one of those not enjoying coding as such, but wanting "solutions", probably also because I now work for an IT-using normal company, not for one making an IT product, and my focus most days is on actually accomplishing business tasks. I do enjoy being able to do some higher level descriptions and getting code for stuff without having to take care of all the gritty details. But this functionality is rudimentary. It IS a huge step, but still not nearly good enough to really be able to reliably delegate to the AI to the degree I want.
- bigstrat2003 10mo ago
  This shit right here is why people hate AI hype proponents. It's like it never crosses their mind that someone who disagrees with them might just be an intelligent person who tried it and found it was lacking. No, it's always "you're either doing it wrong or weren't really trying". Do you not see how condescending and annoying that is to people?
- sydd 10mo ago
  The more I use AI for coding the more I realize that its a toy for vibe coding/fun projects. Its not for serious work. When you work with a large codebase which have a very high complexity level, then the bugs put in there by AI will not worth the cost of the easily added features.
  - Libidinalecon 10mo ago
    Many people also program and have no idea what a giant codebase looks like. I know I don't. I have never been paid to write anything beyond a short script. I actually can't even picture what a professional software engineer actually works on day to day. From my perspective, it is completely mind blowing to write my own audio synth in python with Librosa. A library I didn't know existed before LLMs and now I have a full blown audio mangling tool that I would have never been able to figure out on my own. It seems to me professional software engineering must be at least as different to vibe coding as my audio noodlings are to being a professional concert pianist. Both are audio and music related but really two different activities entirely.
    - xwolfi 10mo ago
      I work on a stock market trading system in a big bank, in Hong Kong. The code is split between a backend in Java (no GC allowed during trading) and C++ (for algos), a frontend in C# (as complex as the backend, used by 200 traders), and a "new" frontend in Javascript in infinite migration. Most of the code was made before 2008 but that was the cvs to svn switch so we lost history before that. We have employees dating back 1997 who remembers that platform already existing. It's made of millions of lines of code, hundreds of people worked on it, it does intricate things in 10 stock markets across Asia (we have no clue how the others in US or EU do, not really at least - it's not the same rules, market vendors, protocols etc) Sometimes I need to configure new trading robots for random little thing we want to do automatically and I ask the AI the company is shoving down our throat. It is HOPELESS, literally hopeless. I had to write a review to my manager who will never pass it along up the ladder for fear of their response that was absolutely destructive. It cannot understand the code let alone write some, it cannot write the tests, it cannot generate configuration, it cannot help in anything. It's always wrong, it never gets it, it doesn't know what the fuck these 20 different repos of thousands of files are and how they connect to each other, why it's in so many languages, why it's so quirky sometimes. Should we change it all to make it AI compatible, or give up ? Fuck do I know... When I started working on it 7 years ago coming from little startups doing little things, it took me a few weeks to totally get the philosophy of it all and be productive. It's really not that hard, it's just really really really really large, so you have to embrace certain ways of working (for instance, you'll do bugs, and you'll find them too late, and you'll apologize in post mortems, dont be paralized by it). AIs costing all that money to be so dumb and useless, are disappointing :(
- jandrese 10mo ago
  The big problem is AI is amazing at doing the rote boilerplate stuff that generally wasn't a problem to begin with, but if you were to point a codebot at your trouble ticket system and tell it to go fix the issues it will be hopeless. Once your system gets complex enough the AI effectiveness drops off rapidly and you as the engineer have to spend more and more time babysitting every step to make sure it doesn't go off the rails. In the end you can save like 90% of the development effort on a small one-off project, and like 5% of the development effort on a large complex one. I think too many managers have been absolutely blown away by canned AI demos and toy projects and have not been properly disappointed when attempting to use the tools on something that is not trivial.
  - DrewADesign 10mo ago
    I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed): The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost done and I just started!”. And it is a genuine win! But for me it’s dramatically less useful after that. The things that trip up experienced developers really trip up LLMs and sometimes trying to break the task down into teeny weeny pieces and cajole it into doing the thing is worse than not having it. So great with the backhoe tasks but mediocre-to-counterproductive with the shovel tasks. I have a feeling a lot of the impressiveness depends on which kind of tasks take up most of your dev time.
    - zeroonetwothree 10mo ago
      The other problem is that if you didn't actually write the first 90% then the second 90% becomes 2x harder since you have to figure out wtf is actually going on.
      - DrewADesign 10mo ago
        Right— that’s bitten me ‘whipping up’ prototypes. My assumption about the way the LLM would handle done minutiae ends up being wrong and finding out why something isn’t working ends up taking more time than doing it right the first time by hand. The worst part about that is you can’t even factor it in to your already inaccurate work time estimates because it could strike anywhere — including things you’d never mess up yourself.
- Jblx2 10mo ago
  I wonder if this issues isn't caused by people who aren't programmers, and now they can churn out AI generated stuff that they couldn't before. So to them, this is a magical new ability. Where as people who are already adept at their craft just see the slop. Same thing in other areas. In the before-times, you had to painstakingly handcraft your cat memes. Now a bot comes along and allows someone to make cat memes they didn't bother with before. But the real artisan cat memeists just roll their eyes.
  - etempleton 10mo ago
    AI is better than you at what you aren’t very good at. But once you are even mediocre at doing something you realize AI is wrong / pretty bad at doing most things and every once in awhile makes a baffling mistake. There are some exceptions where AI is genuinely useful, but I have employees who try to use AI all the time for everything and their work is embarrassingly bad.
    - Jblx2 10mo ago
      >AI is better than you at what you aren’t very good at. Yes, this is better phrased.
- ModernMech 10mo ago
  > If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet... Results are stochastic. Some people the first time they use it will get the best possible results by chance. They will attribute their good outcome to their skill in using the thing. Others will try it and will get the worst possible response, and they will attribute their bad outcome to the machine being terrible. Either way, whether it's amazing or terrible is kind of an illusion. It's both.
- antonvs 10mo ago
  > If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech. Much of this boils down to people simply not understanding what’s really happening. Most people, including most software developers, don’t have the ability to understand these tools, their implications, or how they relate to their own intelligence. > Edit: lol this forum :) Indeed.
- nutjob2 10mo ago
  You whole comment reads like someone who is a victim of hype. LLMs are great in their own way, but they're not a panacea. You may recall that magic is way to trick people into believing things that are not true. The mythical form of magic doesn't exist.
senordevnyc 10mo ago
I’ve been an engineer for 20 years, for myself, small companies, and big tech, and now working for my own saas company. There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems. Maybe AI isn’t the right tool for the job, but that kind of shallow dismissal indicates a closed mind, or perhaps a fear-based reaction. Either way, the market is going to punish them accordingly.
- mjr00 10mo ago
  > There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. "There's not much there" is a totally valid critique of a lot of the current AI ecosystem. How many startups are simple prompt wrappers on top of ChatGPT? How many AI features in products are just "click here to ask Rovo/Dingo/Kingo/CutesyAnthropomorphizedNameOfAI" text boxes that end up spitting out wrong information? There's certainly potential but a lot of the market is hot air right now. > Either way, the market is going to punish them accordingly. I doubt this, simply because the market has never really punished people for being less efficient at their jobs, especially software development. If it did, people proficient in vim would have been getting paid more than anyone else for the past 40 years.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - thewebguyd 10mo ago
    > simply because the market has never really punished people for being less efficient at their jobs In fact, it tends to be the opposite. You being more efficient just means you get "rewarded" with more work, typically without an appropriate increase in pay to match the additional work either. Especially true in large, non-tech companies/bureaucratic enterprises where you are much better off not making waves, and being deliberately mediocre (assuming you're not a ladder climber and aren't trying to get promoted out of an IC role). In a big team/org, your personal efficiency is irrelevant. The work can only move as fast as the slowest part of the system.
gedy 10mo ago
Maybe not what the OP or article is talking about, but it's super frustrating recently dealing with non/less technical mgrs, PMs, etc who now think they have this Uno card to bypass technical discussion just because they vibe coded some UI demo. Like no shit, that wasn't the hard part. But since they don't see the real/less visible past like data/auth/security, etc they act like engineers "aren't trying", less innovative, anti-AI or whatever when you bring up objections to their "whole app" they made with their AI snoopy snow cone machine.
- spaniard89277 10mo ago
  My experience too. They are so convinced that AI is magical that pushing back makes you look bad. Then things don't turn out as they expected and you have to deal with a dude thinking his engineers are messing with him. It's just boring.
- anonymars 10mo ago
  It reminds me of how we moved from "mockups" to "wireframes" -- in other words, deliberately making the appearance not look like a real, finished UI, because that could give the impression that the project was nearly done But now, to your point: they can vibe-code their own "mockups" and that brings us back to that problem
- pzs 10mo ago
  Hmm, (whatever is in execs' head about) AI appears to amplify the same kind of thinking fallacies that are discussed in the eternal Mythical Manmonth essay, which was written like half a century ago. Funny how some things don't change much...
palmotea 10mo ago
> We hear AI advocates say that their workflow is amazing, but we watch videos of their workflow, and it doesn't look that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next release is about to change everything!", but this knowledge isn't actionable or even accurate. There's a lot of disconnected-from-reality hustling (a.k.a lying) going on. For instance, that's practically Elon Musk's entire job, when he's actually doing it. A lot of people see those examples, think it's normal, and emulate it. There are a lot of unearned superlatives getting thrown around automatically to describe tech.
- HumblyTossed 10mo ago
  Yes, much the way some used to (still do?) try and emulate Steve Jobs. There's always some successful person these types are trying to be.
layer8 10mo ago
> Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out. "Engineers don't try" doesn’t refer to trying out AI in the article. It refers to trying to do something constructive and useful outside the usual corporate churn, but having given up on that because management is single-mindedly focused on AI. One way to summarize the article is: The AI engineers are doing hype-driven AI stuff, and the other engineers have lost all ambition for anything else, because AI is the only thing that gets attention and helps the career; and they hate it.
- FridgeSeal 10mo ago
  “Lost all ambition for anything else” is a funny way for the article to frame “hate being forced to run on the hampster wheel on ai, because an exec with the power to fire everyone is foaming at the mouth about ai and seemingly needs everyone to use it”
  - badbird33 10mo ago
    To add another layer to it, the reason execs are foaming at the mouth is because they are hoping to fire the as many people as possible. Including those who implemented whatever AI solution in the first place.
- cs02rm0 10mo ago
  > the other engineers have lost all ambition for anything else Worse, they've lost all funding for anything else.
  - zwnow 10mo ago
    Industries are built upon shit people built in their basements, get hacking
    - r14c 10mo ago
      I think it should be noted that a garage or basement in California costs like a million dollars.
shahbaby 10mo ago
The most ironic part is that AI skills won't really help you with job security. You touched on some of the reasons; it doesn't take much skill to call an API, the technology is in a period of rapid evolution, etc. And now with almost every company trying to adopt "AI" there is no shortage of people who can put AI experience on their resume and make a genuine case for it.

SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago

This isn’t “unfair”, but you are intentionally underselling it. If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech. I’m not making any case for anything, but it’s just not that hard to get excited for something that sure does seem like magic sometimes. Edit: lol this forum :)

ggerni 10mo ago
[flagged]
rconti 10mo ago
> If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech. Or your job isn't what AI is good at? AI seems really good at greenfield projects in well known languages or adding features. It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of complex codebases.
- perardi 10mo ago
  > It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages, or deep troubleshooting/tweaking of complex codebases. This is precisely my experience. Having the AI work on a large mono repo with a front-end that uses a fairly obscure templating system? Not great. Spinning up a greenfield React/Vite/ShadCN proof-of-concept for a sales demo? Magic.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- Aeolun 10mo ago
  > It's been pretty awful, IME, at working with less well-known languages Well, there’s your problem. You should have selected React while you had the chance.
nosianu 10mo ago
> If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right I AM very impressed, and I DO use it and enjoy the results. The problem is the inconsistency. When it works it works great, but it is very noticeable that it is just a machine from how it behaves. Again, I am VERY impressed by what was achieved. I even enjoy Google AI summaries to some of the questions I now enter instead of search terms. This is definitely a huge step up in tier compared to pre-AI. But I'm already done getting used to what is possible now. Changes after that have been incremental, nice to have and I take them. I found a place for the tool, but if it wanted to match the hype another equally large step in actual intelligence is necessary, for the tool to truly be able to replace humans. So, I think the reason you don't see more glowing reviews and praise is that the technical people have found out what it can do and can't, and are already using it where appropriate. It's just a tool though. One that has to be watched over when you use it, requiring attention. And it does not learn - I can teach a newbie and they will learn and improve, I can only tweak the AI with prompts, with varying success. I think that by now I have developed a pretty good feel for what is possible. Changing my entire workflow to using it is simply not useful. I am actually one of those not enjoying coding as such, but wanting "solutions", probably also because I now work for an IT-using normal company, not for one making an IT product, and my focus most days is on actually accomplishing business tasks. I do enjoy being able to do some higher level descriptions and getting code for stuff without having to take care of all the gritty details. But this functionality is rudimentary. It IS a huge step, but still not nearly good enough to really be able to reliably delegate to the AI to the degree I want.
bigstrat2003 10mo ago
This shit right here is why people hate AI hype proponents. It's like it never crosses their mind that someone who disagrees with them might just be an intelligent person who tried it and found it was lacking. No, it's always "you're either doing it wrong or weren't really trying". Do you not see how condescending and annoying that is to people?
sydd 10mo ago
The more I use AI for coding the more I realize that its a toy for vibe coding/fun projects. Its not for serious work. When you work with a large codebase which have a very high complexity level, then the bugs put in there by AI will not worth the cost of the easily added features.
- Libidinalecon 10mo ago
  Many people also program and have no idea what a giant codebase looks like. I know I don't. I have never been paid to write anything beyond a short script. I actually can't even picture what a professional software engineer actually works on day to day. From my perspective, it is completely mind blowing to write my own audio synth in python with Librosa. A library I didn't know existed before LLMs and now I have a full blown audio mangling tool that I would have never been able to figure out on my own. It seems to me professional software engineering must be at least as different to vibe coding as my audio noodlings are to being a professional concert pianist. Both are audio and music related but really two different activities entirely.
  - xwolfi 10mo ago
    I work on a stock market trading system in a big bank, in Hong Kong. The code is split between a backend in Java (no GC allowed during trading) and C++ (for algos), a frontend in C# (as complex as the backend, used by 200 traders), and a "new" frontend in Javascript in infinite migration. Most of the code was made before 2008 but that was the cvs to svn switch so we lost history before that. We have employees dating back 1997 who remembers that platform already existing. It's made of millions of lines of code, hundreds of people worked on it, it does intricate things in 10 stock markets across Asia (we have no clue how the others in US or EU do, not really at least - it's not the same rules, market vendors, protocols etc) Sometimes I need to configure new trading robots for random little thing we want to do automatically and I ask the AI the company is shoving down our throat. It is HOPELESS, literally hopeless. I had to write a review to my manager who will never pass it along up the ladder for fear of their response that was absolutely destructive. It cannot understand the code let alone write some, it cannot write the tests, it cannot generate configuration, it cannot help in anything. It's always wrong, it never gets it, it doesn't know what the fuck these 20 different repos of thousands of files are and how they connect to each other, why it's in so many languages, why it's so quirky sometimes. Should we change it all to make it AI compatible, or give up ? Fuck do I know... When I started working on it 7 years ago coming from little startups doing little things, it took me a few weeks to totally get the philosophy of it all and be productive. It's really not that hard, it's just really really really really large, so you have to embrace certain ways of working (for instance, you'll do bugs, and you'll find them too late, and you'll apologize in post mortems, dont be paralized by it). AIs costing all that money to be so dumb and useless, are disappointing :(
jandrese 10mo ago
The big problem is AI is amazing at doing the rote boilerplate stuff that generally wasn't a problem to begin with, but if you were to point a codebot at your trouble ticket system and tell it to go fix the issues it will be hopeless. Once your system gets complex enough the AI effectiveness drops off rapidly and you as the engineer have to spend more and more time babysitting every step to make sure it doesn't go off the rails. In the end you can save like 90% of the development effort on a small one-off project, and like 5% of the development effort on a large complex one. I think too many managers have been absolutely blown away by canned AI demos and toy projects and have not been properly disappointed when attempting to use the tools on something that is not trivial.
- DrewADesign 10mo ago
  I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed): The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost done and I just started!”. And it is a genuine win! But for me it’s dramatically less useful after that. The things that trip up experienced developers really trip up LLMs and sometimes trying to break the task down into teeny weeny pieces and cajole it into doing the thing is worse than not having it. So great with the backhoe tasks but mediocre-to-counterproductive with the shovel tasks. I have a feeling a lot of the impressiveness depends on which kind of tasks take up most of your dev time.
  - zeroonetwothree 10mo ago
    The other problem is that if you didn't actually write the first 90% then the second 90% becomes 2x harder since you have to figure out wtf is actually going on.
    - DrewADesign 10mo ago
      Right— that’s bitten me ‘whipping up’ prototypes. My assumption about the way the LLM would handle done minutiae ends up being wrong and finding out why something isn’t working ends up taking more time than doing it right the first time by hand. The worst part about that is you can’t even factor it in to your already inaccurate work time estimates because it could strike anywhere — including things you’d never mess up yourself.
Jblx2 10mo ago
I wonder if this issues isn't caused by people who aren't programmers, and now they can churn out AI generated stuff that they couldn't before. So to them, this is a magical new ability. Where as people who are already adept at their craft just see the slop. Same thing in other areas. In the before-times, you had to painstakingly handcraft your cat memes. Now a bot comes along and allows someone to make cat memes they didn't bother with before. But the real artisan cat memeists just roll their eyes.
- etempleton 10mo ago
  AI is better than you at what you aren’t very good at. But once you are even mediocre at doing something you realize AI is wrong / pretty bad at doing most things and every once in awhile makes a baffling mistake. There are some exceptions where AI is genuinely useful, but I have employees who try to use AI all the time for everything and their work is embarrassingly bad.
  - Jblx2 10mo ago
    >AI is better than you at what you aren’t very good at. Yes, this is better phrased.
ModernMech 10mo ago
> If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet... Results are stochastic. Some people the first time they use it will get the best possible results by chance. They will attribute their good outcome to their skill in using the thing. Others will try it and will get the worst possible response, and they will attribute their bad outcome to the machine being terrible. Either way, whether it's amazing or terrible is kind of an illusion. It's both.
antonvs 10mo ago
> If you haven’t had a mind blown moment with AI yet, you aren’t doing it right or are anchoring in what you know vs discovering new tech. Much of this boils down to people simply not understanding what’s really happening. Most people, including most software developers, don’t have the ability to understand these tools, their implications, or how they relate to their own intelligence. > Edit: lol this forum :) Indeed.
nutjob2 10mo ago
You whole comment reads like someone who is a victim of hype. LLMs are great in their own way, but they're not a panacea. You may recall that magic is way to trick people into believing things that are not true. The mythical form of magic doesn't exist.

senordevnyc 10mo ago

I’ve been an engineer for 20 years, for myself, small companies, and big tech, and now working for my own saas company. There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. To me, any software engineer who tries an LLM, shrugs and says “huh, that’s interesting” and then “gets back to work” is completely failing at their actual job, which is using technology to solve problems. Maybe AI isn’t the right tool for the job, but that kind of shallow dismissal indicates a closed mind, or perhaps a fear-based reaction. Either way, the market is going to punish them accordingly.

mjr00 10mo ago
> There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. "There's not much there" is a totally valid critique of a lot of the current AI ecosystem. How many startups are simple prompt wrappers on top of ChatGPT? How many AI features in products are just "click here to ask Rovo/Dingo/Kingo/CutesyAnthropomorphizedNameOfAI" text boxes that end up spitting out wrong information? There's certainly potential but a lot of the market is hot air right now. > Either way, the market is going to punish them accordingly. I doubt this, simply because the market has never really punished people for being less efficient at their jobs, especially software development. If it did, people proficient in vim would have been getting paid more than anyone else for the past 40 years.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- thewebguyd 10mo ago
  > simply because the market has never really punished people for being less efficient at their jobs In fact, it tends to be the opposite. You being more efficient just means you get "rewarded" with more work, typically without an appropriate increase in pay to match the additional work either. Especially true in large, non-tech companies/bureaucratic enterprises where you are much better off not making waves, and being deliberately mediocre (assuming you're not a ladder climber and aren't trying to get promoted out of an IC role). In a big team/org, your personal efficiency is irrelevant. The work can only move as fast as the slowest part of the system.

gedy 10mo ago

Maybe not what the OP or article is talking about, but it's super frustrating recently dealing with non/less technical mgrs, PMs, etc who now think they have this Uno card to bypass technical discussion just because they vibe coded some UI demo. Like no shit, that wasn't the hard part. But since they don't see the real/less visible past like data/auth/security, etc they act like engineers "aren't trying", less innovative, anti-AI or whatever when you bring up objections to their "whole app" they made with their AI snoopy snow cone machine.

spaniard89277 10mo ago
My experience too. They are so convinced that AI is magical that pushing back makes you look bad. Then things don't turn out as they expected and you have to deal with a dude thinking his engineers are messing with him. It's just boring.
anonymars 10mo ago
It reminds me of how we moved from "mockups" to "wireframes" -- in other words, deliberately making the appearance not look like a real, finished UI, because that could give the impression that the project was nearly done But now, to your point: they can vibe-code their own "mockups" and that brings us back to that problem
pzs 10mo ago
Hmm, (whatever is in execs' head about) AI appears to amplify the same kind of thinking fallacies that are discussed in the eternal Mythical Manmonth essay, which was written like half a century ago. Funny how some things don't change much...

palmotea 10mo ago

> We hear AI advocates say that their workflow is amazing, but we watch videos of their workflow, and it doesn't look that great. We hear AI advocates say "the next release is about to change everything!", but this knowledge isn't actionable or even accurate. There's a lot of disconnected-from-reality hustling (a.k.a lying) going on. For instance, that's practically Elon Musk's entire job, when he's actually doing it. A lot of people see those examples, think it's normal, and emulate it. There are a lot of unearned superlatives getting thrown around automatically to describe tech.

HumblyTossed 10mo ago
Yes, much the way some used to (still do?) try and emulate Steve Jobs. There's always some successful person these types are trying to be.

layer8 10mo ago

> Yeah, "Engineers don't try" is a frustrating statement. We've all tried generative AI, and there's not that much to it — you put text in, you get text back out. "Engineers don't try" doesn’t refer to trying out AI in the article. It refers to trying to do something constructive and useful outside the usual corporate churn, but having given up on that because management is single-mindedly focused on AI. One way to summarize the article is: The AI engineers are doing hype-driven AI stuff, and the other engineers have lost all ambition for anything else, because AI is the only thing that gets attention and helps the career; and they hate it.

FridgeSeal 10mo ago
“Lost all ambition for anything else” is a funny way for the article to frame “hate being forced to run on the hampster wheel on ai, because an exec with the power to fire everyone is foaming at the mouth about ai and seemingly needs everyone to use it”
- badbird33 10mo ago
  To add another layer to it, the reason execs are foaming at the mouth is because they are hoping to fire the as many people as possible. Including those who implemented whatever AI solution in the first place.
cs02rm0 10mo ago
> the other engineers have lost all ambition for anything else Worse, they've lost all funding for anything else.
- zwnow 10mo ago
  Industries are built upon shit people built in their basements, get hacking
  - r14c 10mo ago
    I think it should be noted that a garage or basement in California costs like a million dollars.

shahbaby 10mo ago

The most ironic part is that AI skills won't really help you with job security. You touched on some of the reasons; it doesn't take much skill to call an API, the technology is in a period of rapid evolution, etc. And now with almost every company trying to adopt "AI" there is no shortage of people who can put AI experience on their resume and make a genuine case for it.