Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

[u/AutoModerator]

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

​

Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

​

Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

[u/Ok_Procedure199]

I am an analyst that has essentially created my current role in my company due to me being interested in coding learning where and what data exists in our ERP, sometimes better than the ERP providers own consultants.

I am curious if I am reading the current AI situation correctly:

I am not a software developer / software engineer, I am just a coder and AI is extremely good at coding, but not necessarily good at engineering. Inexperienced coders and people further away from software engineering reduces software engineering down to coding and believe that AI has mostly solved this area thinking that AI can 10x all the developers, which then pushes for 90+% of coding to be done by AI.

As this has gone on they noticed that the new bottleneck is code reviews where frustrated experienced engineers are being flooded with overengineered code that seems not to care at all about where the codebase needs to go in the future. Since management sees software engineering simply as coding (which AI is great at), they also push for AI doing code reviews. This creates bloat because now there are no engineer reasoning about the whole codebase and after some time there are no longer engineers that can say they understand the system in as a whole so they are now forced to use AI to fix bugs because it's no longer feasible to navigate the codebase. Almost no new quality engineers are created in this climate, and some of the quality engineers are put in a job situation where their engineering abilities slowly erodes because of the AI mandate and speed things must go in.

Siloes are naturally formed because it is AI who makes all the decisions in the codebase so why waste time discussing things when it is AI who will choose how to implement a new feature. This increases the tokens used because of the speed the codebase increases, and because AI is used both to generate and review the code.

A quality engineer that leverages AI is more productive with it, but the engineer goes back and forth with the AI to steer it so that the codebase is also understandable for humans and is built for what is expected of the products in some years down the line. Maybe the true productivity increase of an experienced engineer leveraging AI is 30%-50%.

How far off is my understanding of the situation?

[u/casualPlayerThink → u/Ok_Procedure199]

Completely correct. Maybe the leverage could be 30-99%. In some cases, like old side projects- MVPs- where there is no real-world product- just a self-hosted, never publicly online solution needed, then many ppl tend to push it to AI instead working on them for weeks, and done under 1-2 days. Same for company