4 ms·

As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck - now I just think about an im

As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck - now I just think about an implementation and it then exist - As long as I thought about the structure/input/output/testability and logic flow correctly and made sure I included all that information, it just works, nicely, with tests. Unix philosophy works well with LLM too - you can have software that does one thing well and only one thing well, that fit in their context and do not lead to haphazard behavior. Now my day essentially revolves around delivering/improving on delivering concentrated engineering thinking, which in my opinion is the pure part about engineer profession itself. I like it quite a lot.

hombre_fatal 6mo ago
I mostly agree with you. Though something I half-miss is using my own software as I build it to get a visceral feel for the abstractions so far. I've found that testability is a good enough proxy for "nice to use" since I think "nice to use" tends to mean that a subsystem is decoupled enough to cover unexpected usage patterns, and that's an incidental side-effect of testability. One concern I have is that it's getting harder to demonstrate ability. e.g. Github profiles were a good signal though one that nobody cared about unless the hiring person was an engineer who could evaluate it. But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems.
- kaashif 6mo ago
  Those things are all still signals. If taken from a snapshot of the Internet pre-AI.
  - treyd 6mo ago
    People were still gaming GitHub profiles before AI, sometimes even just reuploading existing repos as their own.
- Aperocky 6mo ago
  Funny enough, I think github and communication are still a huge part of what I see. Github code itself maybe irrelevant, but is the product KISS/UNIX? Or is it an demonstration of complete lack of discipline about what "feature" should be added. If you see something that have multiple weakly or completely irrelevant feature strung together, it's saying something. Additionally, AI would often create speghetti structures, and require human shepherding to ensure the structure remain sound. Same with communication. I have AI smell, I know if something is AI slop. In my current job, docs sent with expectation for others to read always prefaced with -- this section typed 100% by aperocky -- and I dispensed with grammar and spelling checks for added authenticity. I'll then add -- following section is AI generated -- to mark the end of my personal writing. I think that is the way to go in the future. I pass intentional thinking into AI, not the other way around. There are knowledge flowing back for sure, but only humans possess intention, at least for now.
- the_af 6mo ago
  > But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems. Yup. I've spotted former coworkers who I know for a fact can barely write in their native language, let alone in English, working for AWS and writing English-language technical blog posts in full AI-ese. Full of the usual "it's not X, it's Y", full of AI-slop. Most of the text is filler, with a few tidbits of real content here and there. I don't know before, but now blog posts have become more noise than signal.
  - Aperocky 6mo ago
    It's a strong signal in the negative direction, the best kind of signal really.
  - icedchai 6mo ago
    The "dead Internet" theory has become more real. It's especially bad on LinkedIn. Everyone is now an "AI expert", posting generated slop and updating their profiles with AI enhanced head shots.
    - the_af 6mo ago
      > It's especially bad on LinkedIn Agreed, but to be fair, LinkedIn was especially bad to begin with. Even before AI-slop, LinkedIn posts were rightfully mocked. Self-congratulatory or self-pitying, full of empty platitudes and "lessons learned" and "journeys" (ended or started). There was never anything worth reading to begin with. Now it's of course worse. I don't think I can stand reading about another self-appointed expert on LinkedIn writing about their completely unwarranted strategy and/or lessons and/or skepticism about AI. I only go to LinkedIn for the daily puzzles!
      - icedchai 6mo ago
        Yes, we have more "thought leaders" than ever, all acting like copy-and-pasting from a textbox is some sort of unique skill.
rootusrootus 6mo ago
> My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck I remember those days fondly and often wish I could return to them. These days it's not uncommon to go a couple days without writing a meaningful amount of code. The cost of becoming too senior I suppose.
- simonw 6mo ago
  Anecdotally I've been observing a significant uptick in the amount of code being produced by my peers who are in senior engineer, leadership and engineering management positions. They can take their 20+ years of experience and use it to build working systems in the gaps between meetings now. Previously they would have to carve out at least half a day of uninterrupted time to get something meaningful done.
  - rootusrootus 6mo ago
    > build working systems in the gaps between meetings now Agreed, I've actually done this. Sitting in a meeting where someone was asking about what tooling we could build, what it might be capable of, what their options were. So while we were chatting I was having Claude build a working demo. In the end it still needs to be turned into an enterprise app with all the annoying accoutrements that go with that, but for demo work it was phenomenal.
the_af 6mo ago
> As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited? Everyone thinks it won't be them, it will be others that will be impacted. We all think what we do is somehow unique and cannot be automated away by AI, and that our jobs are safe for the time being.
- xienze 6mo ago
  > How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited? Yeah, no one ever thinks beyond "whoa, how cool, I cloned Slack in 15 minutes!" Personally, the thing I find more depressing is turning a career that was primarily about solving interesting puzzles in elegant ways into managing a swarm of idiot savant chatbots with "OK, that looks good" or "no, do it better" commands.
  - Aperocky 6mo ago
    The problem that I'm trying to solve with agent is similar here, for instance, my comment likely made zero impression on you because I'm against both of the things that you are also against here.
  - yks 6mo ago
    > managing a swarm of idiot savant chatbots with "OK, that looks good" or "no, do it better" commands. That’s what the management class thinks of software development process anyway, LLMs are just more idiotic and more savant than swes
- Aperocky 6mo ago
  As someone in 99th percentile in terms of token usage, it's super clear to me where the agent will not be able to replace my judgement, two areas: 1. if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure. 2. LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build. As such, I'm the limit of the numbers of concurrent agents working fo rme, because there is still a limit to my output of engineering judgement. I do get better, both at generating and delivering this judgement. Exceeding this limit, the output becomes garbage. At this current year and date, the AI does not automate me in anyway, I have something that they just flat out don't have.
eloisant 6mo ago
I'm excited and scared at the same time. Yes I'm much more productive than before, and I'm convinced we can't get rid of engineers altogether... But how long until my team of 5 gets replaced by a single engineer? Am I going to be the one to keep my job or one of the 4 to be let go?
- at-fates-hands 6mo ago
  When I was in automation a decade ago, they keep telling us to never tell people this is going to replace them. What you tell them is it will allow their teams to finally focus on what really matters. Instead of working on all these repetitive tasks, now they can focus on the much larger issues. Everybody bought in, teams felt like the automation we were doing was really going to make their jobs easier. It never did. Managers realized they could trim their teams down after we were done and did in fact, layoff people by the hundreds. Doing the same work with less people was beneficial to them because now they got bigger bonuses and salary increases for adding to the bottom line of the company. Many managers who did nothing more than layoff half their team were promoted faster up the ranks. So yes, be scared, be VERY scared and have a Plan B and a Plan C going forward. The people who created this have rose colored glasses on how its going to revolutionize business. The actual businesses owners and CEO's just a see another new way to reduce human capital in order to increase profits.
- Aperocky 6mo ago
  If the team does the exact same thing, not very long. The ability to know what to build and what not to build is going to be as important as knowing how to build it. I still think engineers have an edge here. All my childhood dreams of what I should be able to do or build are coming to a reality and the only thing that is blocking me is lack of time. I want to go faster still

hombre_fatal 6mo ago

I mostly agree with you. Though something I half-miss is using my own software as I build it to get a visceral feel for the abstractions so far. I've found that testability is a good enough proxy for "nice to use" since I think "nice to use" tends to mean that a subsystem is decoupled enough to cover unexpected usage patterns, and that's an incidental side-effect of testability. One concern I have is that it's getting harder to demonstrate ability. e.g. Github profiles were a good signal though one that nobody cared about unless the hiring person was an engineer who could evaluate it. But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems.

kaashif 6mo ago
Those things are all still signals. If taken from a snapshot of the Internet pre-AI.
- treyd 6mo ago
  People were still gaming GitHub profiles before AI, sometimes even just reuploading existing repos as their own.
Aperocky 6mo ago
Funny enough, I think github and communication are still a huge part of what I see. Github code itself maybe irrelevant, but is the product KISS/UNIX? Or is it an demonstration of complete lack of discipline about what "feature" should be added. If you see something that have multiple weakly or completely irrelevant feature strung together, it's saying something. Additionally, AI would often create speghetti structures, and require human shepherding to ensure the structure remain sound. Same with communication. I have AI smell, I know if something is AI slop. In my current job, docs sent with expectation for others to read always prefaced with -- this section typed 100% by aperocky -- and I dispensed with grammar and spelling checks for added authenticity. I'll then add -- following section is AI generated -- to mark the end of my personal writing. I think that is the way to go in the future. I pass intentional thinking into AI, not the other way around. There are knowledge flowing back for sure, but only humans possess intention, at least for now.
the_af 6mo ago
> But now that signal is even more rubbish. Even readmes and blog posts are becoming worse signals since they don't necessarily showcase your own communication skills anymore nor how you think about problems. Yup. I've spotted former coworkers who I know for a fact can barely write in their native language, let alone in English, working for AWS and writing English-language technical blog posts in full AI-ese. Full of the usual "it's not X, it's Y", full of AI-slop. Most of the text is filler, with a few tidbits of real content here and there. I don't know before, but now blog posts have become more noise than signal.
- Aperocky 6mo ago
  It's a strong signal in the negative direction, the best kind of signal really.
- icedchai 6mo ago
  The "dead Internet" theory has become more real. It's especially bad on LinkedIn. Everyone is now an "AI expert", posting generated slop and updating their profiles with AI enhanced head shots.
  - the_af 6mo ago
    > It's especially bad on LinkedIn Agreed, but to be fair, LinkedIn was especially bad to begin with. Even before AI-slop, LinkedIn posts were rightfully mocked. Self-congratulatory or self-pitying, full of empty platitudes and "lessons learned" and "journeys" (ended or started). There was never anything worth reading to begin with. Now it's of course worse. I don't think I can stand reading about another self-appointed expert on LinkedIn writing about their completely unwarranted strategy and/or lessons and/or skepticism about AI. I only go to LinkedIn for the daily puzzles!
    - icedchai 6mo ago
      Yes, we have more "thought leaders" than ever, all acting like copy-and-pasting from a textbox is some sort of unique skill.

rootusrootus 6mo ago

> My implementation speed and bug fixing my typed code to be the bottleneck I remember those days fondly and often wish I could return to them. These days it's not uncommon to go a couple days without writing a meaningful amount of code. The cost of becoming too senior I suppose.

simonw 6mo ago
Anecdotally I've been observing a significant uptick in the amount of code being produced by my peers who are in senior engineer, leadership and engineering management positions. They can take their 20+ years of experience and use it to build working systems in the gaps between meetings now. Previously they would have to carve out at least half a day of uninterrupted time to get something meaningful done.
- rootusrootus 6mo ago
  > build working systems in the gaps between meetings now Agreed, I've actually done this. Sitting in a meeting where someone was asking about what tooling we could build, what it might be capable of, what their options were. So while we were chatting I was having Claude build a working demo. In the end it still needs to be turned into an enterprise app with all the annoying accoutrements that go with that, but for demo work it was phenomenal.

the_af 6mo ago

> As an engineer, I'm never more excited about this job. How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited? Everyone thinks it won't be them, it will be others that will be impacted. We all think what we do is somehow unique and cannot be automated away by AI, and that our jobs are safe for the time being.

xienze 6mo ago
> How long do you think it'll take for the AI trend to mostly automate the parts of your job that still make you excited? Yeah, no one ever thinks beyond "whoa, how cool, I cloned Slack in 15 minutes!" Personally, the thing I find more depressing is turning a career that was primarily about solving interesting puzzles in elegant ways into managing a swarm of idiot savant chatbots with "OK, that looks good" or "no, do it better" commands.
- Aperocky 6mo ago
  The problem that I'm trying to solve with agent is similar here, for instance, my comment likely made zero impression on you because I'm against both of the things that you are also against here.
- yks 6mo ago
  > managing a swarm of idiot savant chatbots with "OK, that looks good" or "no, do it better" commands. That’s what the management class thinks of software development process anyway, LLMs are just more idiotic and more savant than swes
Aperocky 6mo ago
As someone in 99th percentile in terms of token usage, it's super clear to me where the agent will not be able to replace my judgement, two areas: 1. if it exceed the context the agent does random stuff, that are often against simplicity and coherent logical structure. 2. LLM has zero intention, and rely on you to decide what to build and more importantly not build. As such, I'm the limit of the numbers of concurrent agents working fo rme, because there is still a limit to my output of engineering judgement. I do get better, both at generating and delivering this judgement. Exceeding this limit, the output becomes garbage. At this current year and date, the AI does not automate me in anyway, I have something that they just flat out don't have.

eloisant 6mo ago

I'm excited and scared at the same time. Yes I'm much more productive than before, and I'm convinced we can't get rid of engineers altogether... But how long until my team of 5 gets replaced by a single engineer? Am I going to be the one to keep my job or one of the 4 to be let go?

at-fates-hands 6mo ago
When I was in automation a decade ago, they keep telling us to never tell people this is going to replace them. What you tell them is it will allow their teams to finally focus on what really matters. Instead of working on all these repetitive tasks, now they can focus on the much larger issues. Everybody bought in, teams felt like the automation we were doing was really going to make their jobs easier. It never did. Managers realized they could trim their teams down after we were done and did in fact, layoff people by the hundreds. Doing the same work with less people was beneficial to them because now they got bigger bonuses and salary increases for adding to the bottom line of the company. Many managers who did nothing more than layoff half their team were promoted faster up the ranks. So yes, be scared, be VERY scared and have a Plan B and a Plan C going forward. The people who created this have rose colored glasses on how its going to revolutionize business. The actual businesses owners and CEO's just a see another new way to reduce human capital in order to increase profits.
Aperocky 6mo ago
If the team does the exact same thing, not very long. The ability to know what to build and what not to build is going to be as important as knowing how to build it. I still think engineers have an edge here. All my childhood dreams of what I should be able to do or build are coming to a reality and the only thing that is blocking me is lack of time. I want to go faster still