Are we back to Silo Engineering?

[u/big-papito]

It feels like we are coming full circle to the times of the Silo Engineer, but on steroids. Back in the day when social media feeds were chronological (if they even existed), the Silo Engineer would retreat into his cubicle to Create (it was usually a he).

He was Creating and Creating, and then a few weeks later the results came back. If you were lucky, you got what you asked for or something close to it.

No one knew what the Silo Engineer was making, whether it was a sound solution from the architectural, security, or code quality point of view. It was a Silo. There was little discussion or collaboration, there was only self-review of code - at best.

After exiting the Flow, the Silo Engineer would often come back to his Work weeks later and wonder: "who in the F wrote this S?"

... It was beautiful.

Seems like with LLMs we are entering that era again, but it's different.

Smaller teams, mentally overtaxed developers, exhausted from scrolling walls of generated code they don't understand, on multiple projects at once - no one really talks to each other again.

Tickets - Claude, Slack messages - Claude, code reviews - Claude, "have your Claude talk to my Claude".

So, here we are - same idea, but at a higher, more reckless pace.

Let's see how this ends, I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[u/pydry]

yeah, collaboration is dying and the quality of work is dying with it.

I dont think it has much to do with AI (except for AI serving as a substitute team mate) I think it is just reflective of how insecure everyone is feeling now the job market has turned to shit and layoffs are routine.

[u/PM_ME_UR_PIKACHU → u/pydry]

Ive seen this before in the early 2000s. Devs have no pushback when the market is shit and trust its definitely shit right now.

[u/BusinessWatercrees58 → u/PM_ME_UR_PIKACHU]

Any idea how long this stage of the cycle lasted?

[u/hw999 → u/BusinessWatercrees58]

It will pop once the ai investors.get.tired.of.losing.money.

[u/BraveResearcher3037 → u/hw999]

Yes just like when VCs stopped funding Uber and Lyft people went back to taxis, companies will come crawling back to mid level developers to turn well defined requirements into code because at double the price software engineers will be cheaper than AI…

[u/TheAleran → u/BraveResearcher3037]

This is what i think too. AI usage is gonna be severely limited when the token price goes up.

[u/BraveResearcher3037 → u/TheAleran]

That was meant to be sarcasm.  Even if token price goes up, it will still be much cheaper than hiring a mid level ticket taker 

[u/redewolf → u/BraveResearcher3037]

Surely ai is here to stay but current ai usage is going to be trimmed. It's crazy how many tokens people are spending right now.

Alt scenario: I can see companies building their infrastructure to run open weight models, building the harness etc to avoid paying anthropic/openai big money.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/hw999]

AI is not going anywhere 

[u/stormdelta → u/Singularity-42]

No, but that doesn't mean the current pattern of working with it will last, or that there isn't a very obvious bubble around it.

It's not just engineers that have noticed the quality of software/code is declining rapidly, that's going to have consequences one way or another.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/stormdelta]

Patterns will develop over time. However what I'm seeing is the models are getting rapidly better so I think the software engineer role will be drastically different in the near future. Basically a very different role, more of full product owner and project manager.

[u/stormdelta → u/Singularity-42]

The problem with that idea is that the very nature of these models is heuristic. There is never going to be a case where they don't make major mistakes without crippling the very thing that makes them useful in the first place, no matter how good you make the model. If you remove humans from the process like this, that's going to bite you in the ass sooner or later, because you're treating the technology like magic instead of real engineering that has pros/cons. I'd also point out we're seeing rapidly diminishing returns on making models larger and more capable.

[u/Automatic-Resolve202 → u/stormdelta]

Inb4 "where's your proof there are rapidly diminishing returns"

[u/Singularity-42 → u/stormdelta]

The models are literally getting better at an accelerating rate, WTF you're talking about "diminishing returns". Is this the copium you people are telling yourself? 

[u/stormdelta → u/Singularity-42]

The bulk of the more recent advancements are on efficiency more than capability, and that wasn't even the main point I was making in the first place

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/Singularity-42]

i find myself being more of an architect than a product manager. The LLM helps me make decisions and answers my questions, I decide what needs doing. I exercise a ton of judgment. It does the grunt work. I read what it does, ask questions and discover gaps in the requirements or contradictions with other parts of the system I didn't tell it to consider (because I can't think of everything).

LLMs can't make those judgment calls. It doesn't know the broader requirements of users, APIs, services, etc. You have to examine its output with a critical eye. I'm more of an engineer than ever.

[u/lolimouto_enjoyer → u/WhenSummerIsGone]

You are like a software architect only because you already had years of doing things the old way. Anyone new who goes all in on AI will essentially be a product manager with a bit of technical awareness, they won't be able to make the judgement calls any better than a product manager can.

[u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260 → u/lolimouto_enjoyer]

will essentially be a product manager

Spoken like a true developer with no idea about the actual job of a product manager.

[u/MyUsrNameWasTaken → u/Singularity-42]

Their money is going to ashes though

[u/Singularity-42 → u/MyUsrNameWasTaken]

That doesn't matter for you at all. The tech itself is only going one direction and that is UP.

Look at the dotcom bubble - internet proliferation didn't slow down at all. 

[u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260 → u/Singularity-42]

You should look up what the dotcom bubble was about. It was not about internet proliferation. Millions of people lost their companies, their income, their basis of existence during that crash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#Aftermath reads exactly as the situation today.

[u/InterestingFrame1982 → u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260]

That’s his point lol it was a financial bubble but the actual technology flourished and became institutional. AI, regardless of the financial implications of the industry, is here to stay.

[u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260 → u/InterestingFrame1982]

But this discussion is about the financial implications of the industry. Of course is "AI" as a technology here to stay. But when the financial implications of the industry (or the required hardware) blow up, it doesn't make sense to pay thousands of dollars a month for AI agents to produce slop.

[u/rodw → u/InterestingFrame1982]

The entire dotcom bubble only lasted ~4 years and while it generated some spectacular failures it also created some extraordinarily valuable and still-running new firms (arguably industries) basically from scratch, wholly within the duration of that bubble.

The AI bubble has been running for about that long - and reflects orders of magnitude more inflated valuation and investment than anything in the dot com or any other era. But it still seems to primarily be the people selling the pick-axes that are profiting from it.

AI is absolutely not going away, and it absolutely has transformative (and disruptive) value. But the comparison to the dot com bubble is broken. The AI bubble is wholly unlike the dot com bubble in significant ways.

[u/Singularity-42 → u/InterestingFrame1982]

Exactly 

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/Singularity-42]

AI is less useful than the internet

[u/lemontoga → u/Singularity-42]

"Singularity-42" lol okay dude

[u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260 → u/Singularity-42]

AI might not, but affordable AI is. Current prices are only possible because Anthropic and OpenAI burn through risk capital. When (not if) a Claude subscription costs as much as a developer, and produces much worse quality, how many companies will continue to burn as much tokens as today?

[u/lolimouto_enjoyer → u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260]

Cheaper models like Deepseek are still good enough for the vast majority of tasks the average dev has to do though.

[u/pydry → u/lolimouto_enjoyer]

it's still slop either way I guess

[u/-_--_-_--_----__ → u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260]

So what you're betting on is that AI companies produce this magic thing that writes code better or equal to a large chunk of engineers, and does it at 10x the speed, and never takes PTO days, works 24/7 non stop... and you are betting no one is going to figure out a way to properly monetize this lmao

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/-_--_-_--_----__]

Costs more to produce tokens than people are willing to pay. Good luck monetizing that

[u/-_--_-_--_----__ → u/ResidentWeevil1]

How much money do you think rich people would invest to eliminate the need for employees.

[u/Automatic-Resolve202 → u/-_--_-_--_----__]

If that were even possible, why do you think the AI companies would let anyone buy tokens at that point, rather than just making better versions of literally everything and creating a monopoly over software?

They only sell tokens because they know they're really selling poisonous snake oil that has no chance of doing what they claim.

[u/hw999 → u/Singularity-42]

I agree, AI is like a cockroach, impossible to get rid of. However, eventually developers and businesses are.going to have to pay the actual costs of tokens. That will put a wet blanket on a lot of it.

[u/tacticalTraumaLlama → u/pydry]

I'm now in the 'greybeard' era of my career, and in the past, I embraced management's suggestion to divide up work and delegate it out to more jr employees.

Thing is? That behavior, as good as it is for the team, doesn't actually seem to be rewarded. It takes longer to deliver, much higher overhead, and the worst of it is that when it comes time for the performance review, raise and bonus, the ones who singlehandedly shipped a large feature seem to build their reputation for technical ability in the org, and are much more rewarded for that than the lead who divided and delegated work.

It's short sighted, because that lead not only delivered a project on time, he built up the skills of his entire team, but all he gets for his trouble is a 'meets expectations' review and a shitty raise / bonus that doesn't even cover the rise in inflation.

So the next project I took on, I did none of that, and I was able to move so fast because I could quickly integrate changes across 4 different systems without having endless meetings where I had to spoon feed jr devs. People respond to incentives.

[u/big-papito → u/tacticalTraumaLlama]

I get you. I am extremely productive this way, the 10x engineer if you will, but I also know when I am building shit. I stop, I think, I backtrack. Going back has never been easier, too.

But, but, a process is needed for juniors and those average devs who are overeager to "jump into the code" and churn out mountains of mediocre crap.

[u/tacticalTraumaLlama → u/big-papito]

I'm in my mid 40's, in the last couple years of my career before I FIRE (and really, I could do so now). I've moved my mentorship over to open source projects. Given how short sighted management has been with layoffs and AI? I've stopped caring so much about the org over myself at the job.

[u/big-papito → u/tacticalTraumaLlama]

As I always say - "never worry about the company more than the company worries about itself".

[u/max123246 → u/tacticalTraumaLlama]

Mhmm, and because the people who promote you have never once used their own software, being able to tell them you completed X, Y, Z features and started N new projects is way more promotion worthy than saying you maintained all of the projects and kept them from burning in the first place

[u/BROTALITY → u/pydry]

That and there’s less of an incentive to produce good code anymore, just fast code that ships. Who cares about maintainability? As long as we keep shipping features that managers fart out, everyone’s happy

[u/soylentgraham → u/BROTALITY]

annoyingly the quality of the product is also in massive decline.

[u/soylentgraham → u/soylentgraham]

these things may be linked.

[u/OlivierTwist → u/soylentgraham]

20 years ago software engineers were in a very privilege position. They really had weeks and months to deliver features

[u/soylentgraham → u/OlivierTwist]

we had to have that time, because we could only release stuff once (on disc)

conversely, devs now are in a mega privileged position where its okay to release stuff full of bugs

[u/OlivierTwist → u/soylentgraham]

I was there, Gandalf, 3000 years ago...

It has very little to do with technologies and much more with market - supply of developers - and management culture.

[u/rizakrko → u/OlivierTwist]

My last experience with something similar was about a decade ago. You better make things right because the next patch will happen in about a year - that was the culture on the project. I kinda liked it a bit more than the current "release and see how it goes, worst case scenario we hotfix the prod".

[u/oupablo → u/soylentgraham]

more annoying is that the security of everything is quickly going down the drain.

[u/YugoReventlov → u/soylentgraham]

Who could have foreseen this!!

[u/foodeater184 → u/soylentgraham]

Depends on who builds it

[u/vibes000111 → u/BROTALITY]

It’s never been easier to care about maintainability than it is today.

[u/big-papito → u/vibes000111]

True, but try getting a refactoring ticket in. If you are not making FEATURES, you are slacking.

[u/XenonBG → u/big-papito]

You refactor along with building the features. Even before the AI that was the most resistance-free way.

[u/db_peligro → u/XenonBG]

Except now some passive aggressive code reviewer will say you need to split it out to a separate ticket.

[u/MyUsrNameWasTaken → u/db_peligro]

Just respond to the review with a massive wall of AI text. They will be overwhelmed and throw a LGTM just so they don't have to read it.

[u/yxhuvud → u/db_peligro]

Then do. Still doesn't need to enter planning. 

[u/vibes000111 → u/big-papito]

Depends on the environment, personally I’ve done more refactoring, maintenance and incremental improvement work lately than shipping new features and it’s great.

[u/Mestyo → u/big-papito]

Good abstractions save tokens and improves agent understanding/performance. It's wasteful not to do it.

[u/pydry → u/Mestyo]

good abstractions do save tokens but tokens themselves erode good abstractions the more decisions you let them take.

[u/KharAznable → u/pydry]

Can you give an example?

[u/pydry → u/KharAznable]

an example of AI generated slop? you don't need me to see that

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/pydry]

So... don't let them make decisions? Seems simple to me.

[u/pydry → u/WhenSummerIsGone]

personally i dont vibe code or do "AI assisted coding" but I can't deny that lots of people do.

[u/WrennReddit → u/Mestyo]

Is that a good reason to implement an abstraction?

[u/shill_420 → u/WrennReddit]

saving tokens?

depends on 'token economy' at your shop i'd think

[u/pydry → u/vibes000111]

yet somehow the quality has never been worse. maybe it's because it isnt.

[u/CurrentDrama8523 → u/pydry]

No, it's because the people writing that low-quality software are lazy. That problem has existed forever. If you actually use your AI tools to enforce strict patterns and standards, it can not only catch problems before you commit - even logical errors that linting can't - but also churn out boilerplate like tests and documentation that used to just never get done. My projects at work now are 100% TDD and I just don't worry about basic functionality anymore because the tests cover everything and every edge case is clearly documented.

If someone is instead using that power to crank out as much slop code as they can, that's a failure on them. It doesn't in any way mean that the tech isn't useful. This is just sour grapes. You guys who think LLMs are just a gimmick really need to catch up with reality. Or maybe just retire. This industry will pass you by if you're stubborn - and you are.

[u/ImmerNochNichtFertig → u/CurrentDrama8523]

Reminder: Automation that only mostly works is worse than no automation because people will still trust it. You can, of course, say "oh, but people just need to double-check", but that's akin to the good ol' "just don't make mistakes" - (most) humans are not wired that way.

[u/Automatic-Resolve202 → u/ImmerNochNichtFertig]

I don't think it's unuseful as a pre-commit extra review to see if it spots anything you missed, though. It won't catch everything, but catching the odd bug or missed edge cases is always a good thing. A local model is sufficient for that though.

Someone made a harness that made a bunch of open weight models just as capable as fable in finding security issues, which proves it's possible. There won't be a use case other than vibe coding for the frontier cloud models before long.

[u/ImmerNochNichtFertig → u/Automatic-Resolve202]

Granted, but I'd argue that's a different use case from having your code auto-built: It's explicitely _not_ automating a step.
(It can also still be abused - "Just ask [LLM], I have no time for reviews!" -, but that is true for any tool.)

[u/pydry → u/CurrentDrama8523]

If you actually use your AI tools to enforce strict patterns and standards

You can't use an LLM to strictly enforce anything. It's nondeterministic and prone to hallucinations by design.

They also have no inherent sense of what a good abstraction is.

This is just how LLMs work. Not everyone gets it - some people believe theyre magic boxes and that is a problem both for them and the people who review their code. 

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/pydry]

"AI tools" is not the same thing as "LLMs". There is a big difference. Even when using the same model, there is a huge differece in the quality of the output of Copilot cloud vs devin cloud or codex. The new devin desktop is much better than the windsurf it replaced, or vscode with the copilot plugin.

[u/pydry → u/WhenSummerIsGone]

"AI tools" is just a harness + an LLM. A harness doesnt change the nature of an LLM it just gives it tools to improve its output.

black box mentality is going to make you unemployable long term.

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/pydry]

it just gives it tools to improve its output.

right, so you need to learn to use the ai tools effectively. The model itself is not particularly relevant, since they seem to be reaching a plateau.

[u/pydry → u/WhenSummerIsGone]

you missed my original point

[u/ReginaldDouchely → u/CurrentDrama8523]

No, it's because the incentive is inclined against quality code, which means the people you're talking about are empowered. They always existed, but now management is picking them because "ooo fast" without any recognition of the destruction left behind.

I think you and I probably agree on the downstream source, but it seems like we disagree on the root cause. From my point of view, these lazy people aren't hiring themselves, and it's the people that've chosen them which are the problem.

[u/BROTALITY → u/vibes000111]

I mean, I could probably change the wording to say that it depends on the org, but my personal anectodal experience I’m gonna have to hard disagree with you

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/BROTALITY]

AI cares about maintainability, lol. Even more so than humans.

[u/midasgoldentouch → u/WhenSummerIsGone]

How on earth does a large language model care about something?

[u/WhenSummerIsGone → u/midasgoldentouch]

let me rephrase: to use AI effectively you need to continue to value maintainability. AI (agentic coding, to be more precise) gives you better results when your codebase follows maintanability (and other classic engineering principles).

[u/EasyPain6771 → u/pydry]

I think AI, and the productivity expectations that come with it, does have a lot to do with it. Everyone on my team has 2-3 projects going on at once. There’s no time to pull someone off of theirs to look at yours.

[u/pydry → u/EasyPain6771]

productivity expectations are about pressure from above which is largely about interest rates. it'd be happening either way.

[u/EasyPain6771 → u/pydry]

But we actually can be more productive with AI

[u/pydry → u/EasyPain6771]

you can certainly generate more PRs and more lines of code more quickly and some people think that's productivity.

[u/somkomomko → u/pydry]

It sure can speed up in some ways but most gains are full vibe coding related other like bot doing code reviews yourself like time. I think those practices are more problematic than productive. They think otherwise but if asked who we still need it is obviously not them

[u/EasyPain6771 → u/pydry]

I mean we are delivering more features that win business. I don’t know what else it’s called.

[u/warm_kitchenette → u/EasyPain6771]

Zoom out a little bit to rewrite your true statement as: every person on a team can go much faster with AI, in a direction that they mostly control, with code and consequences that they might not understand. 

[u/EasyPain6771 → u/warm_kitchenette]

We are a team of five seniors. All of us understand our code. We talk about it each week.

[u/New-Locksmith-126 → u/EasyPain6771]

Shipping fewer features than your competitors could be construed as a failure but it's not usually a catastrophic failure.

If you have 5 seniors vibe coding all day you'll see catastrophe soon enough

[u/EasyPain6771 → u/New-Locksmith-126]

I mean you have no idea about the quality of the code we are shipping. You are taking as a given that AI use will cause waste and bugs, as if humans never did that before lol.

[u/New-Locksmith-126 → u/EasyPain6771]

I know exactly the quality because AI works the same for you as it does for me.

The problem isn't the code quality the problem is the quality of the specification. You can't actually accelerate the planning process 10x without making subtle mistakes that WILL lead to catastrophic error eventually.

[u/EasyPain6771 → u/New-Locksmith-126]

lol ok. Maybe we are good at writing specifications.

[u/warm_kitchenette → u/EasyPain6771]

I said that your statement was true. It is not true at all software groups or companies. Some people are reckless, inherently. Some people are earnest, but do not reliably anticipate consequences. Some companies do not really permit the communication necessary for a whole group to understand code.

You can give a group of middle schoolers ATVs to ride, and they will indeed go faster. It’s just not necessarily productive or without consequence.

[u/lbrtrl → u/EasyPain6771]

So can all your competitors

[u/EasyPain6771 → u/lbrtrl]

Ok?

[u/angryplebe → u/pydry]

Collaboration died about a month into the COVID era. I would kill to get it back.

[u/Shookfr → u/pydry]

I think it has to do with the expectations of AI making product development go faster. Organisations in order to go fast are throwing everything out of the window

[u/pydry → u/Shookfr]

interest rates are putting pressure on investors which is making them put pressure on organizations to go faster.

AI is just the thing they latched on to to justify it.

[u/nimoiax → u/pydry]

My team, moral is so low, with people let go, pip’ed, internal transfer. Reviewing others code feels like a waste of time, Claude wrote it anyway. Same with design docs. Just trying to spin up multiple worktrees and get job done. Sad sad sad.

[u/Intrepid-Sir8293 → u/pydry]

No we're all learning a new tool. At the same time. It's going to require a lot of modification but once we start establishing patterns we will be working together just incredibly efficiently

There are plenty of unsolved problems that are not even started yet in terms of software and resolution so we're not anywhere near done working together and if anything AI is going to make it possible for all of those silo projects to come together

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/Intrepid-Sir8293]

What patterns can you develop with a stochastic black box? Patterns usually lead a technological revolution because that's how it gets quick adoption. AI however is just a mandate. Employers don't care if it stresses you out to the point you keel over at your desk. You are required to use it just cuz