4 ms·

Out of curiosity, do you use frontier AI dev tools on a daily basis professionally?

dan_q 2mo ago
Let me guess: AGI is 2-6 weeks away, software development is solved, and anyone who disagrees with your enlightened perspective is a backwards-looking luddite.
- tokioyoyo 2mo ago
  No. I’m asking in good faith. I was skeptical in 2023, but took the approach of using it at least once a week, with all latest models to see the evolution. It’s obvious that the industry is moving that way, and at this point it would be a career-suicide for seniors+ to not be able to drive AI to achieve their objectives . I’m not saying it’s good for everything, but we’ve gone very far in terms of capabilities in the last 3 years. Thinking otherwise will make me question others’ experience on how much they’ve used it so far.
  - dan_q 2mo ago
    I don't believe that you're asking in good faith based on the rest of your comment.
  - andrekandre 2mo ago
    your argument is basically: the industry is moving to it so we should get on board or be left behind it would be more convincing if you had concrete examples of technical merit and quality/speed improvements that worked for you or your team that justify going all-in
    - tokioyoyo 2mo ago
      That is, indeed, my argument. As much as I’ve been loving coding since the past 20+ years, basically from my childhood, I currently do it mostly for living and some side projects. I don’t care about code quality in my side projects, and at work… well, I want to keep getting raises, be employable, and support myself. Priorities.
      - JodieBenitez 2mo ago
        I don't understand the quality criticism. My 2026 professional code has much better quality than my 2025 code. Better algos, better performance, better comments, less bugs, better and more tests, better documentation, etc. What do people do with LLMs to get crap out of it ? Unless I let the agent run an entire monstruous plan and never review anything and never steer, I can never get output that could be described as slop. Bonus point: even after 25 years, I learn a lot with them, just because of their search capabilities applied to a context.
jknoepfler 2mo ago
<rant> I manage several teams of developers who use them every day professionally and use them for personal projects privately. Just last week, at the prompting of said devs, we had a working agreement conversation about curtailing the use of AI in our codebases because of rapid erosion of our teams' ability to operate, update and maintain codebases that had started to spill over with slop. We have had multiple incidents of credential leakage, integration tests wiping live databases, comically broken code that passed vibe-written tests, documentation and code comments that were hallucinated and/or fake, and most importantly developers saying "we no longer know how this code works but it's massively bloated and unreadable and we can't tell you with a straight face that we can maintain it or fix it if it breaks." We have seen a flood of vibe-PRs from engineering adjacent teams that suddenly think they can code shipping prototypes into production that do not work do not scale and cannot be maintained. I am personally writing the tickets to decom one of those today. Which is great, I love telling business "the progress that was reported to you was a lie, this shit never worked, don't shoot the messenger but also don't let this happen again." I embrace GenAI as a productivity tool for people who know what they are doing. It's a +10-15% velocity boost. That's great! That's a big deal, devs are expensive, and that might push some kinds of business model over the threshold into viability. That's great! It is not, however, transforming the profession as I know it, it is rather making my job harder and less pleasant and it is making my leadership dumber by the second. Absolutely no comment on vibe business decisions / vibe OKRs / slop reports or the host of other garbage that has started to creep into professional life. I have had to have some very uncomfortably direct conversations with peers in leadership about using complete bullshit to make decisions, and it is very, very frustrating. Do you know how hard it is to convince someone that metrics their bot hallucinated don't exist and would be meaningless if they did? You can't convince someone of something they are incentivized to not understand. It's been very eye-opening in terms of who I can trust to actually make sense when it matters. I'm grateful for the clarity. Meanwhile we are rapidly losing brainshare from the top because our principal/staff engineers are pissed off and have the bankroll to just leave. We aren't hiring and training younger engineers to keep the talent pipeline moving. Which boy howdy is THAT going to cost us unbelievable sums of dollars to fix in the medium-term future. I am in the uncomfortable role of trying to make the best of this but it would be a metric ton easier if the narrative from the c-suite aligned with reality in any meaningful way. </rant>
deleted 2mo ago
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dan_q 2mo ago

Let me guess: AGI is 2-6 weeks away, software development is solved, and anyone who disagrees with your enlightened perspective is a backwards-looking luddite.

tokioyoyo 2mo ago
No. I’m asking in good faith. I was skeptical in 2023, but took the approach of using it at least once a week, with all latest models to see the evolution. It’s obvious that the industry is moving that way, and at this point it would be a career-suicide for seniors+ to not be able to drive AI to achieve their objectives . I’m not saying it’s good for everything, but we’ve gone very far in terms of capabilities in the last 3 years. Thinking otherwise will make me question others’ experience on how much they’ve used it so far.
- dan_q 2mo ago
  I don't believe that you're asking in good faith based on the rest of your comment.
- andrekandre 2mo ago
  your argument is basically: the industry is moving to it so we should get on board or be left behind it would be more convincing if you had concrete examples of technical merit and quality/speed improvements that worked for you or your team that justify going all-in
  - tokioyoyo 2mo ago
    That is, indeed, my argument. As much as I’ve been loving coding since the past 20+ years, basically from my childhood, I currently do it mostly for living and some side projects. I don’t care about code quality in my side projects, and at work… well, I want to keep getting raises, be employable, and support myself. Priorities.
    - JodieBenitez 2mo ago
      I don't understand the quality criticism. My 2026 professional code has much better quality than my 2025 code. Better algos, better performance, better comments, less bugs, better and more tests, better documentation, etc. What do people do with LLMs to get crap out of it ? Unless I let the agent run an entire monstruous plan and never review anything and never steer, I can never get output that could be described as slop. Bonus point: even after 25 years, I learn a lot with them, just because of their search capabilities applied to a context.

jknoepfler 2mo ago

<rant> I manage several teams of developers who use them every day professionally and use them for personal projects privately. Just last week, at the prompting of said devs, we had a working agreement conversation about curtailing the use of AI in our codebases because of rapid erosion of our teams' ability to operate, update and maintain codebases that had started to spill over with slop. We have had multiple incidents of credential leakage, integration tests wiping live databases, comically broken code that passed vibe-written tests, documentation and code comments that were hallucinated and/or fake, and most importantly developers saying "we no longer know how this code works but it's massively bloated and unreadable and we can't tell you with a straight face that we can maintain it or fix it if it breaks." We have seen a flood of vibe-PRs from engineering adjacent teams that suddenly think they can code shipping prototypes into production that do not work do not scale and cannot be maintained. I am personally writing the tickets to decom one of those today. Which is great, I love telling business "the progress that was reported to you was a lie, this shit never worked, don't shoot the messenger but also don't let this happen again." I embrace GenAI as a productivity tool for people who know what they are doing. It's a +10-15% velocity boost. That's great! That's a big deal, devs are expensive, and that might push some kinds of business model over the threshold into viability. That's great! It is not, however, transforming the profession as I know it, it is rather making my job harder and less pleasant and it is making my leadership dumber by the second. Absolutely no comment on vibe business decisions / vibe OKRs / slop reports or the host of other garbage that has started to creep into professional life. I have had to have some very uncomfortably direct conversations with peers in leadership about using complete bullshit to make decisions, and it is very, very frustrating. Do you know how hard it is to convince someone that metrics their bot hallucinated don't exist and would be meaningless if they did? You can't convince someone of something they are incentivized to not understand. It's been very eye-opening in terms of who I can trust to actually make sense when it matters. I'm grateful for the clarity. Meanwhile we are rapidly losing brainshare from the top because our principal/staff engineers are pissed off and have the bankroll to just leave. We aren't hiring and training younger engineers to keep the talent pipeline moving. Which boy howdy is THAT going to cost us unbelievable sums of dollars to fix in the medium-term future. I am in the uncomfortable role of trying to make the best of this but it would be a metric ton easier if the narrative from the c-suite aligned with reality in any meaningful way. </rant>

deleted 2mo ago

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