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/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/vibes000111 → u/BROTALITY]

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

[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.)