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My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything

My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.

oooyay 7mo ago
> I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management. You let them play out. Shift-left was similar to this and ultimately ended in part disaster, part non-accomplishment, and part success. Some percentage of the industry walked away from shift-left greatly more capable than the rest, a larger chunk left the industry entirely, and some people never changed. The same thing will likely happen here. We'll learn a lot of lessons, the Overton window will shift, the world will be different, and it will move on. We'll have new problems and topics to deal with as AI and how to use it shifts away from being a primary topic.
- oblio 7mo ago
  Shift left? Edit: I've googled it and I can't find anything relevant. I've been working in software for 20+ years and read a myriad things and it's the first time I hear about it...
  - esafak 7mo ago
    It's a security practice. https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cloud-security/shift-left-security/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cloud-se...
    - oblio 7mo ago
      I've heard a ton of times about "designing/planning for quality and security from the start", I guess it can't hurt to also have a buzzword for it.
    - oooyay 7mo ago
      "Shift-left" was a general term that occurred in the systems engineering / devops space – I'm not surprised to see it used in a security context now. More or less, about a decade ago most systems engineers were recruited into the industry without any application software engineering skills and that became a drag on organizations trying to scale. It was about moving testing, devops, security, etc into the software engineering role and attempting to consolidate systems engineering into SWE roles. It was a part of the larger "devops movement".
- noident 7mo ago
  Shift-left was a disaster? A large number of my day to day problems at work could be described as failing to shift-left even in the face of overwhelmingly obvious benefits
idopmstuff 7mo ago
As a former PM, I will say that if you want to stop something from happening at your company, the best route is to come off very positive about it initially. This is critical because it gives you credibility. After my first few years of PMing, I developed a reflex that any time I heard a deeply stupid proposal, I would enthusiastically ask if I could take the lead on scoping it out. I would do the initial research/planning/etc. mostly honestly and fairly. I'd find the positives, build a real roadmap and lead meetings where I'd work to get people onboard. Then I'd find the fatal flaw. "Even though I'm very excited about this, as you know, dear leadership, I have to be realistic that in order to do this, we'd need many more resources than the initial plan because of these devastating unexpected things I have discovered! Drat!" I would then propose options. Usually three, which are: Continue with the full scope but expand the resources (knowing full well that the additional resources required cannot be spared), drastically cut scope and proceed, or shelve it until some specific thing changes. You want to give the specific thing because that makes them feel like there's a good, concrete reason to wait and you're not just punting for vague, hand-wavy reasons. Then the thing that we were waiting on happens, and I forget to mention it. Leadership's excited about something else by that point anyway, so we never revisit dumb project again. Some specific thoughts for you: 1. Treat their arguments seriously. If they're handwaving your arguments away, don't respond by handwaving their arguments away, even if you think they're dumb. Even if they don't fully grasp what they're talking about, you can at least concede that agents and models will improve and that will help with some issues in the future. 2. Having conceded that, they're now more likely to listen to you when you tell them that while it's definitely important to think about a future where agents are better, you've got to deal with the codebase right now. 3. Put the problems in terms they'll understand. They see the agent that wrote this feature really quickly, which is good. You need to pull up the tickets that the senior developers on the team had to spend time on to fix the code that the agent wrote. Give the tradeoff - what new features were those developers not working on because they were spending time here? 4. This all works better if you can position yourself as the AI expert. I'd try to pitch a project of creating internal evals for the stuff that matters in your org to try with new models when they come out. If you've volunteered to take something like that on and can give them the honest take that GPT-5.5 is good at X but terrible at Y, they're probably going to listen to that much more than if they feel like you're reflexively against AI.
cratermoon 7mo ago
To an extent, these people have found their religion, and rational discussion does not come into play. As with previous tech Holy Wars over operating systems, editors, and programming languages, their self-image is tied to the technology. Where the tech argument doesn't apply to upper management, business practices, the need to "not be left behind" and leap at anything that promises reducing headcount without reducing revenue, money talks. As long as it's possible to slop something together, charge for it, and profit, slop will win.
stalfie 7mo ago
Well, to be fair, judging by the shift in the general vibes of the average HN comment over the past 3 years, better use of agents and advanced models DID solve the previous temporary setbacks. The techno-optimists were right, and the nay-sayers wrong. Over the course of about 2 years, the general consensus has shifted from "it's a fun curiosity" to "it's just better stackoverflow" to "some people say it's good" to "well it can do some of my job, but not most of it". I think for a lot of people, it has already crossed into "it can do most of my job, but not all of it" territory. So unless we have finally reached the mythical plateau, if you just go by the trend, in about a year most people will be in the "it can do most of my job but not all" territory, and a year or two after that most people will be facing a tool that can do anything they can do. And perhaps if you factor in optimisation strategies like the Karpathy loop, a tool that can do everything but better. Upper managment might be proven right.
- dwaltrip 7mo ago
  If self-driving is any indication, it may take 10+ years to go from 90% to 95%.
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - scrollaway 7mo ago
    Your definition of a glorified autocomplete is … oof. So in short, “try ask it to do something you’d hate on bad code you’d yourself fail at and it might fail”. And I’m pretty sure I could try Claude on a repo as you describe and it wouldn’t in fact fail. You’re letting your opinions of what LLMs were like a few months ago influence what you think of them now. Comments like yours really annoy me because they are ridiculously confident about AI being “glorified autocomplete”, but also clearly not informed about the capabilities. I don’t get how some people can be on HN and not actually … try these things, be curious about them, try them on hard problems. I’m a good engineer. I’ve coded for 24 years at this point. Yesterday in 45 minutes I built a feature that would have taken me three months without AI. The speed gains are obscene and because of this, we can build things we would never have even started before. Software is accelerating.
noelsusman 7mo ago
Well you're trying to convince them to reject their actual experience. Better tooling and better models have indeed solved a lot of the limitations models faced a couple years ago. I also believe coding isn't going to disappear, but AI skeptics have been mostly doing a combination of moving the goalposts and straight up denial over the last few years.
- jcranmer 7mo ago
  I've been trying out AI over the past month (mostly because of management trying to force it down my throat), and have not found it to be terribly conducive to actually helping me on most tasks. It still evidences a lot of the failure modes I was talking about 3 years ago. And yet the entire time, it's the AI boosters who keep trying to say that any skepticism is invalid because it's totally different than how it was three months ago. I haven't seen a lot of goalpost moving on either side; the closest I've seen is from the most hyperbolic of AI supporters, who are keeping the timeline to supposed AGI or AI superintelligence or whatnot a fairly consistent X months from now (which isn't really goalpost-moving).
heavyset_go 7mo ago
Show them this[1], and if it doesn't sober them up with its absurdity, at least they'll be occupied with something other than treating LinkedIn fluffers as prophets and trying to gaslight you into tanking production [1] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack https://github.com/garrytan/gstack

oooyay 7mo ago

> I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management. You let them play out. Shift-left was similar to this and ultimately ended in part disaster, part non-accomplishment, and part success. Some percentage of the industry walked away from shift-left greatly more capable than the rest, a larger chunk left the industry entirely, and some people never changed. The same thing will likely happen here. We'll learn a lot of lessons, the Overton window will shift, the world will be different, and it will move on. We'll have new problems and topics to deal with as AI and how to use it shifts away from being a primary topic.

oblio 7mo ago
Shift left? Edit: I've googled it and I can't find anything relevant. I've been working in software for 20+ years and read a myriad things and it's the first time I hear about it...
- esafak 7mo ago
  It's a security practice. https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cloud-security/shift-left-security/ https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cloud-se...
  - oblio 7mo ago
    I've heard a ton of times about "designing/planning for quality and security from the start", I guess it can't hurt to also have a buzzword for it.
  - oooyay 7mo ago
    "Shift-left" was a general term that occurred in the systems engineering / devops space – I'm not surprised to see it used in a security context now. More or less, about a decade ago most systems engineers were recruited into the industry without any application software engineering skills and that became a drag on organizations trying to scale. It was about moving testing, devops, security, etc into the software engineering role and attempting to consolidate systems engineering into SWE roles. It was a part of the larger "devops movement".
noident 7mo ago
Shift-left was a disaster? A large number of my day to day problems at work could be described as failing to shift-left even in the face of overwhelmingly obvious benefits

idopmstuff 7mo ago

As a former PM, I will say that if you want to stop something from happening at your company, the best route is to come off very positive about it initially. This is critical because it gives you credibility. After my first few years of PMing, I developed a reflex that any time I heard a deeply stupid proposal, I would enthusiastically ask if I could take the lead on scoping it out. I would do the initial research/planning/etc. mostly honestly and fairly. I'd find the positives, build a real roadmap and lead meetings where I'd work to get people onboard. Then I'd find the fatal flaw. "Even though I'm very excited about this, as you know, dear leadership, I have to be realistic that in order to do this, we'd need many more resources than the initial plan because of these devastating unexpected things I have discovered! Drat!" I would then propose options. Usually three, which are: Continue with the full scope but expand the resources (knowing full well that the additional resources required cannot be spared), drastically cut scope and proceed, or shelve it until some specific thing changes. You want to give the specific thing because that makes them feel like there's a good, concrete reason to wait and you're not just punting for vague, hand-wavy reasons. Then the thing that we were waiting on happens, and I forget to mention it. Leadership's excited about something else by that point anyway, so we never revisit dumb project again. Some specific thoughts for you: 1. Treat their arguments seriously. If they're handwaving your arguments away, don't respond by handwaving their arguments away, even if you think they're dumb. Even if they don't fully grasp what they're talking about, you can at least concede that agents and models will improve and that will help with some issues in the future. 2. Having conceded that, they're now more likely to listen to you when you tell them that while it's definitely important to think about a future where agents are better, you've got to deal with the codebase right now. 3. Put the problems in terms they'll understand. They see the agent that wrote this feature really quickly, which is good. You need to pull up the tickets that the senior developers on the team had to spend time on to fix the code that the agent wrote. Give the tradeoff - what new features were those developers not working on because they were spending time here? 4. This all works better if you can position yourself as the AI expert. I'd try to pitch a project of creating internal evals for the stuff that matters in your org to try with new models when they come out. If you've volunteered to take something like that on and can give them the honest take that GPT-5.5 is good at X but terrible at Y, they're probably going to listen to that much more than if they feel like you're reflexively against AI.

cratermoon 7mo ago

To an extent, these people have found their religion, and rational discussion does not come into play. As with previous tech Holy Wars over operating systems, editors, and programming languages, their self-image is tied to the technology. Where the tech argument doesn't apply to upper management, business practices, the need to "not be left behind" and leap at anything that promises reducing headcount without reducing revenue, money talks. As long as it's possible to slop something together, charge for it, and profit, slop will win.

stalfie 7mo ago

Well, to be fair, judging by the shift in the general vibes of the average HN comment over the past 3 years, better use of agents and advanced models DID solve the previous temporary setbacks. The techno-optimists were right, and the nay-sayers wrong. Over the course of about 2 years, the general consensus has shifted from "it's a fun curiosity" to "it's just better stackoverflow" to "some people say it's good" to "well it can do some of my job, but not most of it". I think for a lot of people, it has already crossed into "it can do most of my job, but not all of it" territory. So unless we have finally reached the mythical plateau, if you just go by the trend, in about a year most people will be in the "it can do most of my job but not all" territory, and a year or two after that most people will be facing a tool that can do anything they can do. And perhaps if you factor in optimisation strategies like the Karpathy loop, a tool that can do everything but better. Upper managment might be proven right.

dwaltrip 7mo ago
If self-driving is any indication, it may take 10+ years to go from 90% to 95%.
hrmtst93837 7mo ago
[flagged]
- scrollaway 7mo ago
  Your definition of a glorified autocomplete is … oof. So in short, “try ask it to do something you’d hate on bad code you’d yourself fail at and it might fail”. And I’m pretty sure I could try Claude on a repo as you describe and it wouldn’t in fact fail. You’re letting your opinions of what LLMs were like a few months ago influence what you think of them now. Comments like yours really annoy me because they are ridiculously confident about AI being “glorified autocomplete”, but also clearly not informed about the capabilities. I don’t get how some people can be on HN and not actually … try these things, be curious about them, try them on hard problems. I’m a good engineer. I’ve coded for 24 years at this point. Yesterday in 45 minutes I built a feature that would have taken me three months without AI. The speed gains are obscene and because of this, we can build things we would never have even started before. Software is accelerating.

noelsusman 7mo ago

Well you're trying to convince them to reject their actual experience. Better tooling and better models have indeed solved a lot of the limitations models faced a couple years ago. I also believe coding isn't going to disappear, but AI skeptics have been mostly doing a combination of moving the goalposts and straight up denial over the last few years.

jcranmer 7mo ago
I've been trying out AI over the past month (mostly because of management trying to force it down my throat), and have not found it to be terribly conducive to actually helping me on most tasks. It still evidences a lot of the failure modes I was talking about 3 years ago. And yet the entire time, it's the AI boosters who keep trying to say that any skepticism is invalid because it's totally different than how it was three months ago. I haven't seen a lot of goalpost moving on either side; the closest I've seen is from the most hyperbolic of AI supporters, who are keeping the timeline to supposed AGI or AI superintelligence or whatnot a fairly consistent X months from now (which isn't really goalpost-moving).

heavyset_go 7mo ago

Show them this[1], and if it doesn't sober them up with its absurdity, at least they'll be occupied with something other than treating LinkedIn fluffers as prophets and trying to gaslight you into tanking production [1] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack https://github.com/garrytan/gstack