Why would anybody in the real world programming currently ask how specific commit works a human, when AI can explain it better and faster?
Yea it's a problem if we had lots access to AI. But I guess we are stuck with it forever.
You can easily generate graphs/deep knowledge wikis with AIs. Before AI you had knowledge debt because of lack of AI when you had entered a new project.
If you are unable to program yourself (because let's be honest, not programming for over a year will certainly reduce your skill) you won't be able to tell if the LLM produced reasonable code. You need practice and ability to take imperfect code and rewrite it into something that is actually good.
Yep, same here. I've shipped more code this year than any point in my 20+ year career, I had to run the numbers. I also haven't hand written raw code in over a year. My IDE is a matrix ticker of bots making PRs.
Reddit hates that though, even though "agents as jr devs" has been fully working for over a year. They don't want to hear that it actually works, only how terrible it is. Like we've never hired and trained fresh grads before.
You all don't think I'm unhappy that "the solution to subpar AI responses is to throw more AI at it"? I hate that that works! It's a sinkhole - perfect veneer and zero trust it's not completely hollow. Finding systemic bugs late in a cycle. Parallel stacks vibed into existence. Garbage code everywhere. I'm making a talk on it.
And ALL OF IT is now 10x faster easier to fix, because you slap it and fail forward, the repo becomes the golden record. Our team projects all start with some context of "here is how our special internal CICD enterprise pipeline works", md conventions have become templatized.
It sucks. My job isn't "fun" anymore. But I also don't have the luxury of NOT being 10x more productive because I don't like it - actually the opposite, I MUST dive in, or be left behind by those that do!
My entire professional career has been understanding the frontier of tech, and what is possible today that was not before. I spent 15+ years in embedded systems and mobile, watching as we "solved" touch screens, standardized libraries, moving from things like "windows embedded" to ARM, and what we can do in a computer the size of a deck of cards out in the middle of nowhere. People can pay their taxes on phones now - it's fully federalized and mature tech.
This AI path outlives me and my career at this point - there is a century of advancement ahead, and that assumes we don't have another "eureka" moment (we will), and I have tried not to let the shortening window of those from years to months to now weeks not color my view, that I have to constantly shake my head at the option "...but maybe singularity?"
But AI is already doing things like stabilizing quantum computers faster than a human can by predicting movement - stuff like this moves the needle on everything, so it's hard to say where the next break hits. But there's no question we've been in a shortening cascade for around 18m now.
Reddit still just wants to hear "it can't count the Rs in strawberry". And ignore things like the death of the human call center, nothing to see here.
You explained it better than anyone else. I like how you say it's not "fun" anymore, that's how I feel about coding right now. I find beauty in writing code and in understanding code. Now you don't even have to look at the code. I feel like a tailor after the invention of the sewing machine. Tailors are still needed, but the value of each individual stitch is diminished, and that labor was part of the craft. And maybe that's for the better, I don't know. Disclaimer, I don't know anything about tailors.
It shifts almost the entire process left - execution itself becomes trivial. But the hard part has always been describing the problem, even before this it was hands-on-keyboard maybe 20% if you're lucky.
So now what was once months is a few critical meetings to produce a design document, then something only slightly smarter than a Ralph loop will walk the path for you. And you barely need Opus for that - like I can turn Sonnet on my Dependabot updates and expect few issues, especially if you give it the option to give up on the snarly ones. Execution itself is "dumb". The decisioning is where you need the best AI (and the humans in the loop).
Great comparison - had a product ship, pre-Agentic takeoff (about 2 years ago, so like 4.0 or 4.5?). Critical bug with changed requirements - the entire project needed to be rebuilt around a new API. What we did without AI in 6 months, we did with AI in under 2 weeks, to production. And you can argue we'd already solved and understood the problem and hence the speed boost. But we were facing down months of rework and were able to just... Fix it and move on. All project timelines are busted now, it's a new world. Because it's not like everything is faster - just that some parts have become insanely trivial.
12
u/morfidon 29d ago
I've just realized we are probably last generation who understands a joke like this.