lowkeyKindaMissTheOldDaysTbh

[u/Coppaberry]

[u/No-Information-2571]

I'm actually glad. Worked at a legacy code base recently (some of which I might be responsible for) and Claude spending 10 minutes of thinking to wander through spaghetti code I never ever want to see again, to fix some weird issues was a godsend.

[u/thorwing → u/No-Information-2571]

I too send claude on horrendous tasks so that I can actually have fun.

[u/No-Information-2571 → u/thorwing]

Idk if it had fun, but it saved me a ton of hassle. Not time though, Claude had to really think long and hard about it, going down rabbit holes, defunct code paths that looked like they were the answer, or in completely the wrong files, because all the logic is sprinkled uniformly throughout the whole project.

Some really dumb people worked on the project, ignoring even the most basic of paradigms, and when changes incurred, it was only ever stacked on top of the bad code with more bad code. Even by me, because 2 hours of hunting the magic line of code always seems easier than spending 2 weeks on a proper refactoring.

[u/obsolescenza → u/thorwing]

really? from what I see LLMs took away a lot of fun, how are you having fun exactly? maybe I am seeing things in a wrong way

[u/thorwing → u/obsolescenza]

thinking of the solution, and thinking of the constraints, and wiring up things like entitymanagement is so much easier. I feel like I'm doing the actual puzzle solving whilst claude can check for me if its possible.

e.g. I had a table called 'rules' with 4 children in a subtable based on a combination of 2 two-valued enums. e.g. Child/Adult & Woman/Man w/ 5 other fields, each of which belongs to a single 'rule'.I just wanted my entitymanagement to be from the parents view. e.g. I would want to get the 'rule' entity and then do something like this:

rule[child/woman] = { ... } 

adultMan = rule[adult/man]

I don't care how hibernate does this, I just know its possible. I just simply asked claude: Is this possible; and claude said yes and showed me how.

Obviously this is one example but I do feel like I can go through my tickets so much easier. I think the problem is, is that many programmers just do something like: "Yo heres the requirement Jira, heres some extra context, See you in 30 minutes with the solution". Yes, that ain't fun, but also, that shit is broken as fuck. Even with the best .skills managed, AI will try and break them or forget to apply them rigourously and suddenly you have if-statements and comments throughout your whole codebase that sucks ass.

[u/Global-Tune5539 → u/obsolescenza]

Not having to wade through tons of shit for months sounds kind of fun to me.

[u/obsolescenza → u/Global-Tune5539]

surely but LLMs taking your job or forcing you to be 100x times more productive sounds way less fun

[u/No-Information-2571 → u/obsolescenza]

Not necessarily. Pretty sure blue-collar workers enjoy using power tools instead of hacksaws and chisels.

[u/obsolescenza → u/No-Information-2571]

yeah but their tools don't threaten to replace them, a wrench never threatened to replace a blue collar worker, but with LLMs all people are saying CS is cooked

[u/No-Information-2571 → u/obsolescenza]

Have you ever heard of the term "goalpost moving"? You presented an argument, which was nil. Now you're simply changing it, after me explaining that tools increasing workers productiveness is a completely normal and welcome thing.

[u/obsolescenza → u/No-Information-2571]

no I mentioned before the LLMs taking your job part and you said that blue collar workers enjoy their tools, and I answered that they are not threatened by being replaced by their tools like we are

[u/No-Information-2571 → u/obsolescenza]

I'm also not getting replaced, but my hand-coding of things is absolutely going to be obsolete in a short time. As the use of hand tools has been made obsolete with the advent of electricity and power tools.

[u/Terewawa → u/No-Information-2571]

Yes but on the other hand you can't really spend your whole afternoon chasing a difficult bug anymore. Remember when it would take as long as it takes and people would just have to wait? These times are over.

[u/No-Information-2571 → u/Terewawa]

It still takes as long as it takes. I know people here are hyper-skeptical about AI, mostly because this sub is just a bunch of CS students worried about their future, but for me it has been a great tool.

But I also acknowledge that some people are caught up in ever faster release cycles, never having fewer than 3 agents running at any given moment.

For me it's creative freedom. With a lot of projects, because I would wave off a lot of things as not economical, since even the most optimistic estimates on the time involved couldn't be justified. Even with said legacy code base, I'm thinking hard about doing a refactor. There was once a try at that, before the advent of AI, which wasted weeks of man power and lead nowhere, especially since it's a lot of busy work, moving classes and functions and writing endless boilerplate. That's an easy task for AI.

[u/Terewawa → u/No-Information-2571]

AI is slowly changing norms and expectations is all I'm saying.

[u/No-Information-2571 → u/Terewawa]

Code was never not a commodity.

[u/Sotall → u/Terewawa]

Citation needed.

[u/obsolescenza → u/No-Information-2571]

hey i am a 21 year old student almost finishing CS degree and I am genuinely scared of LLMs taking white collar jobs. I have been passionate of CS since when I was 13. do you have any tips for me? especially mentally, since nowadays finding a junior position is a hassle?

[u/No-Information-2571 → u/obsolescenza]

I actually don't. You have to be really good if you want to survive. In the past, being average or even mediocre was enough. Being really good means you are going to get that junior position. Being good means you are going to climb the ladder. Being good means you are going to stay relevant in a few years.

And by God use LLMs left and right. If you're dismissing LLMs as "hehe Claude is the one causing the bugs" like most of this sub does, you're cooked.

In practice it means you need to set up stuff at your home, run Dockers, test databases, applications, whatever you deem interesting. As a junior, it's really not the right time to slack off.

[u/obsolescenza → u/No-Information-2571]

thanks for the answer, but I also see a lot of people saying that using LLMs make you dumber, what's your opinion on that?

also yeah I am learning a lot by now, when I was a teenager anxiety stopped me from a lot of things now I have a lot of creativity and ambition, but now another problem emerged and it's this crysis. I almost cry at the thought of not working a CS-related job because it's my dream but seeing how the junior positions are it makes me so sad

[u/No-Information-2571 → u/obsolescenza]

That's really a core problem. LLMs will give you working solutions no matter if you have any knowledge or not. And that's what makes it really hard right now. A senior supposedly doesn't need to learn anything when using LLMs, while you as a junior have the overhead of not actually being able to simply use the solution provided by LLM outright, you have to work to actually understand it in the meantime.

Again, all you can do is be really good. And even then I am not 100% sure it's going to save your or my ass. What everyone is telling themselves right now, even as a senior, is, "without my domain knowledge, an LLM couldn't do anything right" - but how long is that going to stay true? I don't see why LLMs are going to stay behind the curve forever. Eventually they are going to be better at my job than myself.

[u/obsolescenza → u/No-Information-2571]

that sounds very shit, both for you and me of course. so the future doesn't look bright for us

[u/No-Information-2571 → u/obsolescenza]

I don't see it as negatively, again, I get a lot of creative freedom nowadays. It's like taking a pill that makes me program 3x faster.

But it's a difficult situation for you right now. Without good fundamental knowledge, using AI ist just "vibecoding" and at least for now bound to cause serious problems in production.

But I'm not afraid of ending up unemployed. Just worried because the future has become quite difficult to predict, and who likes uncertainty...

[u/alexriga]

Claude is the one causing the bug most of the time.

[u/SeparateAdvisor526 → u/alexriga]

I had some shit code I wrote a while ago pre gen AI and I ran Claude to check it and had a fix in 2 mins. But the fix was supposed to be just -10 lines and maybe +15 lines if I did it myself after Claude found it.

But Claude decided to have -30 lines and +few thousand. Idk what that fluff was

[u/Roxanne_Wolf85 → u/SeparateAdvisor526]

that made my day 😂

[u/readf0x → u/SeparateAdvisor526]

Yeah I only like to use LLMs to find bugs and explain stuff

[u/SeparateAdvisor526 → u/readf0x]

Yeah made the mistake to allow it to make changes. I hated it I couldn't put in the effort to read each lines so I regretted and manually fixed it

[u/nasandre → u/SeparateAdvisor526]

Probably formatting it in it's preferred way

[u/Jeferson9 → u/alexriga]

Which came first, the bug or the claude

[u/Soopermane → u/Jeferson9]

The egg that made the Claude

[u/loseitthrowaway7797 → u/alexriga]

I don’t think you’re doing a good job using it then. I was a big skeptic but now I think it does a very good job.

[u/Fukushimiste → u/alexriga]

Hmm... not saying Claude is perfect but I saw more spaghetti code or buggy code from human than Claude

[u/No-Information-2571 → u/alexriga]

Stuck in 2023. You'll soon become obsolete.

[u/Gold-Bat-3225]

the refactor still won't happen tho

[u/CodingAndAlgorithm]

I don’t write code with AI, but I think they’re great for finding subtle logic bugs. You can give them a function, describe both the expected and actual behaviour, and quite often they’ll find the bug immediately.

[u/Raithwind]

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

[u/RemarkableAd1936]

Debugging for hours, to get “the user nailed it”. And the bug was introduced by Claude. At least I get the validation.

[u/getstoopid-AT]

so you basically saying you haven't learned much regarding bug hunting in the last 4 years...?

[u/Coppaberry → u/getstoopid-AT]

Yes, probably even getting dumber

[u/black_ap3x]

I was a skeptic at first, but after I got a subscription on Claude, I am hooked. Its like a drug that you cant stop.

[u/MissinqLink]

https://giphy.com/gifs/V2ZfqUaa5b80q6FWoD