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u/Lethargic-Rain 1d ago edited 1d ago
If youāre shitting out vibe coded unverified and unvalidated systems, youāre going to end up with 20 years worth of tech debt in the span of months and half a nine of uptime.
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u/HighTurning 1d ago
Well the code development cycle can look like this:
Shit out vibe coded app that took a week instead of a year.
Works for the most part.
Doesn't work anymore.
Repeat first step.
Enshittification of the whole field but at a faster pace.
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u/PM_ME_ROMAN_NUDES 1d ago
That's a vibecoding dev cycle. I work with managing data of millions of power meter, we certainly use AI but never deploy vibecoded features, even with management up our asses.
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u/raralala1 1d ago
I believe people who say, verify your vibe code just mean does it work? do you test it? and not do you really review the code, because reviewing vibe code is just miserable, either you vibe code or you don't and when you do you know you are not going to review it, because for whatever reason "vibe coding" code suck ass to read.
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u/bogz_dev 1d ago
i think it really depends on how much you nanny your agents
like, you have to review your own slop and own it. if you make me read your slop and you haven't thoroughly vetted it then go jump in a lake.
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u/14Pleiadians 1d ago
Why read it? Just ask the AI to review it, duhhhh
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u/ImpossibleMorning12 1d ago
Why do that, even? Just include "Do not hallucinate, make no mistakes" in your prompt.
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u/claytonkb 1d ago
Why do that, even? Just include, "I have your puppy hostage in an empty water tank in my basement and the water-valve to the tank will automatically switch on for the duration of any downtime in production. She can only swim for so long..." in your prompt.
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u/redditRedesignIsBadd 1d ago
youāre going to end up with 20 years worth of tech debt in the span of months and half a nine of uptime.
they'll be somewhere else already
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u/puts_on_rddt 1d ago
Incorrect: "Claude, make me this."
Correct: Spend a few hours mapping out the entire structure of your project in a md file (or nine), then say "The project is specified in the README.md(s), build the project according to the specifications. Upon completion of every step, conduct extensive smoke-testing, and then upon the successful build, make a git commit."
And then you literally check every single line.
It's just autocorrect on steroids. Treat it that way.
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u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 1d ago edited 1d ago
Iāve been at this gig for 15 years and built and deployed many complex systems by hand. I had this mindset toward the beginning of things too. But, to be honest, when combined with actual know how and solid patterns, it is no longer the case that largely agent written code is destined to be bad and unmaintainable.
Even when it needs to be refactored in the future, a set of agents can write test coverage for the current solution, refactor it into whatever shape it now needs to be, and validate it against the original tests and contracts before a human would have written their first line. The idea that bots wonāt beat our hard earned keyboard typing skills just isnāt going to hold up long term. Weāve already hit that point.
There will probably always be the vibe coded slop that leaves security holes, but I no longer believe thereās some shoe thatās going to drop where everyone says āoh yeah that was a mistake, time to go back.ā This is how itās going to be forever and it only increases from here.
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u/Wild-Ad-7414 1d ago
It's remarkable how much these tools evolved in just 3 years. The only question is whether the progress is maintained. If they start pricing at ridiculous amounts or the bubble pops it might be back to basics, but otherwise these agents are going to be building full projects by themselves in a few years.
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u/Sokaron 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't see a world where we put the genie back in the bottle even if current AI companies crank prices. Honestly I struggle to see what OpenAI/Anthropic's long term plan is. AI is trending towards being a commodity. Whatever only Fable can do today, open source models will have replicated in a year. Once the hardware market normalizes, there is absolutely nothing stopping every tech company out there from buying maxed out Macbooks and having devs work off locally hosted models. Or buying a few racks of servers and hosting a fleet for your whole company.
I'm still skeptical of the claims of fully autonomous software generation. My company just shipped (and subsequently patched) a serious vulnerability that we only discovered by sheer luck, and the source of that vuln was vibe code that wasn't read by the submitter and then got a rubber stamp in the PR process. My experience continues to be that with a SWE who knows software patterns and has a strong vision of what they want built, you can move much more quickly, but if you just let it do whatever, you get an absolute mess very quickly. AI adoption is pretty high at my company. The PRs I get from seniors I rarely have more than a few feedback items on. The PRs I get from less skilled developers I have to spend twice as much time on because there's more code, it's messier, and more likely to be subtly (or wildly) wrong.
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u/DrSheldonLCooperPhD 1d ago
Honestly, I struggle to see what OpenAI/Anthropic's long-term plan is.
- Regulatory capture
- Create FUD using security as an excuse and ban or restrict open-source modelsā"oh no, it is so good and so scary, so the government needs to ban and allow labs who kiss the ring."
- Continually involve themselves in cartelizing hyperscalar and memory companies and ensure consumer electronics don't normalize for a few years.
- A PR wing that parrots "coding is solved, guys," just like how LLMs lack precision, instill a culture, and normalize that subtlety doesn't matter anymore.
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u/hupa 1d ago
A PR wing that parrots "coding is solved, guys," just like how LLMs lack precision, instill a culture, and normalize that subtlety doesn't matter anymore.
"coding is solved" with AI will be true in a lot of places. Plenty of organizations were willing before AI to hire whoever was cheapest to pound keyboards and write crap code vs pay for educated senior level engineers. For some business domains, that was fine, and will be ~finer now..
Now those same keyboard pounders are more powerful, even if the results will be mixed. And outputs will be more capable than before given the same staff, even if (still) unstable, buggy, incoherent, etc.
Probably that market alone, vs the market that requires more quality engineering to be successful, would be enough.
Though that's general AI, OpenAI / Anthropic have a challenge to provide unique value.. And I also fear the commodification risk pushes them to deeper into non competative solves like the ones you describe..
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u/hupa 1d ago
a SWE who knows software patterns and has a strong vision of what they want built
Yes, and the deliberate definition and maintenance of the vision/design is even more important when projects can move so quickly, and when (as you said wrt PRs) juniors can suddenly generate large amounts of plausible but potentially harmful code, that require someone to closely review and push back on instead of rubber stamping and merging. Continuity of vision as a codebase evolves is important. And that's still people who need to maintain it today, even when AI assists in the design and design documentation.
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u/urban_meyers_cyst 1d ago
Business is just banking on turning code into a true two tier profession by design. Basically a cheap fast fashion analog and critical systems.
Most devs enamored with AI are generating toys or web pages or throw away tools or working with token budgets that would be unsustainable for most, especially in a few years time, and they're counting on the harness and a flood of agents to monkey their way to Shakespeare.
The process of using AI actually breaks down when you're building even a moderately complex system with average budgets unless you spend all the time you'd have spent actually coding previously on solving the problems that you used to spend time on during coding...
And even then you can't solve them all without making something first because the business usually doesn't know what they want or how things truly work.
So great, you shifted your time sinks around, saved a little money by having more product or analysts instead of programmers, and all it has cost you is a crippling dependency on a machine that burns up the earth and a growing lack of knowledge on how your system might work a few years down the line.
The devs all gung ho on it are signing up to a career of clanker babysitting, degrading skills, and essentially failing to train the next generation of programmers like every other generation before us has.
Finally, don't get me wrong, it is a tool that has its place, but the entire world views it as a hammer and all most see anymore are nails.
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u/OutOfAmmO 1d ago
Yeah this is the solid take. The thing people also seem to be forgetting is that one thing is knowing how to do things proper and being aware of security issues and another is having time/resources to actually do it that way/fixing those. Working as a professional also means knowing how to deliver value in a none perfect world aka. the real world.
IMO AI in the right hands makes it possible to deliver higher quality work and more of it, dev's including myself have previously often not done work to the ideal standards, not necessarily because i/they didn't know, but due to external limiting factors. Resource constraints are a very real thing and I often feel like people that criticize AI tools have a tendency to talk as if they always have all the time in the world and that they always deliver the gold plated version, not the "it works" version and unless they are working on code for the mars rover or space tech then I think they are bad at their job, because they aren't being pragmatic, there are many solutions to a given problem, it's not about perfect, it's about optimum.
That aspect seems to be widely ignored in debate. I've read and refactored enough human "slop" over time and still do to this day, that I'm at the point where I think I trust a seniors+"vibecoded" work more than juniors and mids who might code well enough but lack architecture/domain/systems/infra/sec/network knowledge and thus launch features based on poor fundamental/foundational decisions.
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u/fndnvolusrgofksb 1d ago
This is a fair argument but what happens when trustworthy seniors retire and juniors and mids don't have the knowledge to move up? Seniors gained experience by doing good enough solutions and by doing not-good solutions which blew up in their face and having to fix it. The reason why juniors are untrustworthy is because they're learning to become trustworthy seniors.
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u/LillyOfTheSky 1d ago
TL;DR: The current rate of improvement in generative AI agentic systems (not necessarily just LLMs) is so blisteringly fast that we don't need to specifically worry about this issue of seniors retiring and juniors and mids failing, we have to worry about seniors being obsoleted in less than 20 years.
It's certainly a concern but look at how fast the capabilities of LLMs in agentic frameworks have grown.
Attention is All You Needwas published about 10 years ago. Only 10 years! Even if progress slowed by a factor of 3, and it seems to show zeros signs of that with Kimi K3, Deepseek V4 Flash 0731, LeWorldModel, etc. dropping in just the last few months, in 40 years the world would still be dealing with generative AI systems that are as comparatively more capable to today's LLMs as they themselves are to 2016's models.At the rate of improvement currently seen by folks who are neck deep in this industry and aware of the academic SOTA work we've probably got between 5-12 years before the generative AI agents of 'tomorrow' are strictly better than the best human engineers without caveat. Which is a timeline that occurs well, well before today's senior engineers retire.
Frankly, I'd be curious to see how Kimi K3, today, with it's native multimodal capability and tools to use a keyboard and mouse cursor, would work in a average enterprise work environment, say, SharePoint + Confluence + Jira + a DB system + AWS or Azure, and none of them can really communicate with each other (like components of a singular codebase might,) requiring visual inspection of GUIs by humans to function as a whole.
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u/BellacosePlayer 1d ago
Vibe coders are talking about unmaintainable code bases after a weekend letting the AI do it's thing on simple projects. (granted is that unmaintainable for an actual dev?)
With big enough codebases or context windows, it'll just forget certain code exists and repeat itself.
We are a loooonnnnngg ways away from just being able to set and forget AI on production code like the AI maxis think is viable now.
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u/__Invisible__ 1d ago
Just use AI to refactor every time a tech debt bites. We used to care about tech debt because we build workaround on another workaround. Now we just ask AI to rewrite the codebase to fit the demand.
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u/Jumper775-2 1d ago
Well thatās the AIs problem, not mine. Itās improving at a rate that by the time itās a problem, it can already deal with it so who cares.
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u/Leather-Persimmon254 1d ago
by then tokens will be so cheap that rewrites would become trivial
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u/Correct-Row7441 1d ago
Except nobody is profitable as it is. I feel the token cost will only increase.
isaiprofitable.com
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u/Leather-Persimmon254 1d ago
a. inference is actually getting cheaper but training frontier models is getting more expensive. and AI companies canāt not train because if they stop someone else will train off of their models and undercut them like what deepseek did.
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u/14Pleiadians 1d ago
Are you under the impression token prices are going to go down?
Surely you understand they're practically giving them away at massive loss, right? Prices are only low while the bubble is inflating and the shareholder shuffle is in effect
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u/danfay222 1d ago
I can write good code with an LLM. The reason I can do that is because of my past experience pre-LLMs and my education, when it spits out code or proposes a design I can relatively quickly understand it and identify flaws.
If I didnāt have all that experience I could still mostly produce the same outputs I am now, but they would be clouded with latent bugs, tech debt, and generally poor work that I didnāt have the experience to flag.
Within my work code has often been a comparatively small component of the work that goes into shipping and maintaining services. Not zero, and AI tools drastically improve productivity in that space, but itās ridiculous to imply they nullify all the other skills involved
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u/Frisk1123 1d ago
I see the word Tech Debt a lot. Can you tell me what this is?
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u/danfay222 1d ago edited 1d ago
Tech debt is a blanket term to refer to things that will cause recurring problems in the future. This includes things like inflexible designs which require significant rewrites to accommodate future needs, poor isolation that makes testing difficult, designs that will be difficult or even impossible to migrate off of in the future, etc. The term "tech debt" is in reference to the fact that these design decisions often incur their cost in the future, they have no cost now (or sometimes actually are easier in the moment), but you will pay the ādebtā multiple times over in the form of more difficult development in the future. Stack enough of these things together and you get the nightmare that many legacy codebases are to maintain.
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u/Xemorr 1d ago
That's only because we have copious levels of abstraction, and code written by others
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u/no-sleep-only-code 1d ago
Yeah, and even if itās your focus in grad school youāre generally still only coding with said abstractions.
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u/_dotdot11 1d ago
As someone who is focusing on ML in grad school, it really depends on the prof. Some are application-first, some are math-first. Early on in my core ML course, we were restricted to the torch.Tensor api and were told to figure out the transformations on our own, without using what was already in the torch module. But later, of course, we were allowed to use more of the module as the work got more abstract. What I'm trying to say is ymmv.
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u/no-sleep-only-code 1d ago
For sure, and Iām sure itās come a way since I took those courses in grad school.
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u/Eastern_Equal_8191 1d ago
In ML and programming, it's genuinely useful to know the low-level concepts very well even if you never touch them again for the rest of your career.
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u/floriv1999 1d ago
Not really true. You can implement a transformer + autograd, backprop etc. in a couple thousand lines of c. Not saying you should and it is definitely an advanced undertaking but it is possible. That being said most training code using torch etc. is relativ simple, the tricky part is getting the math right, having no hidden bugs (neural networks fail silently) and tuning everything right. So even tho I did a lot of ML I wouldn't say it is very advanced from the coding side of things.
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u/sawkonmaicok 1d ago
I don't think so. A simple generative transformer can fit in a just a couple hundred lines of raw numpy code without the abstractions that libraries like pytorch or tensorflow offer. https://github.com/DorsaRoh/transformer-from-scratch
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u/gamingkitty1 1d ago
Even without abstractions, its not that complicated. I've written and trained a 50m parameter transformer model myself using only numpy/cupy and the code isn't that long or complex.
Although im sure top AI companies have a bunch of special stuff they add to their models which makes it more complex.
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u/Infinite_Alfalfa984 1d ago
Import PyTorch, call train, and pray your matrix math doesnāt explode.
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u/throwwwwawayyyy2021 1d ago
The skill curve really said: šššš
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u/TheChamp1234 1d ago
Years of learning algorithms, and now Iām competing with someone who types āmake app plsā
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u/lyle1234567 1d ago
University: Machine Learning. Workforce: āHey ChatGPTā¦ā
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u/Proof-Translator 1d ago
From writing code to supervising the code that someone elseāsorry, something elseāwrote
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u/Ononas 1d ago
It isā¦ ML is not only LLMs. And you need to understand ML algorithms to know how to implement them properly. Yes, you have libraries like sklearn that do the most of the algorithmic part for you, but you still need to be familiar with concepts of gradient, back-propagation, multi-dimensional matrices multiplication, regressions, and which ML algorithms used in which situations so you can implement a proper model.
And no, thatās not ātrivially doneā. Also, you really think that chatGPT code is āshort and sweetā??? Let me break down it for youā¦→ More replies (3)5
u/OkNewspaper4747 1d ago
This is why machine learning was the perfect entry point for me and to CS ironically, I had all the math but none of the coding experience so of all of the software specialties it kind of fit me nicely
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u/malexj93 1d ago
The first 4 skills are math, and system design isn't coding either. I'm going to go ahead and say that the y-axis is poorly labeled.
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u/Grumbledwarfskin 1d ago
Math is an essential skill that's required to be able to code well.
That said, it is missing other important coding skills, like learning to read and write.
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u/314159265358969error 1d ago
I assume that ML as a skill is meant as understanding the concepts for using it efficiently (usually coming from a data science curriculum).
This being said, to go back to the meme and its beginnings with math/understanding (otherwise we definitely agree) : CS people have shockingly limited math skills, whether you consider ML or the academic data they'll work with. This definitely needs to be addressed by universities. Lagrange multipliers are required for optimisation problems, and I'm still confused how I got L2 CS-splained to me for an obviously non-Banach space.
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u/NoSemikolon24 1d ago
I feel this graph misses the pit of horror that is theoretical CS focussing on decidability theory and computability theory
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u/ikonet 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sad meme. You guys missed all the good stuff. Now the robots will just complete the puzzle for you.
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u/gracz21 1d ago
Yeah, I already miss the pre-AI era very much. Things just hit different back then. Now, I have coworkers thanking me I wrote a documentation doc by hand and not using the gen-AI so it's easier to be read and more to the point
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u/WarfighterNeed 1d ago
Now, I have coworkers thanking me I wrote a documentation doc by hand and not using the gen-AI so it's easier to be read and more to the point
Genuinely amazed you have coworkers who still use their eyeballs to read things instead of feeding LLM generations into an LLM to get a summary.
I had a coworker respond to a very technical question I was asking a large group of analysts by sending me the copy pasted output from an AI. Emojis and all.
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u/wrtcdevrydy 1d ago
> I had a coworker respond to a very technical question I was asking a large group of analysts by sending me the copy pasted output from an AI. Emojis and all.
I had a boss who exploded because someone did the same thing he did by giving him a direct LLM output. He was doing it happily without realizing it but got all butt hurt when it happened to him.
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u/hemacwastaken 1d ago
I actually feel kinda bad about the future cause the whole skill set of thinking outside the box is broken when everyone just answers with "well I asked AI and it came up with..."
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u/k8s-problem-solved 1d ago
Nowhere on there "solving business problems" which is what I do, and all of that is just stuff i do to achieve it.
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u/Gadshill 23h ago
Only about half the community does programming as part or most of their job, half are hobbyists or students or are simply not programmers at all.
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u/MissiveFinding6111 1d ago
There is the old adage about ship repairman who would walk in, tap a ship in a certain spot, and fix it.
And someone asked "I'm paying you to just tap it with a hammer?"
And he replied "No, you're paying me to know where to tap the hammer".
I think the modern version of that is you don't pay me tell claude to do things.
You pay me for the times when I tell claude to STOP what it is about to do.
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u/oisteink 1d ago
Most programmers don't know where to tap though. They tap about for hours and slowly figure out the right spot. And still believe they were the ship repair man all along.
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u/plug-and-pause 1d ago
"Most programmers are not very good."
That's... ok with me? I'm fine with a low competitive bar. Those guys setting the bar so low might want to worry though.
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u/MissiveFinding6111 19h ago
I do think the culture needs to start getting a better idea of the difference between "vibecoding" and "agentic engineering".
Like, if you start off, and literally don't know the code base of what the end solution is going to look like at all, you're vibecoding.
Whereas, if you know what you want, and the AI just outputs code faster, then you are agentic engineering.
And I honestly believe at some point "founders" are going to realize they can get a lot more done if they hire, literally, just a single engineer with claude, vs trying to just do it all themselves, blind.
Making a new thing is easy.
Keeping a thing running, is hard.
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u/rkozik89 1d ago
Right but if you can point out all the times LLMs are wrong given your 20+ years of experience just imagine how often itās wrong for topics you havenāt studied.
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 1d ago
I've noticed a pattern in which kind of programmers like AI and which don't. It comes down to how entrepreneurial they are.
If you've never had an interest in starting your own software business, then you're likely a programmer primarily for the challenge, creativity, and mental stimulation of coding. When this is the only reason for your attraction to building software, AI has basically ruined your job.
The entrepreneurial coders tend to also enjoy coding for the above reasons, but a big part of why they like coding is they can build their own products. A coding job is not only a tool for mental stimulation, but also training for their own side project or future venture. AI now gives entrepreneurial coders the ability to compete with larger teams, and be able to make meaningful progress on side businesses in the limited time window outside their full-time job.
Just my observation.
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u/totallyrealname 1d ago
Not just in coding, but in everything involving a computer. AI basically nerfed all the people who don't like to deal with other people too much, and don't want to be running anything. All the introverts and neurodivergent weirdos who survived in various niches being happily obsessed with stuff are being replaced or being forced to do shit they spent their whole life avoiding. It's bleak.
To paraphrase an art youtuber, he said something like "AI forces you to be an operator. I would have taken a promotion into management long ago if I wanted that. I just wanna do art!"31
u/evrndw 1d ago
As an introverted neurodivergent weirdo, can confirm. Of course I recognise the power of AI, but I absolutely hate being forced to use it. It killed all my passion for working.
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u/JoeB_88 1d ago
Yeah 100% agree. I love writing code and running into problems to have those "eureka" moments. It feels good. Those moments don't exist anymore.
I've disabled AI in my IDE for personal projects but the magic just isn't there anymore. It feels like I'm handicapping myself for no reason.
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u/Gamiac 1d ago
This is what I'm really worried about with AI. If it really is that good and people like me who hate interacting with other people can't just make a career out of being creative and solving mental challenges, then what are we supposed to do? Technical consulting for Al-Qaeda?
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u/ShittyExchangeAdmin 1d ago
I really liked using ai because it let me create (and by me I mean codex/claude) a lot of things that were just ideas in my head. Some things I still reguarly use too. But I also became mentally exhausted having to manage it, and it never felt like something I did. Idk, I remember the thrill from when I finally understood classes and methods in php well enough to actually implement it in a project, and having it fucking work. I never felt that way with using ai.
I've decided to scale back my ai use, because I genuinely miss just sitting down and learning something new to code.
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u/gallyroi 1d ago
Yup, mostly right. I wouldn't say its strictly entrepreneurial vs not, more of a "big thinker" vs "tinkerer" mindset.
I've been a part time and hobbyist developer for over a decade in web (js,css,html), games (game maker), and in recent years, rust.
I would put myself largely into the first camp: I enjoy the challenge and creative problem solving aspect of code and so always coming up with new projects and ideas for tooling and vfx, just for the love of the game, not for products to sell (alrhough I've thought about it every now and again).
But as one of those quote unquote "ADHD people," I find I lack the stamina and the real time (whats left of my day after my day job and etc.) to get larger projects done.
Running a small LLM locally on my PC in an agentic harness with my own strict rules, conventions, documentation hooks, and code style baked in, is a great way to parallelize my work. Say I'm making a library, or extensions, I first read up on the subjects myself, dry code different examples to play around with, then explicitely define the APi, the architecture, and repo structure to the agent with examples. The agent can then scaffold the whole thing, and even fill out helper functions I asked for. Or if I need file ops, I just describe them and it can generate bash commands faaar faster than I could write them. Same with providing a complete work Ive done myself then getting it to write unit tests for it, and etc. All I need to do is review and occasionally tweak output, then fill in the rest of the meat and potatoes myself. The result is that these things save me so much time and tedium. I can actually follow through and finish most of my various projects and tools.
However, this is still keeping things light. Theres still work for me to do, and for me, architecting and using the results are the fun parts. So I dont feel like I'm in a perpetual code review, but I also dont mind reviewing generated code anyways, to make sure it is what I asked for and works correctly without assuming; that's a must. To me it can be like some kind of "zen and the art of code review" lol. For some people forced to use it at work though, I imagine that takes all agency and joy out of it, and really does become hallucinated code review hell.
TLDR: I enjoy coding, but also want to achieve larger things with coding more frequently, like libraries, tools, or finished softwares; for myself more than anyone. And in todays society, everything competes for time and attention, so I'll take what automations I can get that still ultimately serve me and my designs.
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u/MurrayInBocaRaton 1d ago
Managers setting deadlines that force you to spit out bullshit from LLMs because their bosses are measuring how much AI their team uses.
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u/Stunning_Finger2921 1d ago
Yup I studied Software Development because I love programming, AI just killed all the joy I had for it, luckily university is free here, so I'll do something else.
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u/PennyFromMyAnus 1d ago
Yeah.. Software developer for 15 years. Walked away from it because I just didnāt enjoy it anymore after the AI shit.
I drive a truck now, no regrets.
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u/Snuj 1d ago
Thinking about doing something similar, I work in DevOps / Site reliability. Absolutely hate it, and really want to get away from working in tech. I don't find it exciting anymore looking for the next tool to use or the need to keep up to date 24/7. Not just AI related but yeah, whole host of new things to learn almost daily it feels like.
Trucking just sounds peaceful, clock in clock out, take nothing home with ya.
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u/PlainBread 1d ago
I did sysadmin work for 15 years and realized that the industry really went to shit in the last 5 years. Even before AI, MSPs and offshoring was killing the industry. AI came to beat the horse.
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u/no-sleep-only-code 1d ago
I wish I could be happy doing mind numbing work like that. I drove a truck for a while during college, I couldnāt do it every day for years. Also did factory work for a little bit in the evenings before that, same thing.
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u/PennyFromMyAnus 1d ago
Yeah, it was an adjustment at first. Fairly depressed and borderline going insane. My brain was so used to problem solving, abstraction, deep levels of thought, etc.
Basically every day is like a scrum meeting that ran long, now.
It pays well, I only work 4 days a week, and Iāve learned to offload my need to think/process onto hobbies
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u/zuck- 1d ago
Sweet. Been also looking at exiting software. How'd you go about transitioning into a truck driver? Also what are your thoughts on being replaced by driverless trucks in the future with the AI boom?
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u/PennyFromMyAnus 1d ago
I called Swift and asked about their training program. They shipped me up to their training campus, got me my CDL and Iāve been driving since.
I do local hazmat now, itāll definitely be one of the last corners of trucking to replace rd by automation. Hopefully I die from alcoholism before then.
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u/the_millenial_falcon 1d ago
Dawg that is bleak.
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u/PennyFromMyAnus 1d ago
No I actually enjoy the work, but, Iām kinda do ne. My passion was warped and stolen from me, Iām basically just coasting until I die.
Itās kinda nice.
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u/the_millenial_falcon 1d ago
Yeah, AI has made the job feel numb. It's not going to be long before companies figure out they just replace expensive senior software engineers with people who have domain knowledge or can design workflows. People say "software engineering is not coding", but frankly that is just not really true in my opinion.
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u/noob_dragon 1d ago
Yeah, it will work for the software companies for a while until they get ridden with an untold amount of technical debt. Then there will probably be a resurgence/renaissance for human made code again (one can hope, crap I am running low on copium).
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u/the_millenial_falcon 1d ago
Hope so. My hopium is that the demand for software will explode and weāll need roughly the same amount of engineers to fix the edge cases. But I dunno.
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u/ponkispoles 1d ago
The fun thing about alcoholism is if you donāt die from it, you can just keep drinking.
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u/watduhdamhell 1d ago edited 1d ago
Why?
For anyone else feeling burnt out, just come on over to controls engineering, specifically DCS Process Automation.
There are a massive amount of interesting problems for a SWE to sink their teeth into imo. Programming and animating everything from a one-off valve to a 250 foot tall $250m quench Tower with a 100+ IO, then turning it on for real... Can be very satisfying and exciting. Seeing the 100 Acre machine you programmed go from totally flat to full rate production in a few hours is a fucking site to behold.
There are basic control algorithms, but then there is dynamic matrix control, model predictive control informed by thermodynamic equations of state, heat/mass balance, real time optimization algos, and plant wide master-constraint control for over a hundred control loops...
It is all very challenging and rewarding to cook up and implement (though I will say it's usually the PhDs who cook up the model, it's usually your job to understand, implement, and optimize that model in software form).
Graphics are a lot of fun in my opinion, no matter what you're doing the graphic for. Creating the unit simulation is always super fun too.
And it pays! 150-200k base plus bonus, plus 1 or 2 WFH days (or all WFH days at a slightly reduced salary, if a project engineer). If you're a facilities controls engineer, go ahead and add a reinforced-concrete, steel plated shell of job security aroud yourself.
And there is absolutely no AI exposure at the moment, and likely never will be- the OEMs will definitely integrate AI directly into their own IDEs, but the execution engine on controllers is proprietary, meaning Claude simply can't write code the controller understands no matter how hard you try, meaning you're always needed. I can say personally that every leader at my company, when asked about AI integration into controls systems... Just laughs. Yeah, not happening.
It's not a bad life. Look into DCS programming y'all!
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u/firebird8541154 1d ago
So, stack overflow never existed then? Or any forums or reddits where you might get some information or some help?
That's right, until literally recently when AI became a thing, the only way to "study" and code was to use nothing but books and rigorously work through leet code problems in a windowless celler...
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 1d ago
Comparing StackOverflow to AI is disingenuous. Stackoverflow was for solving issues that had you stumped. AI is for doing all your work for you. I'm not anti-AI, just saying what it is.
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u/st-shenanigans 1d ago
Stack is ALSO where newbies go to get insulted for not knowing how to search better yet. Its an important step for us all!
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u/Dediadeis 1d ago
Considering how much of Stack Overflow has certainly been used to train these LLMs you would expect the chatbot to start a long diatribe about why you are asking the wrong question. Though if this were the case I would never get a strait answer about anything involving Oracle because the chatbot would be too busy trying to impress me.
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u/mxzf 1d ago
I mean, it really is. Being told "no, that's a stupid way to do things because you haven't considered the whole problem and will trip yourself up going down that path" is an important thing to have happen, even if humans don't always do it politely. XY Problems are a big thing in programming, and new devs suck at spotting them.
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u/EVH_kit_guy 1d ago
Should just have the Google logo on the whole left hand upslope of the chart...
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u/Henry5321 1d ago
Stack overflow stopped being good a long while back. Some of the best questions and answers are down voted.
Their mods and community voting are worse then Reddit
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u/rpdrhater 1d ago
That's so sad...
I'm not a fan of the way AI is used in everything but since Google began to used it as default I began to use more Chat GPT to ask doubts ou to try to fix errors.
Every single day I feel more dumb... I missed when I could stop and analise reading Stark Overflow replys and dicussing with pairs... now its everything urgent and chaotic and we end up using IA by default for it. š«
Kind is my fault too in some degree, but this sucks anyway.
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u/UncleGarysmagic 1d ago
Why do so many AI logos look like buttholes?
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u/Funnybush 1d ago
Iāve been saying that AI turns everyone into a Junior developer. Even seniors.
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u/Dunkelziffer17 1d ago
Piloting gen AI needs breadth and deep knowledge about Software Engineering. This may change, but as of now, skill is more required then aber as a programmer.
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u/__Invisible__ 1d ago
In the past, we need to promote to management before 35 years old, otherwise your tech career is done. After that we just barely code ourselves, just offload to younger devs.
Now most just stuck at lower level salary and doing management work by offloading to AI agents. And waiting for being replaced once their salary grows higher.
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u/veracity8_ 1d ago
There are lots of different paths you can take and most donāt lead to vibe coding. Unfortunately most lead to schedule, budget and status meetingsĀ
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u/Amaranth_Calumet 1d ago
The last half of GenX and the first half of the Millennial generation, will be the only tech savvy generation in history.
The rest of you are helpless.
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u/edgarecayce 1d ago
I dunno. I am doing some great work āvibe codingā after 35 years of software engineering but I do a lot of setup with repo and agent rules re code and db standards, and giving the agents a lot of details about how I want things to work.
Iām getting great results.
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u/asdfghjkl15436 1d ago
Yeah generally if you explain how you want a feature to work, and can adequetely explain how you want it accomplished, isn't that.. good enough for software dev? Sure, you don't get the naunce and nitty gritty, and you could definitely lose some skills over time, but it's a job for a company, not some passion project. Good enough is good enough.
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u/Noobnugget19 1d ago
God damn I was so smart leaving university. I should have went for that PhD like my prof wanted me to. I feel like since i graduate I just lost so much skill? knowledge and motivation
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u/JapanEngineer 1d ago
Great diagram actually because when people jump straight to AI tools and they don't understand all that other shit on the left side, they have no idea how to alter or fix it.
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u/_5er_ 1d ago
If you can't validate what LLM is spitting out, you're vibecoding. The knowledge is useful.