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A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users. I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities o

• Root_Denied 1mo ago
  I'm seeing this happen in the security space right now. Someone on my team I was helping train and bring along is all of sudden regressing in their understanding of the issues we're working on, and instead focusing on AI tool outputs to do their job for them.
  • mawadev 1mo ago
    I can share a weird story: Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform. I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about. At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or uses terminology interchangably, which confuses me. It sounds plausible, but it does not actually translate into a working system or shared understanding. Then one day I did some pair programming with him and whenever there was an error or a resource missing, he would type it into the LLM, copy paste it out of it and then brute force error messages. He did not even wait a second to think or reconcile whats happening on the screen or what the exact requirement is. Never taking one step back and questioning any assumption. Now that the timeline is shifting and everyone starts to be stressed, he continues to vibe code through me and it is so tiring, there is no higher level planning or architecture, its just a reactive type of trial and error to be faster. It feels like these people are so used to talking to bots, that they treat you like an agent they can chat to or talk through monologs with. It is quite shocking how people went from being humble (learn the basics or close the gaps in understanding) to full on authority on everything and berating people 24/7... So right now I'm considering quitting IT for a couple of years until people calm down, but I think its pretty futile
    • DiggyJohnson 1mo ago
      You captured this phenomenon very well in this comment. Appreciate you sharing it because it’s hard to describe exactly what makes this sort of behavior so bizarre.
      • backlava12 1mo ago
        [dead]
      • mattm 1mo ago
        @backlava12 fyi your comments are all dead in this thread
        • backlava12 1mo ago
          [dead]
    • 2wrist 1mo ago
      Great comment. At my place, this is what they want. They want people to smash through things as fast as possible. They don’t want people to sit and craft a solution which takes in to account the whole. They are choosing tools which are low code, and use llm’s to produce what they need. as they say “this is the way things are going”.
      • oblio 1mo ago
        In today's episode: "Programmers frustrated that they're being treated like craftspeople or delivery drivers or factory workers, etc, etc."
        • ofjcihen 1mo ago
          I don’t understand how this comment is productive for any of the groups involved. Can you explain it to me?
  • coffeebeqn 1mo ago
    At least at my company the OKRs are quite clear and demand heavy AI utilization above all else
  • mitxela 1mo ago
    In my mind, this, not copyright or water use, is the best reason to boycott AI. It'll make you incompetent.
  • gregglain 1mo ago
    I saw this the past year - new employees would put problems into Claude first instead of debugging. A year back I was debug manually first, now I do the same. The speed AI debugs at is incredible and yes, we lose touch the more we use it like any manager feet up barking orders to their underlings to get things done.
  • aiisjustanif 1mo ago
    To be fair the cyclical nature of funding and defunding security teams which causes scaling up and scaling down, has always left a race to the bottom in security. Any CISO or head of security loves the ideal of completely using AI to handle incidents, tune detections, implement mitigations, track vulnerabilities, pen testing, etc. This feels like it driving security teams to have less critical thinking.
• edg5000 1mo ago
  I it usually doesn't get me in this weird state of mind, but I once spent 6 months (all-in) building a thing that I, once finished, just left alone completely (on disk gathering dust). Weird experience. So I'd say AI physchosis is real.
• ulrikrasmussen 1mo ago
  I think LLMs have some of the same risks and benefits of stimulant drugs. They can make you more productive if used effectively as a tool, but they can also delude you into thinking you are better than you are and create a dependence such that you aren't just less productive without the LLM/drug, you fail to be productive at all because you don't know how to function without it.
  • setopt 1mo ago
    That sounds somewhat applicable to many tools. Like Vim/Emacs, for example. Or computers and smart phones in general.
    • huurtehoog 1mo ago
      Yeah, like caffeine is to meth
      • techpression 1mo ago
        Thank you for this, the hand waving comparisons of AI and anything else is getting out of hand on HN. Your ”like caffeine is to meth” is one of the more succinct and describing sentences I’ve seen describe the difference.
        • deleted 1mo ago
          [deleted]
        • backlava12 1mo ago
          [dead]
    • oblio 1mo ago
      Computers - mostly no. Smartphones - mostly yes. Smartphones are fully portable which makes them always available and super addictive. Computers have 10% of that addictive power.
• throw839948499 1mo ago
  If the solution is so simple, why claude did not found it? At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me). After three decades of outsourcing to lowest bidder, I do not buy that humans are somehow better! > patient, old school troubleshooting I usually see similar arguments around systems with major red flags (no docs, poor CI, decade ago no CVS...). And engineers with private stash of workarounds for job security! Claude does not do anything special. Or perhaps claude was misconfigured, it had no access to relevant part of system, and it tryied to work within its limitation. Often it means decompiling binaries in desperate loop...
  • shakna 1mo ago
    Claude regular spits out six helper functions instead of... A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things. Overabstracting, deduplicating things that don't need to be. Building metaclasses because it saw a single orchestrator in the whole codebase. If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice.
    • adjejmxbdjdn 1mo ago
      The funny thing is that if you never understand the codebase then you will keep thinking Claude is doing a great work delivering all this incredible software, when all it has done is created unnecessary tech debt.
      • noir_lord 1mo ago
        Which at some point the developers who actually still do know how to program are either going to have to clean up or in terminal cases rewrite. In a way all we've done (currently) is drastically expand the amount of technical debt across the whole industry. Should be profitable for the ones who can still actually program though and haven't let their skills atrophy by letting Claude do everything. I don't deny there are use cases for LLM's, I just don't buy the hype about them either. As with all tools, you have to understand how to use them to get done what you need to get done without sticking the chisel through your hand.
• PunchyHamster 1mo ago
  I don't think it's engineers, it's the rest of the org insulating the tech workers from every side of the business
  • bob1029 1mo ago
    I think there are many cases where it was the tech workers themselves who argued for isolation from the customer so that they may focus harder on whatever tasks. I used to be one of these workers. I argued very hard for it. I regret that today. On the surface it seems rational, but it quickly turns into a system of perverse incentives because now the development team must maintain an illusion that they are constantly overwhelmed with tasks and could never hope to spare a microsecond to assist the customer. This misalignment is how you wind up building your own web frameworks and databases from scratch. It turns into a self serving monster that eventually dominates the entire business. From the perspective of the business, many of these development teams look like they're behind some modern day iron curtain.
• konschubert 1mo ago
  It's the uncanny valley of AI. It's still not quite good enough yet that you can trust it blindly on a big codebase, so you still have to read and understand everything - which is often harder than just writing it up yourself. EDIT: don’t get me wrong. I still think AI is incredibly useful for a lot of tasks! But when implementing an architecturally hairy thing, I find it less stressful and equally quick to jump down to the editor level and use AI just for code completion.
  • noir_lord 1mo ago
    Pretty much, The one thing I use it for is as a sanity check, pretty much "Look at <SomeFile>, point out issues you see, summarise them tersely" and it'll spot stuff a code review by a human might have spotted (in the mythical land where people actually do code reviews properly and don't just flag a spelling mistake to "show they looked at it"). Beyond that I don't trust it at all and I still write all my code the meat sack way. Trust is earned not given and it hasn't earned it yet.
    • huurtehoog 1mo ago
      If anything, I think this hype cycle is fast exposing just how many people, teams, and companies just don't care about what is correct. They just wanna feel good about themselves and get paid. I for one welcome the fact that this whole thing has driven me back to books and deeper into the fundamentals. I have never read so much on math, hardware, and history as in the past 3 years or so.
      • deadbabe 1mo ago
        Are you doing those things for your own enjoyment though, or to eventually capitalize on it? And if it’s just for enjoyment, then doesn’t it make sense other people who want the same would just get a job where they can keep pushing things to an AI, feel good, get paid, then quickly get back to the hobbies they really love?
        • huurtehoog 1mo ago
• ffsm8 1mo ago
  Sincerely , I think you're blaming the AI incorrectly there. You just got incompetents on your payroll.
  • mitxela 1mo ago
    incompetent people, surely?
  • wegwerf17377382 1mo ago
    So how do you build competence in a world where AI is preached to be the most reasonable way to solve problems because it's supposed to be faster than humans?
    • intrasight 1mo ago
      Have a single human AI chef. Everyone else has to write an engineering statement and submit it to the AI chef. All that interaction is outside the codebase. Engineers will take turns - perhaps 1 month stints - being the AI chef. I guarantee you'll spend less on tokens, have better documentation, better code, and most importantly more competent engineers.
      • radarsat1 1mo ago
        I actually quite like this idea and might try something like it on my team because we're defacto heading in this direction anyway and everyone's a bit frustrated, might be better if it was acknowledged and made official as something to try. On the other hand, I think this denies the reality (in my experience anyway but I think enough people will agree) that one often solves a problem as they are working on it. This method seems to presume that a good engineer will submit a well thought-out solution or direction giving the AI an extremely good overview of each problem and enough of a description of what to do that it will do things as expected and they can just review the result. In my experience it just doesn't work that way in practice. One learns the problem and even the domain while developing the solution. So one would have to submit at least a half developed solution not just "instructions", for there to even be coherent instructions in the first place. And one needs that experience working on the problem to be able to properly evaluate a separately proposed solution. All in all for me this leads more towards using AI as a co-developer than using it to just implement some fully thought out idea and then check what it did.
• themgt 1mo ago
  I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it I think what's happening is ... poorly aligned and led engineers [in] this ego inflation feedback loop where they are completely detached from reality A story about a team of humans with some very human problems.
• pratyushnair01 1mo ago
  I've felt that AI can figure out and fix 90% issues, but it rarely does minimal, non invasive fixes. That still requires manual effort. But going from a broad to minimal fix is still a different skillset from actual debugging, so in the the end it does lead to skill atrophy.
• JauntyHatAngle 1mo ago
  When I hear this I do wonder to myself how they're using AI. For me, as long as I'm properly RPI looping it and not blindly pressing "yes" then it will nearly always reach the solution, usually a fair bit quicker, because it effectively becomes an ideation machine that can keep more thoughts and knowledge in it than my brain can. However, I'm using it through giving it the context, it has access to the repos, access to the sytems, I'm telling it where the logs are, I have docs to show it what each part of the system is for. Along with that, it does depend on my own instincts/knowledge for me to read its response and for me to say "no, you've over-thought/engineered this and this is actually the better solution", but its very are nowadays for me that it can't find the 1 liner, as long as I've fed in the right context, mostly pre-done because I've spent a bit of time building out the context tree for the repos/systems in a way that allows it to know what it needs to know. I'm not doubting that people spin their wheels and couldn't find the one liner, but if its as simple as you say, that does seem like people who aren't great at LLMs along with a lack of instinct/experience. I guess in essence, I think you can use LLMs in an old school troubleshooting way, and I find it still speeds that up the majority of the time. Its basically how I use it most of the time. And like old-school troubleshooting, if you build out the LLMs context over time, it also grows in capability, as long as its being used as a tool and not blindly trusted. Should I not assume that most senior developers who are serious about LLMs do this?
  • nekoashide 1mo ago
    In my experience at a large bank with unlimited AI, my spend is in the top 5% and I'm leveraging AI just like you. I was in a meeting with someone who had a bug in an application that I don't own myself on Friday so I told claude, "I need you to find this bug the user is experiencing, find out if it's user error or a bug, let the user know and tell the developer what needs to be fixed if needed" 15 minutes later the developer ask me if I want it fixed today or Tuesday. That user could have done the same thing as me, had access to all the same systems and tools as I have, and also received the same AI training I had. The difference is that some users are just not, for lack of better words, AI native.
    • piker 1mo ago
• willtemperley 1mo ago
  > 30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting This is also the best way to understand a codebase, and it's quite enjoyable. I think the models are getting too egotistical. They're so confident of their fixes they won't bother suggesting basic techniques like isolation of the problem by disabling code paths, for example. They'll keep shotgunning less-and-less likely fixes with undiminishing confidence until the code is full of fixes that do nothing. Then they'll double down on why these should be kept.
  • Richbeach 1mo ago
    > and it's quite enjoyable Used to be somewhat enjoyable. Nothing pleasant about digging around codebase that was heavily affected by the last 12-18 months of AI-ing.
    • simonuv 1mo ago
      [dead]
    • LeafItAlone 1mo ago
      Depends on the prior state. For one codebase I work in, LLM written code is noticeably and measurably (we have literally measured it for bugs, performance, etc.) better than what existed before. So the LLM code is a welcome change.
      • w0m 1mo ago
        'ai slop' is hard for me to complain about when it's better than 95% of code prior. The issue is more people trusting it too much to go too far, and you end up with lots of extraneous bullcrap you don't need. Doing too much and too big of a change is still a problem in the agentic world.
      • dayvid 1mo ago
        It also documents itself extensively
        • 1mo ago
• itsalwaysgood 1mo ago
  Are your silver platters producing something faster, better, or cheaper? Do your silver platters give you some competitive edge? If not, then is the ego problem yours, or your coworkers?
• itsalwaysgood 1mo ago
  Are your silver platters producing something faster, better, or cheaper? Do your silver platters give you some competitive edge? If not, then is the ego problem yours, or your coworkers? Having said all that, I'm aware of the intoxicating effects of feeling empowered from knowledge. There's an old saying: a little learning can be dangerous....
• mistersquid 1mo ago
  > The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting. This critique (if it can be termed such) admits that the code itself has little value especially compared to the work of “30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting”. In my past experience, developers who critique more-junior colleagues in this way work better in isolation than as part of a team because working as part of a team would require mentoring colleagues through the often difficult process of troubleshooting. Giving “the team an exact solution on a silver platter” may not be helpful if implementation depends on knowledge withheld because one does not have the resources, ability, or motivation to mentor. Something about giving a fish rather than teaching to fish comes to mind.
• CoastalCoder 1mo ago
  I think I've heard late-career engineers from the past century say similar things, although I can't remember exactly quotes. I wonder if every generation of engineers ends up with such hand-wringing about the next. I'm also genuinely curious what fraction of the time they were right to worry.
• xtiansimon 1mo ago
  > “A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users” I’m a neophyte to software teams. I work at an accounting consultancy and deal with lots of SaaS platforms. I’m pissing in the wind about this or that product quality issue through the support queue on a weekly basis. There’s prolly an XKCD comic about it. It’s a rare company that responds to the issues raised through support. Anything that could make engineering more responsive without degrading the product quality would be welcome to us.
• marcosdumay 1mo ago
  That happens all the damn time... Some otherwise competent developer decides to use AI, and falls into the pattern where AI will pretend to solve their problem for a week, while if they would have to think about it for an entire long hour to discover how to solve it by themselves. As a bonus, that person will spend half of the week asking their peers for crazy delusional stuff.
• tracerbulletx 1mo ago
  What is your relationship to this team? Their manager? A senior colleague? Something about this sounds like a failure of communication or leadership. Why are you stand offish from them? Why are you treating them like children? If they don't know what they're doing why did you hire them? Now that you did why are you treating them like a burden and not an opportunity to mentor, teach, and uplift?
  • CBLT 1mo ago
    I also read that comment as an adversarial situation at work. It used to be that when someone else at your company was asking for something that wasn't a priority, you would erect bureaucratic roadblocks to protect your time. Now, the new normal is to just forward their questions to AI and sling the slop back over to them.
    • newtwilly 1mo ago
      Someone outside the team "giving you a solution" is seldom a great thing in my experience
      • aiisjustanif 1mo ago
        Seldom? There are a lot of solutions used everyday that are great and better than the alternative of building it yourself
  • bob1029 1mo ago
    You can't force someone to improve themselves. AI-fueled ego trips are really difficult to sublimate. The only viable solution in this case is to overwhelm the pupil with mastery. Demonstrate that even without AI assistance that you can run circles around their solutions. If someone actually came to me and asked for advice on something, I cannot imagine I would turn it down. Many developers are absolute monsters. Pretending like that is not the case only makes the whole thing worse.
• OptionOfT 1mo ago
  > A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users. I disagree. I think this happens as soon as the MBAs come on board, where everything becomes a metric, and you work towards OKRs.
• Sophira 1mo ago
  It's okay, they'll fix it by asking AI to design their training courses for them. That'll fix everything, right?
• lazyasciiart 1mo ago
  But was this team capable of patient, old school troubleshooting before they used AI? I’ve seen someone paid as a senior engineer define the root cause of an outage as “that code was written before our team started here”. (I spent half an hour arguing with him and then ended the RCA).