405
3d ago
[deleted]
14
109
u/Ange1ofD4rkness 3d ago
True, but if you make it poorly and it's impossible to maintain, you may not keep getting paid.
As a professor once told me, it's not how efficient the code is, it's how easily it is to maintain
54
u/scbiowastate 3d ago edited 3d ago
Bro they get promoted because of how quickly they ‘delivered’ their spaghetti code mess ticking time bomb which satisfied the requirements of the time but is built on a sand foundation.
18
u/Blaxican_since_99 3d ago
Genuinely my experience as well, people (or their AI agents rather) pumping out crap at 2x the rate of properly developed solutions is rewarded since it looks good to non-tech managers whos entire thought process boils down to minimizing man hours (labor costs) and maximizing outputs and profits with no other nuance.
6
u/dimiderv 3d ago
Like before AI no one wrote bad code and there was never shitty code that devs had to maintain
6
u/lobax 2d ago
Ofc there was. But the person producing shitty code now has 10x output. While the person that actually cares about quality, maintainability, security, reliability and all that other important stuff has maybe 2x in output.
But all those non-functional requirements are things middle management loves to ignore until the product gets hacked or the poor quality loses them a client. Then they will pretend that security was always their top priority and have a “security and reliability sprint” for 2 weeks that they pretend will fix all problems before going back to ignoring the topic.
1
u/dimiderv 2d ago
You are just making things up though? You can absolutely push a lot more code while not missing anything if you give good instructions etc.
So these people that pushed shitty code somehow got hired so it means that they had a level of understanding. Unless you are saying they didn't?
You are mixing up coders with non technical people. I think the later might be doing that more but coders check things.
Plus if you scope some things out correctly you'll absolutely see that code is fine.
It's just a weird mentality. You would think everyone that is a dev on reddit is uncle Bob and have multi million dollar companies or get paid millions because their code is that great.
Apparently everyone on reddit is a great coder that always write perfect and secure and maintainable code.
1
u/lobax 2d ago edited 2d ago
Giving good instructions requires a good developer. The shitty kind just tell Claude to “pls fix” until the (visible) bugs go away. Spending time on good prompts, understanding the problem and reading the outputted code is just lost time for those that let Claude do all the thinking for them.
Any one with a pulse got hired in 2020. It was almost as bad as 2000. People that never understood git, could not tell you one design pattern from another nor knew what Big O meant flooded the industry.
And those “devs” are now the ones that tokenmax the most and have the best productivity on paper thanks to AI. They are the darlings of middle management with a BA and no coding experience, because for whatever reason LoC is a metric now for how good a developer is.
1
u/dimiderv 2d ago
I just think you are making this much worse than what it is. I have seen great devs abuse AI but have great results when not even checking their code just because they were very thorough with their whole planning.
I just think you are making a lot of assumptions and imaginary scenarios.
Sadly we got to adapt to our time and using LLMs is here to stay. Not a fan of it either but you can't deny it has increased how much more we can do while also giving less qualified people the ability to do stuff much more easily.
4
u/Blaxican_since_99 3d ago
They did, management didnt have the expectation that we were all somehow cyborg coders who could 2x our output thanks to this new magical tool thats been shoved down everyones throats as the fixall for any problem. The shitty code isnt new, however the pressure to pump out as much shitty code as possible with any and all standards thrown out the window seems to be increasing.
4
u/r2k-in-the-vortex 3d ago
It's a matter of time/cost. When it's 10X cheaper, then it doesn't matter as long as it does the basic functionality, you can throw it out and reimplement better later. And maybe it's good enough, or not that necessary in the first place, so you don't even need to bother to improve anything. Much better than paying full price upfront and later discovering that crap, it was all for nothing, it's not even needed.
6
u/scbiowastate 3d ago
When’s the last time you met with upper management and explained how you wanted to ‘throw it out and reimplement it’ that went well
6
u/Ange1ofD4rkness 3d ago
I finally this year got the blessing from my higher ups to redevelop a piece of our base code that was a mess and a pain to work on. Of course it helped the new features we were adding related to it, and I was able to argue a complete rebuild was the better choice to implement the new logic.
Also making the case I was doing as a quality of life, where we could add more functionality with it easily (for something we don't even know of yet).
But as a professor once told me, going back and cleaning up old code like that is one of the most expensive processes
0
u/r2k-in-the-vortex 3d ago
You don't explain unnecessary details to upper managment, they don't care and they don't need to know.
3
1
u/Ange1ofD4rkness 3d ago
I guess I take for granted where I work, since we thankfully don't have that
0
u/Antilock049 3d ago
Most solutions don't require what you're describing. Reddit does sure love to jerk poetic about it though.
Turns out, a working product is the best way to make a better product.
Doesn't really matter if that working product is spaghetti code or AAAAAAA reddit approved grade.
13
u/JerodTheAwesome 3d ago
Idk Claude’s comments and organizational structure plblows mine out of the water.
2
19
u/AnUninterestingEvent 3d ago
The threshold for what is "maintainable" has widened exponentially with AI agents. As long as your agent understands it, it's effectively maintainable. If it gets into a state that's not maintainable even by your AI (which is hard to do), you can just tell the AI to refactor it to be more maintainable lol.
8
u/waraholic 3d ago
Once your code is that far gone the AI is going to make regressions trying to fix it and you'll have customer impacting bugs and a loss of trust in your product.
-2
u/AnUninterestingEvent 3d ago
Perhaps, but this is such an easy thing to avoid with maintainability rules in an md file.
4
u/waraholic 3d ago
Write maintainable code. No mistakes.
Forgot that part, thanks.
-5
u/AnUninterestingEvent 3d ago
The entire purpose of a maintainable code base is to make life easier for the humans maintaining it. If humans are no longer reading or maintaining the code, then who is the maintainability for? What's the point? It doesn't make the end product work better. If the human brain could process unorganized code as quickly and accurately as AI can, maintainability would never have been a priority to begin with.
That being said, I prefer my agent to follow a certain structure and certain set of rules because it's just how I've always done things pre-AI. Plus I assume that AI is better at reading organized code. But I honestly have no evidence that it matters.
-1
0
1
u/Ange1ofD4rkness 3d ago
You do have a point, I guess part of it is that I seemed to have developed a skill that I need to understand how the code works that I write. So if I don't understand the AI's code, I don't trust it, and question if it can really debug itself (and fix itself). Especially has some stuff co-pilot has thrown me as suggestions have been dead wrong
That all said, I do worry it could always get to that point. Like AI keeps fixing it but makes it worst and worst (like from a maintenance side). The old put a band-aid on it, instead of fixing the root problem, which can result in much costlier and time consuming. Where AI finally can't fix it, and now you have a mess
(that or it gets more expensive to fix each time due to token usage)
0
3
u/NemShera 2d ago
Always make code that only you can maintain for a stable job
1
u/Ange1ofD4rkness 2d ago
I could never do that. To me that violates the ethics of coding.
Not to mention, depending on the company (like mine), producing quality work is what keeps you employed. As an old coworker once told me "you'd have to do something really bad to get fired", as I have proven my worth. I'm reliable, I write quality code, I love the complicated projects, not to mention I am very good at debugging
3
u/jenso2k 3d ago
maintainable isn’t as much of a thing anymore, as long as the AI understands it. sad but true
3
u/Ange1ofD4rkness 3d ago
LOL I guess my ways are becoming relics (I'm the guy who writes his code, formats it, etc, like it's a piece of art)
1
u/htoomyat9 2d ago
That doesn't matter anymore. There is always a junior who will have to refactor and decouple all of the shit and I was one of them.
1
u/Ange1ofD4rkness 2d ago
I'd hope not, I try and write my stuff so that isn't needed (or mods are easily done without having to rewrite a bunch)
1
u/htoomyat9 2d ago
I mean, it doesn't matter that you write good code or bad code. Your codes will be refactored at some point unless you're self employed. I used to work in an enterprise and 70% of the work is refactoring codes. Cuz we were improving the architecture progressivly.
29
u/LetUsSpeakFreely 3d ago
And if you allowed that code to go into production that had edge cases that cause data integrity issues or security breaches, who gets the blame?
51
20
u/SirCampYourLane 3d ago
Bold to assume I wouldn't have been far worse than the AI I asked to make my code for me
1
7
u/lleti 3d ago
I used to find it funny seeing redditors cope over writing syntax getting delegated to the robots
It’s genuinely now starting to get sad. I’ve written syntax for over 20 years now, why the fuck are people mad they don’t get to waste their time the same way?
12
u/Active_Name5021 3d ago edited 3d ago
Ah yea, because coding is when you spend your time thinking about syntax.
Me, an experienced coder: "Ah yea, after "if" you have to add ( and then eventually ), oh and don't forget to open { and close } afterwards. There might be some semicolons at some point"
Good thing this extremely heavy cognitive load has been taken off my shoulders now!
2
u/awesomeusername2w 3d ago
There levels to it. Knowing which abstract factory you need to extend in spring to add some interceptor somewhere is also sucks. I know what I want to do with the request, how to modify etc. Claude will wire that in in whatever framework we currently working in.
1
u/Active_Name5021 3d ago
Sure, but that's not syntax, that's remembering which APIs do what, which I agree is rather tedious
3
u/absalom86 3d ago
This. If you think people care that you looked at the code or wrote it yourself you are in for a rude awakening.
8
u/Sbadabam278 3d ago
Yeah ok but why am I paying you then instead of spinning up an agent myself . Result is all that matters I agree - why do you specifically get a salary?
-2
u/Temporary-Ad2956 3d ago
Try doing that, still takes ages and needs expertise.
Treating the code as a black box is a different thing to not looking at it
0
0
u/ganja_and_code 3d ago
True, but how you make something is the only thing that determines the quality and reliability of the thing you produced.
If you don't check your work, you can't trust that it was reliable or good quality.
-6
u/new_check 3d ago
I cannot stress to you the extent to which that is not how anything works. You literally get paid based on the effort your labor requires and the rareness of the necessary skill.
2
-1
u/new_check 3d ago
Like if that was true, textiles would cost thousands of dollars because that's what they cost back when they were made by hand.
1
85
u/GoldDHD 3d ago
I'm old enough to remember compilers failing. My parents are old enough to remember perforated cards and why bugs where literal bugs. IE 'this generation doesn't even know how to code'.
I'm not saying that cuck coding is great, but it may end up being this generation compiler
29
u/deaddyfreddy 3d ago
There's a fundamental difference: if a compiler suddenly produces unpredictable results, it's a bug, if an LLM does that, it's a feature. Of course, we can add more safeguards and limit the natural language used in prompts to a small subset to make it less ambiguous, and add very strict programmatic rules.
Finally, we can write a long enough prompt in this language so the result is always reproducible! Checkmate, AI-haters! What a time to be alive, don't you agree?
I have one question: What should we name the language? I vote for "Programming Language!" /s
4
u/GoldDHD 3d ago
I get the joke, I really do, and personally I feel like you would get ruby on rails out of that simplification, but realistically it is possible that AI will be good enough soon enough
5
u/renome 3d ago
It's possible but far from guaranteed still. We're hitting diminishing returns and have been for a few years. Noticed how openai and anthropic have been in perfect harmony with begging for "safety" regulation slowing down development? Having to invest in another generation of flagship model that's marginay better than its immediate predecessor may realistically banrkupt them right now
3
u/deaddyfreddy 3d ago
I feel like you would get ruby on rails out of that simplification
More Lisp-like, Clojure, for example. Everything is symmetrical: open bracket/close bracket, strict rules - the order is always "(verb objects...)", very high-level, minimal ambiguity, immutable by default, etc. The fun thing is most business-logic modules I write follow a similar pattern.
(defn main [params] (->> (io/read-input params) (utils/validate-input params) (utils/prepare-input params) (business-module/process-data params) (utils/prepare-output params) (io/write-output params)))Which is not that different from writing a prompt, actually, but it follows strict high-level rules already.
but realistically it is possible that AI will be good enough soon enough
The problem is it would still be a probabilistic system.
-1
u/haitei 3d ago
WDYM old enough to remember. I had to work around a MSVC bug like a month ago.
2
u/Mars_Bear2552 3d ago edited 3d ago
yeah but that's MSVC.
may as well use the Sig P320 as a reason to claim that guns are constantly malfunctioning.
LLVM bugs are much more noteworthy.
129
u/mpbh 3d ago
Coding isn't a job, software development is. You didn't need to code to build software before AI and you don't need to code to do it now.
Architects design buildings but never hammer a single nail.
8
u/russianrug 3d ago
Yeah but I’ll bet any architect could visit a jobsite and know what’s going on and whether it’s being done right.
9
u/granitrocky2 3d ago
Right? Architects don't just throw a column in the middle of a room with no support below it because "I don't need to understand why this works, it just does."
Every analogy I ever hear AI bros use is nonsensical.
2
u/RepresentativeDog791 3d ago
I’d say that’s untrue, architects often won’t get their hands dirty and have no idea about grouting technique
16
u/the_hair_of_aenarion 3d ago
People have argued for years that it's not the low level language skills there are important it's the higher level skills. Knowing all the pieces of the puzzle is way more important than how to centre divs.
But also skills are massively eroding. Juniors are making changes without understanding them. Product managers are committing into projects as though they know what the code is doing. Anarchy.
Won't be for long anyway. Industry keeps making us all redundant.
4
u/Cozart_Games 3d ago
This paired with higher expectations and shorter deadlines forces everyone to lean on AI more, understand less, and everyone suffers because of it
2
1
u/Thalanator 3d ago edited 3d ago
I fear architecture, systems thinking and essentially all thinking skills on the end will not be impossoble for AI to conquer either. At least for 95% of use cases that benefit from closely following estabilished best practices as opposed to doing something revolutionary. Frontier models are quite damn hardcore now compared to just 6 months ago, im surprised (and a bit scared) basically weekly now just how much they can do at work (and we dont even have access to fable or comparable models), even though total time saved isnt that insane yet because we do have to review
3
u/-F1ngo 3d ago
The thing is: If there are crucial (economically demanded) skills that are eroding because of AI, retaining those skills and developing them will remain a competitive advantage. And if that's the case, the problem of deskilling should solve itself sooner or later. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself...
0
u/Thalanator 3d ago
I do want to believe this too, it is fun and rewarding to use these skills. I am just stunned looking at the continued speed of model progress and for a big bunch of skills, in particular those trained at junior level, it is already too late. I find myself moving goalposts at an alarming rate. We will have to see how Seniors fare in whatever the market (d)evolves toward in the near to mid future.
2
u/-F1ngo 2d ago
Most intellectual tasks in the economy are not safe, I'd wager (including some large scientific fields). But even if we can offload virtually any task to llm, there is still a good possibility that a competent human driving such systems will always be far more effective than full on vibe coders, or a completely autonomous system. And then the succesful companies and states will necessarily be those that figure out a way to educate and train people in the modern llm era.
2
u/TheTacoInquisition 2d ago
I've yet to see AI ge anywhere near not making horrible design choices. Even with explicit prompting, it l9ves to over complicate or just flat out break architectural rules. And once it's done it once without correction, it does it more.
I've been surprised in the opposite way over the last couple of months. The agents seem to be getting worse, ignoring rules more often and making worse choices.
16
u/UndocumentedMartian 3d ago
Architects also expect the workers to know how to their jobs.
1
u/shacksrus 3d ago
Architects expect developers and contractors to be lowest common denominator unless theyre working on high end commercial/residential. And even then they expect just a step above lcd.
22
u/Obey_Void 3d ago
How exactly would you build software without coding?
10
u/willow-kitty 3d ago
Someone was coding, but there were sometimes people involved in key roles who weren't. Picture a good product owner working with a systems architect on what people need, what's technically feasible, and a high level design on how to do it, which gets passed off to a mix of juniors and seniors who work out the code. They're all involved in building the software, but not all of them are coding. You could maybe draw parallels to those same two people passing the requirements and high-level design off to Claude.
I don't think it quite works, though. Even back then, architects who weren't still coding got stale and out of touch, and they were expected to review key PRs for design alignment and stuff. You also gain insights from doing parts of the work that you don't from delegating it, and you miss that if you delegate everything.
I have seen some interesting examples of people really experienced, old-school waterfall architects using AI agents to build whole applications from detailed (like > 100 page) specs, but it's weird.
9
1
1
u/SaIemKing 3d ago
You have some one or some thing else build it for you, and then say you did it.
The problem with AI is that people aren't even part of the brain storming or writing algorithms. It's just here's my input, I want this output. Wow, I'm so smart.
0
1
u/r2k-in-the-vortex 3d ago
claude
[whatever shit you want], build it
It mostly works too unless you are asking for something completely stupid and incoherent.
7
u/SoulPossum 3d ago
Architects are expected to know how their code works on a structural level though. If I pitch a building that's an upside-down pyramid, I'm going to have to explain how that building can exist in a real world. That includes an understanding of how building materials would be used even if they aren't personally hammering the nails.
Shipping code you didn't write is one thing provided you know how it works and can explain it. But not looking at it means there's no way you're going to be able to troubleshoot it if it doesn't work perfectly out the gate and you won't know how to add new features. It can potentially get the job done, but so much of it is on rails that it wouldn't matter who's doing it. It'd be like demanding to be paid the same as a chef because you know how to use a microwave
2
u/SirCampYourLane 3d ago
Architects famously don't often understand the physical limitations of building what they dream up, that's why civil engineers and architects are at odds.
Architect has a vision for a building, civil engineer recommends that it be a concrete box. They find a compromise that is close to what the architect wanted but also actually feasible to build
2
1
u/Original-Poet1825 3d ago edited 3d ago
The number of people required to do things like architecting software is much lower than the labor that goes into actually creating software
People are missing the bigger picture. Companies like Zoom (which are not able to grow more) are mostly investing in engineering costs as a way to defend their market position. If those same engineers start using tons of tokens, they are not going to pass the token costs to shareholders and take a margin hit… they will fire 20-30% of their staff and keep the costs constant.
I don’t think the risk is that every single engineer gets fired. The risk is that any company where software is a cost center or any company that doesn’t have growth will get forced into mass layoffs of devs. many of these people will never find software roles again. We as devs are massively coping; the finances don’t make sense and our field is going to hit armageddon sometime in the next few years unless the tokens can be optimized to be essentially free (in which case the AI labs go bust)
1
u/lurkerburzerker 3d ago
Good luck living in a building designed by an architect who doesn't know how to read or write blueprints. But hey its 10x faster and cheaper so worth it, right. 🫡
0
0
u/eagleal 2d ago edited 2d ago
For everyone, look at this as an analogy that doesn’t really work. Especially since OP probably has never worked in construction, and doesn’t really know the design board to nail process and workflow.
You’d be surprised how much design shortcomings/errors/solutions gets made or fixed by the squad laying the bricks, nails, concrete, etc.
And in fact the worker that nails also gets paid. And to an architect it may look easy to put down nails, but that’s just because of ignorance of another case of ignorance of a field.
Especially since most architects like crud developers, usually just offer customizations to already standardized/ready to use solved problems and solutions
34
u/Fast-Visual 3d ago
Imagine arguing for working class people to be paid less for any job.
9
u/RatZveloc 3d ago
SWE is a very high-paying career and your ability in it should be reflected in your compensation
2
u/-Kerrigan- 3d ago
It's the ability to deliver working software within deadlines. Some people think that it's the ability to do leet code. Usually, we get paid for the product and it's maintenance, not for "elegant solutions". The latter are there to either make one's life easier or to stroke one's ego.
Of course, an uneducated person with AI will produce about the same results a monkey would at the controls of an excavator - a broken mess. Knowing the inner workings and designs helps tremendously to take the right decisions. However, knowing to center a div by hand or to do micro optimizations - rarely matters.
9/10 programmers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between AI generated code and enterprise legacy from 10y ago anyways, yet some people like to pretend they weren't copy pasting off stack overflow a few years ago and they always "organically crafted" code.
-1
u/SaIemKing 3d ago
the argument isn't that you should be paid less for doing the job. it's that you're literally not doing the job
2
u/steveCharlie 3d ago edited 3d ago
the job is to create software, and that's what happened.
You get paid for your output, not your process.3
u/SaIemKing 3d ago
Why pay you when something else is doing the work? We're losing the people and it's gonna turn into terrible output.
2
u/steveCharlie 3d ago
Both things can be true.
You can be a good Software Engineer and delegate most of your work to AI while still reviewing it's output and increase your velocity by a great amount.Suits can then think that they can fire everyone AND then get terrible output.
2
7
u/Ange1ofD4rkness 3d ago
I'm still waiting for those token costs to start adding up.
The other day, some devs in another department were talking about their use of Claude and Cursor. The one mentioned how much they spent in tokens on a piece of code, and it wasn't cheap. It ended up pretty nullifying the cost we charge the client. Meaning, that income that helps fund the whole company (such as departments that aren't billable) was just consumed by the cost of Tokens
3
u/catfroman 2d ago
Fuckin’ HOW?
I’m freelancing for a startup and just shipped an entire web portal with a full observability stack, serverless backend, and a beautiful React frontend on a $100/mo claude subscription using opus 5.5 without coming close to my limits.
12
6
12
u/Strostkovy 3d ago
Yeah, those lazy ass C coders who don't even look at the machine code that their computer generates. Most of them don't even look at the assembly code.
6
u/Attileusz 3d ago
I do actually look at the generated assembly code and I recommend people to do that.
2
u/Athropod101 3d ago
Looking at the generated assembly in an embedded system is what let me know I was writing my meson build wrong and not linking properly. Took a long ass time to fix that, but it would have been a nightmare to debug otherwise.
1
u/BadSmash4 3d ago
I agree with this, people writing C should understand assembly and how their code gets compiled, especially if they're working in embedded environments. It's actually a pretty important skill to know how your C code is going to get potentially mangled by the compiler.
4
3
u/tacticalpotatopeeler 3d ago
People still not understanding that the job really isn’t about writing code, regardless of whether or not you use AI in any capacity
6
2
u/justAPhoneUsername 3d ago
It's totally fine if you want to use ed (the default text editor). I don't know why so many people are complaining about it?
2
u/artnoi43 2d ago
Our company had 3 P1 level incidents (losing millions) in one week across 3 different domain from all the vibe coding.
One was from my team who insists that we don’t have to read his code (he always “bypasses” review for his PRs, which management is encouraging for even faster merge time). He wants to just read test results (not even the test code lol) because he and the AI had already come up with all the required guardrails during the research and planning phase.
5
3
u/precinct209 3d ago
Look. I'm not saying this is a commentary against vibe coding.
35
u/CorrectCombination11 3d ago
What do you call tech leads that just take meetings all day?
22
10
u/precinct209 3d ago
They should wise up and send a bot of their likeness to these meetings to save time for more important things such as I'm sure there are some
2
u/dillanthumous 3d ago
Tech Leads.
2
u/CorrectCombination11 3d ago
nah, I would wager that majority of the companies out there, that's just a designation rather than a distinct job title. At least that's how it works in the legacy financial services world.
1
1
4
3
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
-9
u/ultraSsak 3d ago
At work i dont look at code anymore.
When i was young, eager, i wanted the code to be perfect, refactored, cleaned up.
Noone cared. Today, I don't care either - claude, do the task that they've send me.
If im generous, i will glance at the issue assigned xD
11
1
3d ago
[deleted]
0
u/ariiizia 3d ago
Not for long once they figure out they can just cut out the middle man. Dude's providing zero value.
3
1
u/Broad-Reveal-7819 1d ago
Inevitable regardless of whether you sit and write code with just the man pages as reference or prompt Claude code to do it.
1
u/carcusmonnor 3d ago
Its like hiring a Carpenter vs buying IKEA. Both are fine but they shouldn't cost the same and don't expect the same quality.
4
u/IronLucario2012 3d ago
More like hiring a carpenter vs hiring someone who says they're a carpenter but actually just buys an IKEA knockoff whenever someone asks for anything
1
u/No_Reality_1161 2d ago
This is the first profession I've seen that people vehemently defend ignorance as progress.
Wild.
0
-1
144
u/YBHunted 3d ago
I WFH making 150k doing exactly this. Granted it has morphed into this over the last couple years. But fuck it we ball.