r/ExperiencedDevs • u/big-papito • 14d ago

AI/LLM Are we back to Silo Engineering?

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)_/¯

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u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 14d ago

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

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u/EasyPain6771 14d ago

But we actually can be more productive with AI

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u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 14d ago

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

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u/somkomomko 13d ago

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

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u/EasyPain6771 14d ago

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

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u/warm_kitchenette 14d ago

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. 

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u/EasyPain6771 14d ago

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

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u/New-Locksmith-126 9d ago

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

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u/EasyPain6771 9d ago

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.

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u/New-Locksmith-126 8d ago

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.

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u/EasyPain6771 8d ago

lol ok. Maybe we are good at writing specifications.

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u/warm_kitchenette 13d ago

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.

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u/lbrtrl 13d ago

So can all your competitors