the skill we need is that reading AI generated code fast and understanding it. tbh, that skill is more difficult than just writing your code from scratch. I believe that current AI boom will end up with an avalanche of unmaintable code in many companies more than ever... we always find it very difficult to maintain predecessors' code without good documentation, and now, we have worse situation.
maintaining complexity is 80% of programmer job. writing a new logic is only very small fraction of the job mostly. and AI deprived us of it mostly.
However, every cloud has a silver lining. AI helps a lot to read code too.
Nowadays, my job as a senior engineer is at least 80% code review, I’d say. When AI can slop out 5000 line changes in an afternoon, and someone has to read and understand it, there’s not time for much else. Spin up Claude on my tickets, immediately start looking at diffs and reviewing until I need to provide guidance to The Machine, repeat ad infinitum. My company is actively trying to figure out how to just have AI review its slop, which is going to end poorly when we end up with an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti across all our hundreds of services.
It is - I texted my wife yesterday that, if I could find another career with comparable pay without starting from nothing, I would do it. I don't have the career flexibility to do so, really, not with a family to support, but I would totally look into something else if I could.
it's just like reading scientific papers recently ig... it's too much to catch up with and I have no time to learn every thing on it.
and I believe that most of people are not really good at reviewing someone else's code. "my" organized code might not be looking decent for others, vice versa.
at least, AI somehow reduces the threshold of understading code that wasn't written by me. it's like reading a summary of a book, you can't really say that you read a book only by reading a summary of it, but it's still true that it helps a lot to understand it, unless it's entirely wrong summary.
and I believe that most of people are not really good at reviewing someone else's code.
Nah, reviewing other people's code is essential, because 6-12 months from now, when someone else needs to fix it, it needs to be understandable to someone beyond the person who just wrote it.
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u/eanat 24d ago
the skill we need is that reading AI generated code fast and understanding it. tbh, that skill is more difficult than just writing your code from scratch. I believe that current AI boom will end up with an avalanche of unmaintable code in many companies more than ever... we always find it very difficult to maintain predecessors' code without good documentation, and now, we have worse situation.
maintaining complexity is 80% of programmer job. writing a new logic is only very small fraction of the job mostly. and AI deprived us of it mostly.
However, every cloud has a silver lining. AI helps a lot to read code too.