3 ms·

It's very true, you used to have to hire people you knew were not very good just to have warm bodies who could throw together widgets, minor bug fixes, etc. You

by mjr00 2mo ago

It's very true, you used to have to hire people you knew were not very good just to have warm bodies who could throw together widgets, minor bug fixes, etc. You still had to have a competent developer review what they did, which was annoying, but ultimately a time saver over doing it themselves. Now the competent developer can just run agents and do the same review process, except it's ~free (relative to human salaries, even outsourced). So we've got a bimodal distribution going on where the bottom X% of developers have become essentially worthless while the top Y% of developers are now more valuable than ever.

platevoltage 2mo ago
Well now you have lousy developers generating 1000 line PRs for their lousy colleague to approve while neither of them understand the code.
johnnyanmac 2mo ago
> it's ~free (relative to human salaries, even outsourced). Even ignoring the shift to token based costs, the opportunity costs of throwing everything onto your "competent developers" isn't free. They still need time to review and correct output on top of whatever else they were doing in their day to day. And they probably aren't getting a pay raise either, so how long until they use that bullet point to jump jobs?
- mjr00 2mo ago
  > the opportunity costs of throwing everything onto your "competent developers" isn't free. They still need time to review and correct output on top of whatever else they were doing in their day to day. Maybe it wasn't clear in my comment, but this was already happening in many large organizations pre-AI: you had a small contingent of competent senior developers whose job was to review and correct outputs from junior and/or outsourced staff. From people I've spoken to in these types of situations, they're very happy with getting rid of their offshore teams and using AI instead.
  - johnnyanmac 2mo ago
    >they're very happy with getting rid of their offshore teams and using AI instead. I've read different testimony.

by mjr00 2mo ago

platevoltage 2mo ago

Well now you have lousy developers generating 1000 line PRs for their lousy colleague to approve while neither of them understand the code.

johnnyanmac 2mo ago

> it's ~free (relative to human salaries, even outsourced). Even ignoring the shift to token based costs, the opportunity costs of throwing everything onto your "competent developers" isn't free. They still need time to review and correct output on top of whatever else they were doing in their day to day. And they probably aren't getting a pay raise either, so how long until they use that bullet point to jump jobs?

mjr00 2mo ago
> the opportunity costs of throwing everything onto your "competent developers" isn't free. They still need time to review and correct output on top of whatever else they were doing in their day to day. Maybe it wasn't clear in my comment, but this was already happening in many large organizations pre-AI: you had a small contingent of competent senior developers whose job was to review and correct outputs from junior and/or outsourced staff. From people I've spoken to in these types of situations, they're very happy with getting rid of their offshore teams and using AI instead.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago
  >they're very happy with getting rid of their offshore teams and using AI instead. I've read different testimony.