6 ms·

Will Claude Code ruin our team?

113 points by YounesDz 7mo ago

shablulman 7mo ago
[flagged]
overgard 7mo ago
I won’t take credit for this insight, but as someone else pointed out, everyone oversimplifies other people’s jobs. To PMs engineers are just code monkeys that they won’t need soon. To engineers, PMs are the guys that manage Jira. Designers are the fussy people that make things look pretty. The reality is all these jobs have intricacies AI absolutely sucks at but those intricacies are lost in the larger discussion. As a coder though, I’ll point out this is why the “AI solved coding” shit drives me crazy. You only believe that if you don’t know how to code or you have an agenda.
- adithyassekhar 7mo ago
  And for people who never liked it in the first place and just wanted a quick buck.
  - ares623 7mo ago
    which doesn't make sense because the quick buck train is gonna stop. But then again, maybe there wasn't any sense in them in the first place.
  - tadfisher 7mo ago
    You can't pay Claude with equity though
    - maininformer 7mo ago
      You can tell him and he will love it and I bet he has encoded the behavior of working better because of it just how some tried threatening LLMs to work harder
- idontwantthis 7mo ago
  Do people really think like that? I see the other people at my company as human beings solving complex problems whether they are an engineer, a manager, an exec, or HR.
  - e40 7mo ago
    Absolutely. This is precisely why people are saying AI will eliminate software jobs.
    - idontwantthis 7mo ago
      Do we need more of those “If you think it’s so easy, try being me for a day!” sitcom episodes?
- threethirtytwo 7mo ago
  No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice. I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. There are many people who cannot learn programming in a reasonable amount of time and therefore are unable to pick up the skill. It is not universal like car driving. The thing with being a PM or a designer is that this skill is learnable. Anyone can do it. The reason why these jobs are segregated is because society is under the delusion that these are special skills that require intense training when at most he training is equivalent to learning how to drive. Some of you may be thinking I’m insane but there are tons of jobs that are like this. The presidency for example. You can be senile and insane and still be president. The country doesn’t blow up just because you’re insane. Or maybe this isn’t a good characterization. Hmm electrician or plumber is the better comparison. The skill level required to be a PM or designer is equivalent to electrician or plumber. Anyone can pick it up with training. It’s not rocket science folks.
  - paulhebert 7mo ago
    Huh as someone who has a career doing both design and engineering I disagree with this take. I think both skills can be learned. I also think that people have intrinsic talents that make them better or worse at those skills. Put another way, anyone can learn to code but some people will never be great at it while others have a natural talent. Same for design. I’m curious why you think otherwise. What’s the difference in your mind?
    - chamomeal 7mo ago
      I’m kinda getting off topic here but anecdotally: I’ve tried to get so many of my friends to learn programming. I love it, and I think a lot of em would love it too. But they hit a hard wall with the patience needed to self learn. Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really feel like the venn diagram of “people who can code” and “people who can google errors they don’t understand for a couple hours” is nearly a perfect circle. LLMs can smooth out those little tediums, so maybe more people really will be able to learn programming now. But then again if you don’t have the patience to trudge through the annoying parts, will you have the patience to be confused and struggle, instead of letting Claude do the hard stuff for you? I’ll be interested to see what future self-taught devs look like!
- devsda 7mo ago
  Instead of engineer vs PM/manager I separate those jobs based on these categories. 1. How long they can survive in the job while being mediocre or outright bad at their job. 2. Probability of failing upwards. Engineering roles tend to filter out bad candidates more early, quickly and the probability of failing upwards is less when compared to PM and managerial roles. Also, in my experience PM and managerial roles looks like skills based jobs but they tend to select individuals with specific personality types and they are more likely to excel. Developer roles also select towards certain personality types but I think its more diverse than we care to admit.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
avaer 7mo ago
I don't know why people are talking so theoretically. This was months ago. My friends have startups, I know a lot of engineers. The startups have been laying off people for months, and many of my engineer friends don't have jobs anymore. Teams are already ruined. I just don't think the companies are. In many cases this seems like rational reallocation of capital to AI, and in a VC funded ecosystem you're failing at your job if you're not following the math. I think you must have a very cushy job if you're still armchair speculating about this.
- suzzer99 7mo ago
  We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix it. Can you (senior engineer consultant) look under the hood and fix it?" Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.
  - satvikpendem 7mo ago
    I clean up vibe code as a senior engineer consultant, it's quite lucrative actually. I specifically offer this service because I know how to do it.
    - Tallain 7mo ago
      I've been thinking of jumping into this sooner rather than later because I see this becoming a Thing eventually. Are you enjoying it?
      - satvikpendem 7mo ago
        It's fine, I suppose. It's like a puzzle, and you really need to be comfortable with banging your head against a wall trying to make work what is essentially immediately created legacy code by the LLM.
toomanyrichies 7mo ago
As an engineer and a daily if not hourly user of Claude Code, I would never dream I could do the jobs of my product / designer teammates. Not because I don’t have opinions on product or design, but simply because they do me the huge service of attending meetings so I don’t have to. I recognize the necessary evil that is Zoom calls and face-to-face time in the larger context of running a business, but I also know what I’m good at and what I’m not. And long, drawn-out “alignment sessions” are not in my wheelhouse. If my PM and design friends are happy to take that bullet for me, I’m happy to let them do so.
- peter_mcrae 7mo ago
  When the product marketer, product manager, and designer are the same person there is no alignment meeting.
  - toomanyrichies 7mo ago
    They meet with customers as often as they meet with each other. Another one of those necessary evils IMO- it's not fun but it needs to get done.
  - reverius42 7mo ago
    In my experience at BigCorp, Inc., "alignment meetings" are for meeting with other teams, not for meeting with your own team. You'd just call that a "team meeting", "feature crew meeting", "leads meeting" (if it's just leads), or something to that effect. In BigCorp, Inc. you traditionally need to have both kinds of meetings somewhat regularly. Not sure how the advent of AI will change that structure.
- 3rodents 7mo ago
  The final frontier: a warm body.
rvz 7mo ago
It already has. Those jobs PM, designer and engineer are all affected and there will not be a need for too many of them for a product feature and will be reduced over time. While those roles will still exist, there will be a initial shock in people who once believed they were 'valuable' but the business thinks otherwise and does mass layoffs just like Block, because of let's face it; AI. The way to still remain relevant is to absorb all three roles and build a startup with Claude Code on your side and move rapidly.
- empressplay 7mo ago
  I think you're probably still going to need all of those people, just less of them to accomplish the same amount of work. It's the nature of LLMs that they will always need oversight. Having 20 or even 100 of them agree on something is never going to be 100% accurate -- it can't, the randomness and hallucinations are part of the secret sauce. There will always be a need for people to verify what they do. That said, it was the exact same when people were doing the work.
- lelanthran 7mo ago
  > The way to still remain relevant is to absorb all three roles and build a startup with Claude Code on your side and move rapidly. Just how fast can you possibly move? I can take a gander at your good idea, get claude to implement it in less time than it took you, and offer it cheaper as a result.
nemo44x 7mo ago
You need to be sociopathic aggressive right now. We are in a few month window here where execs are very confused even if they parrot their group chat talking points to sound smart and ahead of it. They are all behind and they know it. This isn’t comfortable but now is the time to ship fast and hard. To overstep boundaries and be the person getting attention. In a few months everyone will be so you need to do this now. Just don’t. Don’t limit yourself. Ask for forgiveness.
stana 7mo ago
I wonder if this could go down similar way some SaaS systems went to lower barrier to customisation so less technical users could do it. For example, having to interface with some ServiceNow instances I often find major flaws with db schema design - similar data in multiple places, lack of constraints, etc. Basically one big mess you are now stuck with that could have been avoided if a db expert was in charge of data model design.
adamtaylor_13 7mo ago
This naturally seems to indicate smaller teams will become more normal. Many of my clients are blown away by what our teams can do with 1 senior engineer now. Anything below enterprise level software should be thinking very hard about what team composition actually needs to look like to achieve good results. It's likely a lot smaller headcount than it used to be.
- mijustin 7mo ago
  I definitely think teams will be getting smaller, and will become even more outcome oriented.
subpar 7mo ago
Being a generalist is less fun when you don't have specialist colleagues around to teach you new things and take over the tasks that require actual experience, training, intuition, etc.
xrd 7mo ago
One phrase stuck with me from this: "they'll start to absorb lessons that it took their colleagues decades to learn." I think the point of failure now will hinge on the willingness of teams to admit what they don't know. The ones that don't won't be saved by Claude.
- mijustin 7mo ago
  What’s changed now, with AI, is that you can have compressed learning cycles. Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before. Admitting when you don’t know something has always been important; but the ability to build, deploy, and find out has never been greater. Instead of theorizing about what might work, you can just build it and find out.
  - EagnaIonat 7mo ago
    > Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before Fail faster yes. Learn faster no. The research out there shows that having the AI doing the work stops the learning process.
    - jghn 7mo ago
      I use the GenAI tools all the time and I'll be the first to admit that cognitive debt is a real thing
  - lelanthran 7mo ago
    > Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before. Certainly build and deploy faster. You aren't going to learn faster though. Just like reading math without doing problems doesn't enable to you pass your exam, reading code without writing any of it doesn't allow you to learn at all.
- tuan 7mo ago
  > absorb lessons That maybe correct for some lessons. Many lessons you have to learn the hard way to really absorb them.
827a 7mo ago
I think the reality is that these tools are good enough that, to some degree, all three of the roles are correct, everyone is now definitely more able to do others' roles, leadership knows this, and even if there's a period of inefficiency or overwork or lower quality output, there's going to be a drive toward collapsing responsibilities. OpenAI saw this early: Member of Technical Staff. The degree to which this negatively impacts the team or company's output is really a function of (1) how drastically leadership does layoffs, (2) how quickly models and agents continue to improve, and (3) how earnestly leadership can admit mistakes and backfill humans when they realize they've over-fired. In other words: Yes it will ruin our team.
joeyguerra 7mo ago
XP is still a good method to practice, but now with AI.
1123581321 7mo ago
I’m mainly concerned about communication worsening. If a former engineer, designer and PM all want to do the same job now, the results will be fine, excellent, even, but only if they communicate and build together better than they used to. People who only communicated along the lines provided by the design of their role or organization have new skills to learn.
nurettin 7mo ago
I think it will enhance everyone. PMs can't develop, since llm development (adding code to whatever the llm initially spat out) still consumes time and effort, but they can now write a PoC without devs and quickly get it up and running without sys ops.
ddmma 7mo ago
Three parallel terminals of coding agents and crosswords magazine until they complete their jobs. Work with real experts and solve real world problems.
satisfice 7mo ago
The skills list weirdly leaves out “knowing the capabilities and limitations of the tools.” This is non-trivial to say the least. The roles list also leaves out testing, which seems to me to be the second most important thing (after specifying). This may be because non-testers assume that testing is easy or will be done by the AI. But any testing done by AI is not testing at all, because the effect of real testing is to inform a human of the status of the product based on that human’s empirical investigation. When AI “tests” the humans are being asked to trust instead of investigate.
black_13 7mo ago
[dead]
AtlasBarfed 7mo ago
The class system of business is a warning here. There used to be hundreds of humans doing math by hand. They were computers. The people that managed those armies of humans were management class. Then came actual silicon computers. The ones that managed those, despite the fact the value, quality, efficiency, productivity of the systems they now managed dwarfed the old human armies, those people were no longer management. They were labor. AI will bring a similar effect. These front line "managers" who were already greyarea management, will be labelled "labor".
erelong 7mo ago
sounds fun if framed as: everyone now has tools to help each other's role more
h4kunamata 7mo ago
AI in general is ruining companies as a whole. Companies are finding out the hard way that replacing engineers with AI, is costing them twice as much to fix the problem and having to hire people again. If I get fired because a company went crazy into AI, things went bad, and they call me back, you sure as hell I am not returning.
- ramon156 7mo ago
  Hey there! This is the exact thing that happened (although I cannot say I was a perfect employee). They replaced me for a relatively important product, where I was already the only dev along with 4 PMs that never agreed on each other. The entire company is hell, it made that switch overnight and never looked back at the devs that have to endure all this bullshit. Luckily I found another company that treats devs as humans. I've convinced one other employee at $EX_COMPANY to make the switch, with success! I'm planning to find everyone there a proper job that doesn't make u feel like you're under surveillance.
kordlessagain 7mo ago
Yes, it will. No team needed.
Traster 7mo ago
>we're no longer hiring: specialists. In this new era, generalists win. I am truly astonished someone said this. My experience with AI has been the opposite. It can knock up something reasonable given the right prompting. It can generate a lot of code. It will hit deliver whatever goal you have, but it won't do it in the simplest neatest way, it won't have context about how you way to grow the codebase in the future. The inevitable result of this is that it produces much more complexity to do a given thing than a senior engineer will. This is a big problem, because their performance degrades as their context window fills. So you will reach a point where the AI has coded you into a corner, it has created such complexity that it can't understand what is going on without filling its context window, at which point it can't do anything and you're left with a massive stinking pile of slop that's too big for you to work on and too complex for it to unpick. The only way of sustainably using AI to accelerate your productivity is to be the specialist who can give guidance on structure and approach so that the codebase doesn't spiral.
yangro 7mo ago
[flagged]

113 points by YounesDz 7mo ago

[flagged]

I won’t take credit for this insight, but as someone else pointed out, everyone oversimplifies other people’s jobs. To PMs engineers are just code monkeys that they won’t need soon. To engineers, PMs are the guys that manage Jira. Designers are the fussy people that make things look pretty. The reality is all these jobs have intricacies AI absolutely sucks at but those intricacies are lost in the larger discussion. As a coder though, I’ll point out this is why the “AI solved coding” shit drives me crazy. You only believe that if you don’t know how to code or you have an agenda.

adithyassekhar 7mo ago
And for people who never liked it in the first place and just wanted a quick buck.
- ares623 7mo ago
  which doesn't make sense because the quick buck train is gonna stop. But then again, maybe there wasn't any sense in them in the first place.
- tadfisher 7mo ago
  You can't pay Claude with equity though
  - maininformer 7mo ago
    You can tell him and he will love it and I bet he has encoded the behavior of working better because of it just how some tried threatening LLMs to work harder
idontwantthis 7mo ago
Do people really think like that? I see the other people at my company as human beings solving complex problems whether they are an engineer, a manager, an exec, or HR.
- e40 7mo ago
  Absolutely. This is precisely why people are saying AI will eliminate software jobs.
  - idontwantthis 7mo ago
    Do we need more of those “If you think it’s so easy, try being me for a day!” sitcom episodes?
threethirtytwo 7mo ago
No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice. I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. There are many people who cannot learn programming in a reasonable amount of time and therefore are unable to pick up the skill. It is not universal like car driving. The thing with being a PM or a designer is that this skill is learnable. Anyone can do it. The reason why these jobs are segregated is because society is under the delusion that these are special skills that require intense training when at most he training is equivalent to learning how to drive. Some of you may be thinking I’m insane but there are tons of jobs that are like this. The presidency for example. You can be senile and insane and still be president. The country doesn’t blow up just because you’re insane. Or maybe this isn’t a good characterization. Hmm electrician or plumber is the better comparison. The skill level required to be a PM or designer is equivalent to electrician or plumber. Anyone can pick it up with training. It’s not rocket science folks.
- paulhebert 7mo ago
  Huh as someone who has a career doing both design and engineering I disagree with this take. I think both skills can be learned. I also think that people have intrinsic talents that make them better or worse at those skills. Put another way, anyone can learn to code but some people will never be great at it while others have a natural talent. Same for design. I’m curious why you think otherwise. What’s the difference in your mind?
  - chamomeal 7mo ago
    I’m kinda getting off topic here but anecdotally: I’ve tried to get so many of my friends to learn programming. I love it, and I think a lot of em would love it too. But they hit a hard wall with the patience needed to self learn. Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really feel like the venn diagram of “people who can code” and “people who can google errors they don’t understand for a couple hours” is nearly a perfect circle. LLMs can smooth out those little tediums, so maybe more people really will be able to learn programming now. But then again if you don’t have the patience to trudge through the annoying parts, will you have the patience to be confused and struggle, instead of letting Claude do the hard stuff for you? I’ll be interested to see what future self-taught devs look like!
devsda 7mo ago
Instead of engineer vs PM/manager I separate those jobs based on these categories. 1. How long they can survive in the job while being mediocre or outright bad at their job. 2. Probability of failing upwards. Engineering roles tend to filter out bad candidates more early, quickly and the probability of failing upwards is less when compared to PM and managerial roles. Also, in my experience PM and managerial roles looks like skills based jobs but they tend to select individuals with specific personality types and they are more likely to excel. Developer roles also select towards certain personality types but I think its more diverse than we care to admit.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

avaer 7mo ago

I don't know why people are talking so theoretically. This was months ago. My friends have startups, I know a lot of engineers. The startups have been laying off people for months, and many of my engineer friends don't have jobs anymore. Teams are already ruined. I just don't think the companies are. In many cases this seems like rational reallocation of capital to AI, and in a VC funded ecosystem you're failing at your job if you're not following the math. I think you must have a very cushy job if you're still armchair speculating about this.

suzzer99 7mo ago
We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix it. Can you (senior engineer consultant) look under the hood and fix it?" Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.
- satvikpendem 7mo ago
  I clean up vibe code as a senior engineer consultant, it's quite lucrative actually. I specifically offer this service because I know how to do it.
  - Tallain 7mo ago
    I've been thinking of jumping into this sooner rather than later because I see this becoming a Thing eventually. Are you enjoying it?
    - satvikpendem 7mo ago
      It's fine, I suppose. It's like a puzzle, and you really need to be comfortable with banging your head against a wall trying to make work what is essentially immediately created legacy code by the LLM.

toomanyrichies 7mo ago

As an engineer and a daily if not hourly user of Claude Code, I would never dream I could do the jobs of my product / designer teammates. Not because I don’t have opinions on product or design, but simply because they do me the huge service of attending meetings so I don’t have to. I recognize the necessary evil that is Zoom calls and face-to-face time in the larger context of running a business, but I also know what I’m good at and what I’m not. And long, drawn-out “alignment sessions” are not in my wheelhouse. If my PM and design friends are happy to take that bullet for me, I’m happy to let them do so.

peter_mcrae 7mo ago
When the product marketer, product manager, and designer are the same person there is no alignment meeting.
- toomanyrichies 7mo ago
  They meet with customers as often as they meet with each other. Another one of those necessary evils IMO- it's not fun but it needs to get done.
- reverius42 7mo ago
  In my experience at BigCorp, Inc., "alignment meetings" are for meeting with other teams, not for meeting with your own team. You'd just call that a "team meeting", "feature crew meeting", "leads meeting" (if it's just leads), or something to that effect. In BigCorp, Inc. you traditionally need to have both kinds of meetings somewhat regularly. Not sure how the advent of AI will change that structure.
3rodents 7mo ago
The final frontier: a warm body.

rvz 7mo ago

It already has. Those jobs PM, designer and engineer are all affected and there will not be a need for too many of them for a product feature and will be reduced over time. While those roles will still exist, there will be a initial shock in people who once believed they were 'valuable' but the business thinks otherwise and does mass layoffs just like Block, because of let's face it; AI. The way to still remain relevant is to absorb all three roles and build a startup with Claude Code on your side and move rapidly.

empressplay 7mo ago
I think you're probably still going to need all of those people, just less of them to accomplish the same amount of work. It's the nature of LLMs that they will always need oversight. Having 20 or even 100 of them agree on something is never going to be 100% accurate -- it can't, the randomness and hallucinations are part of the secret sauce. There will always be a need for people to verify what they do. That said, it was the exact same when people were doing the work.
lelanthran 7mo ago
> The way to still remain relevant is to absorb all three roles and build a startup with Claude Code on your side and move rapidly. Just how fast can you possibly move? I can take a gander at your good idea, get claude to implement it in less time than it took you, and offer it cheaper as a result.

nemo44x 7mo ago

You need to be sociopathic aggressive right now. We are in a few month window here where execs are very confused even if they parrot their group chat talking points to sound smart and ahead of it. They are all behind and they know it. This isn’t comfortable but now is the time to ship fast and hard. To overstep boundaries and be the person getting attention. In a few months everyone will be so you need to do this now. Just don’t. Don’t limit yourself. Ask for forgiveness.

stana 7mo ago

I wonder if this could go down similar way some SaaS systems went to lower barrier to customisation so less technical users could do it. For example, having to interface with some ServiceNow instances I often find major flaws with db schema design - similar data in multiple places, lack of constraints, etc. Basically one big mess you are now stuck with that could have been avoided if a db expert was in charge of data model design.

adamtaylor_13 7mo ago

This naturally seems to indicate smaller teams will become more normal. Many of my clients are blown away by what our teams can do with 1 senior engineer now. Anything below enterprise level software should be thinking very hard about what team composition actually needs to look like to achieve good results. It's likely a lot smaller headcount than it used to be.

mijustin 7mo ago
I definitely think teams will be getting smaller, and will become even more outcome oriented.

subpar 7mo ago

Being a generalist is less fun when you don't have specialist colleagues around to teach you new things and take over the tasks that require actual experience, training, intuition, etc.

xrd 7mo ago

One phrase stuck with me from this: "they'll start to absorb lessons that it took their colleagues decades to learn." I think the point of failure now will hinge on the willingness of teams to admit what they don't know. The ones that don't won't be saved by Claude.

mijustin 7mo ago
What’s changed now, with AI, is that you can have compressed learning cycles. Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before. Admitting when you don’t know something has always been important; but the ability to build, deploy, and find out has never been greater. Instead of theorizing about what might work, you can just build it and find out.
- EagnaIonat 7mo ago
  > Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before Fail faster yes. Learn faster no. The research out there shows that having the AI doing the work stops the learning process.
  - jghn 7mo ago
    I use the GenAI tools all the time and I'll be the first to admit that cognitive debt is a real thing
- lelanthran 7mo ago
  > Folks can build, deploy, and learn faster now than ever before. Certainly build and deploy faster. You aren't going to learn faster though. Just like reading math without doing problems doesn't enable to you pass your exam, reading code without writing any of it doesn't allow you to learn at all.
tuan 7mo ago
> absorb lessons That maybe correct for some lessons. Many lessons you have to learn the hard way to really absorb them.

827a 7mo ago

I think the reality is that these tools are good enough that, to some degree, all three of the roles are correct, everyone is now definitely more able to do others' roles, leadership knows this, and even if there's a period of inefficiency or overwork or lower quality output, there's going to be a drive toward collapsing responsibilities. OpenAI saw this early: Member of Technical Staff. The degree to which this negatively impacts the team or company's output is really a function of (1) how drastically leadership does layoffs, (2) how quickly models and agents continue to improve, and (3) how earnestly leadership can admit mistakes and backfill humans when they realize they've over-fired. In other words: Yes it will ruin our team.

joeyguerra 7mo ago

XP is still a good method to practice, but now with AI.

1123581321 7mo ago

I’m mainly concerned about communication worsening. If a former engineer, designer and PM all want to do the same job now, the results will be fine, excellent, even, but only if they communicate and build together better than they used to. People who only communicated along the lines provided by the design of their role or organization have new skills to learn.

nurettin 7mo ago

I think it will enhance everyone. PMs can't develop, since llm development (adding code to whatever the llm initially spat out) still consumes time and effort, but they can now write a PoC without devs and quickly get it up and running without sys ops.

ddmma 7mo ago

Three parallel terminals of coding agents and crosswords magazine until they complete their jobs. Work with real experts and solve real world problems.

satisfice 7mo ago

The skills list weirdly leaves out “knowing the capabilities and limitations of the tools.” This is non-trivial to say the least. The roles list also leaves out testing, which seems to me to be the second most important thing (after specifying). This may be because non-testers assume that testing is easy or will be done by the AI. But any testing done by AI is not testing at all, because the effect of real testing is to inform a human of the status of the product based on that human’s empirical investigation. When AI “tests” the humans are being asked to trust instead of investigate.

black_13 7mo ago

[dead]

AtlasBarfed 7mo ago

The class system of business is a warning here. There used to be hundreds of humans doing math by hand. They were computers. The people that managed those armies of humans were management class. Then came actual silicon computers. The ones that managed those, despite the fact the value, quality, efficiency, productivity of the systems they now managed dwarfed the old human armies, those people were no longer management. They were labor. AI will bring a similar effect. These front line "managers" who were already greyarea management, will be labelled "labor".

erelong 7mo ago

sounds fun if framed as: everyone now has tools to help each other's role more

h4kunamata 7mo ago

AI in general is ruining companies as a whole. Companies are finding out the hard way that replacing engineers with AI, is costing them twice as much to fix the problem and having to hire people again. If I get fired because a company went crazy into AI, things went bad, and they call me back, you sure as hell I am not returning.

ramon156 7mo ago
Hey there! This is the exact thing that happened (although I cannot say I was a perfect employee). They replaced me for a relatively important product, where I was already the only dev along with 4 PMs that never agreed on each other. The entire company is hell, it made that switch overnight and never looked back at the devs that have to endure all this bullshit. Luckily I found another company that treats devs as humans. I've convinced one other employee at $EX_COMPANY to make the switch, with success! I'm planning to find everyone there a proper job that doesn't make u feel like you're under surveillance.

kordlessagain 7mo ago

Yes, it will. No team needed.

Traster 7mo ago

>we're no longer hiring: specialists. In this new era, generalists win. I am truly astonished someone said this. My experience with AI has been the opposite. It can knock up something reasonable given the right prompting. It can generate a lot of code. It will hit deliver whatever goal you have, but it won't do it in the simplest neatest way, it won't have context about how you way to grow the codebase in the future. The inevitable result of this is that it produces much more complexity to do a given thing than a senior engineer will. This is a big problem, because their performance degrades as their context window fills. So you will reach a point where the AI has coded you into a corner, it has created such complexity that it can't understand what is going on without filling its context window, at which point it can't do anything and you're left with a massive stinking pile of slop that's too big for you to work on and too complex for it to unpick. The only way of sustainably using AI to accelerate your productivity is to be the specialist who can give guidance on structure and approach so that the codebase doesn't spiral.

yangro 7mo ago

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