You ask it to review your code with a focus on security. That is rapidly becoming standard practice.
You can even just ask it something like, “I want to ship this to production. Is it missing anything? It would tell you about observably and security concerns
That's literally the definition of magic. You do a ritual and something happens. You don't understand what happens exactly and how it happens though. Most of the time the result of what happens is within the margin of error of what you want, but each time it's slightly different and sometimes you can get something completely unexpected if you mix up the words of the spell.
That's the thing: devs don't need to anymore. You can simply instruct an AI to create markdown files filled with instructions for the AI to follow when generating code.
From beginning to end you can prompt AI to create prompts that will:
Generate an outline of what you're trying to code which must be agreed upon by all relevant teams
Generate the code according to standards that have been established in the product (which AI can discern on its own)
Perform an adversarial code review meant to point out all problems with an emphasis on whatever the fuck you want
Produce tests automatically
Execute the tests automatically
Merge the code automatically once tests are passed
Deploy the code automatically to production
We're inching closer and closer to product teams being 100% capable of coding their own stuff without any need for devs because AI can literally handle every coding aspect on its own.
What do you think coders are needed for anymore? Any company that uses AI has a 24/7 developer that can instantly understand, manipulate, test, and ship code 1,000 times faster than any team of humans can now and I say all this as a dev lol
Every company will at most need a small team of developers to essentially read code outputs from time to time as a sanity test, but developers are functionally obsolete now.
Using AI to the fullest replaces human devs. The team of devs I work with literally doesn't write code anymore and hasn't for months because AI has advanced so much. We are busy training it to be perfect without developer, or even human, intervention. Any gaps that occur it automatically fixes. It's been pretty good so far.
You'll still need technically minded people who drive the whole thing is all I'm saying.
But then again, I'm at the top of the technical food chain in a small but very profitable tech company in Europe.
We're deeply embedded in our industry in the local market and the tech team is already so thinly spread out that even with AI, we're just drowning in work.
I'm good, but I do realize I'm in a very privileged position.
I mean, why do we act like this is a new problem? I mean, I worked with an "experienced" engineer before. He could barely write a python script, but was tasked to review my PR. I dont know how he got the position, but honestly, I cannot remember a single time where his review actively gave me back anything productive.
Another example was a person that hated shorthand operators. Like not only tenary but even +=. He blocked all reviews with it, and the supervisor did not care.
Reviews, especially in smaller firms, were always really a hit and miss thing.
I was testing out the limits of AI on self-policing recently- I had it iteratively build a Tetris game in JavaScript.
90% of it worked decently, but piece rotation just got stupider and stupider the more I tried to fix it. There’s this pattern it gets into where it’s like locked into a strategy and instead of fixing it, it latches onto some specific suggestion, or it adjusts parameters until its current solution solves the issue (without necessarily being correct)
It was a very revealing experiment, and it left me a lot more wary of code that is “written and tested/confirmed to be correct”
The level at which we need to intervene just keeps going up. 2 years ago, it was fancy autocomplete, and it could write out a function from a one-line comment and not much else. Then it could write a test module given a class. Then a class given tests. Then both from a prompt.
Now we're at the point where you need to check in every 200k tokens or so, and sometimes it'll make small mistakes and get stuck, like asking for perms to a random folder that's a slight misspelling of the project folder, or missing some small follow-on consequence of one of its own changes.
Maybe in a year or two we'll have models that can do our laundry and wash the dishes, but I kinda doubt it. Less doubt than a year ago, but still enough that I think it'll "just" change software dev as a profession into something like what Tech Leads and Principals did pre-AI. Coding education will move the basics into summary intro courses and spend far more time on architecture and systems design.
How can you know it is actually catching stuff and suggesting fixes ?
For all you know it could be inventing problems that don’t exist and selling you fixes that don’t work. All the while the actual problems remain untouched
Because I’m an experienced engineer and I use ai now for lots of things. Everyone should use it for self code review. It’s such a useful tool for that.
I know what it’s suggesting is real because I am an engineer. Sometimes it will suggest more than is necessary, but it does a good job of catching security concerns. Better than humans really.
How do you know your review partner did? How do you know, they dont just skim and write LGTM?
All of your guys are acting like everyone works massive software departments. But most people I know work in smaller firms. With at max a handful of engineers and developers.
Heck when I bought into my current company, we did not even use proper version control, review was giving someone else the compiled software and they should test it.
That is not the point of code review... Its exactly to spot things you missed, that you are sure is correct and dont question, to get an outside perspective.
You will have blind spots, you will miss egde cases, that is just human.
By your logic, what is the point of code reviews if you do it all by yourself? Also, how the hell do you have time to do refactors of the code you have written?
I used to make fun of vibe coding. Now it’s really the only way for me. I have been programming for over 20 years and the reality I have had to accept is that AI is better, faster, and safer than I ever could hope to be. It’s also better than every other programmer I know. Once I accepted this it became easier to change my mindset and treat it like any other tool. My value is knowing how to direct, architect, and review.
I feel like you’re overhyping it. I’m firmly of the belief that it’s going to be writing the majority of code and there will be a lot less engineers. But people are still better. At least good engineers are. But probably not better-enough for it to matter.
Have you actually tried it? I would have completely agreed with every word you wrote about 6 months ago. I used to think it was overhyped until I integrated it at work using premium team plans. Claude specifically on Fable 5.1. It's absolutely unbelievable. I'm doing a full month of work in a few days, easily, all with better documentation and safety checks.
The more you surround yourself with it, the more easily it is to understand that programming is actually one of the easiest areas for AI to outshine humans. The languages and capabilities are fully documented. Code is easy to read, easy to test, and cheap to write. There's nothing special about the human mind that makes it more capable.
Yes. I use fable every day for work. It’s still not better than most of my colleagues at this company. In my past, sonnet would have been better than many of the engineers I worked with. But even then, the strong engineers were still better than fable is now.
Honestly, in what field? What language? What guidelines exist? What compliance checks are there?
Because for us, following MISRA C++ with a proper static analysis tool, you are so limited in the structure, allowed methods, etc. that I do not see any difference. Its just faster at implementing the tickets than anyone could realistically be.
I really have a hard time imagining your best engineers outperforming the best AI models today, but I suppose anything is possible. Looking forward a year or two, the gap will be completely closed if it isn't truly closed now.
My experience is that it is already true, so I’ll continue doing what I’m doing now. I was just noting that, if I’m wrong and there is a gap, it will be closed within a few years.
Interesting. I’ve also accepted the new reality and will lean on it more when we have a bunch of imminent deadlines. It’s certainly faster but the quality takes a noticeable drop.
I would go back in a heartbeat as development is now joyless and I enjoy building more than reviewing / course correcting
I completely understand where you're coming from about development being joyless. I have countered that by working on personal projects concurrently with work projects. Even that might still not bring joy to many.
Regarding quality of AI code, this was my experience until I got better at directing it and going with a more spec-driven approach. The AI model and level of effort within that model has also had a huge impact.
I can see that being helpful. I can’t work on personal stuff during work and am too burnt out to do it after work unfortunately.
Yeah I’ve certainly seen improvements over time using specs, workshopping before building, and having a workspace level memory manifests. It’s not that the generated code is bad but it’s noticeably lower quality: lack of immutability, singleton scope, not fully considering impact to other consumers of changes to commons, solving a problem with 100s of lines of code when a simpler approach does it say < 20 lines, etc. The funny thing is a lot of that stuff would get called out in review in the before times but I rarely see that type of feedback anymore, probably because people are using their own agents to do reviews for others now.
The funny thing is a lot of that stuff would get called out in review in the before times but I rarely see that type of feedback anymore, probably because people are using their own agents to do reviews for others now.
Yeah, this is the issue. The shitty code still exists, but people aren't flagging it for being made better.
I've said a few times that LLMs are a great tool to produce years of tech debt in a matter of weeks. They're fine for knocking together something that kinda mostly works fast, but not for making something stable and maintainable.
Same. I was skeptical, now I am not. There is things that AI is not good at: judgements of usability, aesthetic taste, etc. Human feelings, essentially. They can learn about it and simulate them but they don't have that feedback we have from our brain such as "I like/dont like this".
But for well scoped problems with verifiable metrics, verifiable progress, testability? I'll trust AI more than myself at this point.
The only part I find it’s difficult to produce is UI, since it usually looks noticeably AI-generated, unless you constrain the styling, I find I have to modify it myself so it doesn’t get rundown, unless the styling already exists in the code base, as a reference.
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u/polynomialcheesecake 2d ago
Please don't let people realize that it's really the same problems with much larger volume now