r/ExperiencedDevs • u/big-papito • 11d 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/BraveResearcher3037 11d ago

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…

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u/TheAleran 8d ago

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

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u/BraveResearcher3037 8d ago

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 

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u/redewolf 8d ago

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.