3 ms·

So what you are a saying is that you removed the people who can make the decisions that keep your software maintainable and kept the people who will slowly over

by zaphar 7mo ago

So what you are a saying is that you removed the people who can make the decisions that keep your software maintainable and kept the people who will slowly over time cause your software to become less maintainable? I'm not sure that tradeoff is a a good one.

butILoveLife 7mo ago
This might have been true pre-agent AI programming, but honestly the code seems better than ever. It finds edge cases better than me. I know... I know buddy. The world changed and I don't know if I'm going to have a job.
- daveguy 7mo ago
  Finding edge cases is completely orthogonal to creating maintainable software. Finding edge cases ~= identifying test suites. Making software maintainable ~= minimizing future cost of effective changes. Ignoring future maintenance cost because test suites are easier to create seems like disjointed logic.
  - butILoveLife 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - hobs 7mo ago
      And the human downstream of this random reorganization of things at will, how do they manage it? If its AI agents all the way down its commoditization all the way down, if humans have to deal with it there's some sort of cost for change even if its 0 for code.
    - switchbak 7mo ago
      "Im not even sure we will need maintain software" (sic) - I'm not sure what your specific background is, but with a statement like that you lose all legitimacy to me.
      - aspenmartin 7mo ago
        Writings on the wall, it is true, tech debt will no longer be a thing to care about. "but who will maintain it?" massive massive question, rapidly becoming completely irrelevant "but who will review it?" humans sure, with the assistance of ai, writing is also on the wall: AI will soon become more adept at code review than any human I can understand "losing all legitimacy" being a thing, but to me that is an obvious knee jerk reaction to someone who is not quite understanding how this trend curve is going.
        switchbak 7mo ago
        Trust me, I’m a well seasoned leathery developer and I’m no newbie when it comes to using AI. But this level of irrational exuberance is so over the top I just can’t take it seriously. Yes, in the very long term I expect this to be able to replace large swaths of the sw dev lifecycle, product, ideation, the whole kaboodle. That’s a long way off, whatever “a long way off” means in this accelerated timeline. For the next bunch of years, yes you’ll have to worry about architecture, coupling, testing, etc. I’m happy to have my competitors share your attitude, cause we’ll smoke them in the market.
      - bigstrat2003 7mo ago
        New account... singing the praises of how AI "changed everything" in the past few weeks... my money is on this being a shill.
        toraway 7mo ago
        They were a skeptic 3 weeks ago... fast forward today and they've oriented their company's strategy around Opus 4.6 agents and vibe-coding.
        layla5alive 7mo ago
        This would be funny if it were not exactly what appears to be happening where I work...
      - 7mo ago
- zaphar 7mo ago
  I'm every bit as immersed in this as you are. I've been developing my own custom claude code plugins that allow me to delegate more and more the agents. But the one thing the agent is not reliably doing for me is making sound architectural choices and maintaining long term business context and how it intersects with those architectural choices. I tried teaching all of that in system prompts and documentation and it blows the context window to an unusable size. As such the things that as a high level experienced senior engineer I have been expected to do pre-agents I am still expected to do. If you are eliminating those people from your business then I don't know that I can ever trust the software your company produces and thus how I could ever trust you.
  - aspenmartin 7mo ago
    > making sound architectural choices and maintaining long term business context and how it intersects with those architectural choices. I completely agree with you, but this is rapidly becoming less and less the case, and would not at all surprise me if even by the end of this year its just barely relevant anymore. > If you are eliminating those people from your business then I don't know that I can ever trust the software your company produces and thus how I could ever trust you. I mean thats totally fine, but do realize many common load bearing enterprise and consumer software products are a tower of legacy tech debt and junior engineers writing terrible abstractions. I don't think this "well how am I going to trust you" from (probably rightfully) concerned senior SWEs is going to change anything. s
  - bigbadfeline 7mo ago
    I'd try a different approach - mechanical engineering isn't that hard and it can benefit greatly from developing some specialized agents and fine-tuned LLMs for it. As a side benefit, that approach happens to create some software jobs too, open source for best results.

by zaphar 7mo ago

butILoveLife 7mo ago

This might have been true pre-agent AI programming, but honestly the code seems better than ever. It finds edge cases better than me. I know... I know buddy. The world changed and I don't know if I'm going to have a job.

daveguy 7mo ago
Finding edge cases is completely orthogonal to creating maintainable software. Finding edge cases ~= identifying test suites. Making software maintainable ~= minimizing future cost of effective changes. Ignoring future maintenance cost because test suites are easier to create seems like disjointed logic.
- butILoveLife 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - hobs 7mo ago
    And the human downstream of this random reorganization of things at will, how do they manage it? If its AI agents all the way down its commoditization all the way down, if humans have to deal with it there's some sort of cost for change even if its 0 for code.
  - switchbak 7mo ago
    "Im not even sure we will need maintain software" (sic) - I'm not sure what your specific background is, but with a statement like that you lose all legitimacy to me.
    - aspenmartin 7mo ago
      Writings on the wall, it is true, tech debt will no longer be a thing to care about. "but who will maintain it?" massive massive question, rapidly becoming completely irrelevant "but who will review it?" humans sure, with the assistance of ai, writing is also on the wall: AI will soon become more adept at code review than any human I can understand "losing all legitimacy" being a thing, but to me that is an obvious knee jerk reaction to someone who is not quite understanding how this trend curve is going.
      - switchbak 7mo ago
        Trust me, I’m a well seasoned leathery developer and I’m no newbie when it comes to using AI. But this level of irrational exuberance is so over the top I just can’t take it seriously. Yes, in the very long term I expect this to be able to replace large swaths of the sw dev lifecycle, product, ideation, the whole kaboodle. That’s a long way off, whatever “a long way off” means in this accelerated timeline. For the next bunch of years, yes you’ll have to worry about architecture, coupling, testing, etc. I’m happy to have my competitors share your attitude, cause we’ll smoke them in the market.
    - bigstrat2003 7mo ago
      New account... singing the praises of how AI "changed everything" in the past few weeks... my money is on this being a shill.
      - toraway 7mo ago
        They were a skeptic 3 weeks ago... fast forward today and they've oriented their company's strategy around Opus 4.6 agents and vibe-coding.
        layla5alive 7mo ago
        This would be funny if it were not exactly what appears to be happening where I work...
    - 7mo ago
zaphar 7mo ago
I'm every bit as immersed in this as you are. I've been developing my own custom claude code plugins that allow me to delegate more and more the agents. But the one thing the agent is not reliably doing for me is making sound architectural choices and maintaining long term business context and how it intersects with those architectural choices. I tried teaching all of that in system prompts and documentation and it blows the context window to an unusable size. As such the things that as a high level experienced senior engineer I have been expected to do pre-agents I am still expected to do. If you are eliminating those people from your business then I don't know that I can ever trust the software your company produces and thus how I could ever trust you.
- aspenmartin 7mo ago
  > making sound architectural choices and maintaining long term business context and how it intersects with those architectural choices. I completely agree with you, but this is rapidly becoming less and less the case, and would not at all surprise me if even by the end of this year its just barely relevant anymore. > If you are eliminating those people from your business then I don't know that I can ever trust the software your company produces and thus how I could ever trust you. I mean thats totally fine, but do realize many common load bearing enterprise and consumer software products are a tower of legacy tech debt and junior engineers writing terrible abstractions. I don't think this "well how am I going to trust you" from (probably rightfully) concerned senior SWEs is going to change anything. s
- bigbadfeline 7mo ago
  I'd try a different approach - mechanical engineering isn't that hard and it can benefit greatly from developing some specialized agents and fine-tuned LLMs for it. As a side benefit, that approach happens to create some software jobs too, open source for best results.