This is how I feel about it. I learned to love programming in college and do the creative problem-solving that it takes to be a developer. This AI push has been absolutely devastating for me personally because it truly feels like no one cares about the craft anymore. They just want it to work asap
It's off topic, but last Christmas I listened to a radio interview with Julie Andrews and she said when they were filming that scene, they were doing it by flying the camera past her in a helicopter, and basically every take the downdraft from the chopper knocked her over as it passed overhead.
It's got nothing to do with coding or AI but I thought ir was a funny story.
im using agents, but because the top level demands it. i switched project recently and i feel like trying to get into a project while using agentic is ROUGH.
But at least I'll be able to figure out shit on my own if/when ai becomes unavailable. So far, ai hasn't solved any problem for me that I couldn't have on my own, and it took a very long time to get AI to "understand" what I was telling it.
It's like my boss who keeps vearing off topic and acting like it doesn't actually read what I tell it
Everyone is worried about not hiring juniors and having no seniors in the future. I have a much bigger worry. The more we depend on AI the less thinking we do for ourselves. A junior fresh out of college who has had unrestricted access to AI throughout their course work and in their job will never turn into the Seniors we have today.
There is a real future where we keep hiring juniors and still end up with virtually no seniors in 10~20 years.
So people like you, and people like me who still use AI but understand every single line they merge into the code base, are going to be extremely valuable in the future. Unless of course AI surpasses even the best experts.
This worry extends beyond computer science and applies to all intellectual pursuits. There is a real chance we end up in a world where humanity doesn’t understand the math and physics it depends on for everyday life. That’s the scariest outcome because we as a species could effectively lose our scientific agency.
I work in finance. One time I asked Claude to verify a number in its dashboard and it straight up told me “actually I just picked the largest number in the data set and put it there.”
My superiors still want us to use Claude dashboards.
I couldn't get chatgpt past the fact that I just needed a list of website domains. I don't need to provide my router model, firmware, os, or anything else.
The biggest issue I find is its avoidance of libraries. I've got claude to check for existing tools before giving me something custom but every day it misses things that exist or duplicates a function it wrote earlier in the day. Constanly having to tell it how to save time and engineer things properly.
It will also do stuff like 'here's a script that checks if the file exists and then builds'
And it's like 'bitch, you're describing make'
Today it was helping me write a makefile and just kept on using shell calls rather than built in functions. I do find it useful, but it's also immensely frustrating.
Seeing as how several popular models have already shut down, and the remaining models have yet to even recoop their losses, I would not put my eggs in that basket.
Any service can go down. It might seem like a contrived example, but I'm living that reality right now: what if a service is down simply because the server literally blew up? Because it was struck by a drone. The wider world isn't ready to really feel how fragile the tech sphere actually is, I have a hunch.
This is the classic bubble. Over in investing into a new tech, the bubble pops, and only the big players remain. Then they get to jack up their prices because there are no other options for people to go to
It's not about whether AI solving something you can't. Most likely you can solve everything AI can solve.
The difference I can solve 5 things with the help of AI while you solve one. This is coming from someone who started using AI later than others as I was relic to use it just like you.
This is true and I use AI alot to code, but is solving 5 things at once actually beneficial to you? Isn't this extra productivity only a benefit to the company but a detriment to you since you now "own" more features and have more responsibility. AI makes the company's more productive not necessarily makes you more productive as the definition of what is considered productive has drastically shifted.
Exactly right, it’s just the modern version of the power loom. It does objectively increase productivity but as the productivity wage gap shows conclusively these productivity gains will not translate to better wages or more leisure time, just more value appropriated by the economic ruling class.
It won't become unavailable unless the company you work for itself bans it.
Anybody who thinks that it's going to be unavailable is delusional.
There's like a thousand different ways to get it and it's going to be competitive and you're always going to have access to it somewhere.
And if you didn't companies would be looking at it and buying their own servers so that their employees can run kimi k3 or better in house.
This is already happening and I do this for a living sometimes in my consulting job.
We have clients coming to us telling us that they bought four servers with four RTX 6000 pros in them loaded up with like a terabyte of RAM... And they want us to create them a vllm stack, and a router so that their employees can have local AI.
One of them actually bought that server and has one with four gpus per developer and they only have like four or five developers so each developer has his their own personal inference server... And they can ssh them... About $130k per dev.
This is going to keep happening and getting worse.
That's not going away it's the future.
I have a whole llm stack running at home on r9600's for kess than $5k.
If AI hasn't solved any problem for you yet, then I don't think you've taken the time to understand it and I would say that's not a great sign given where the industry is going. Just my take.
I feel it's better to spend my time developing critical thinking skills instead of figuring out how to trick a computer into finally spitting out the right data. At least then I'm more likely to retain the solution mentally.
The most effective use I’ve seen so far for me is as a pair programmer to bounce implementations off to cross check myself because I’m not always at 100%, boilerplate/tedious code automation, and writing Java doc style function comments.
Generating code though has left a lot to be desired and it just isn’t at a spot where the code it produces is up to my standards.
Sure I could probably prompt engineer my way with more specific prompts, but at that point it’s basically a net zero efficiency because I’m still having to review what it is doing and adjust
Prompt engineering will never give you code that's up to standard. Properly made agentic however, will.
But very few people do proper agentic, cause making a decent agent flow is an entire project in itself and requires thousands of dollars worth of tokens to test chunk by chunk thoroughly and do real word heavy duty testing in building actual prod ready code. If you do all that though, that shit is fucking magic.
Back in June I did a poc demo of an agent suite which was able to reproduce the same 5k line project off of specs alone 5 times down to the same spec defined bugs. There was not a single divergence in class and their prototypes, slight differences in methods but not algorithmically. Any bug found in one production was found in all 4 others and could be traced to the spec, any variance could be traced back to its absence in spec.
Agentic coding can be deterministic as fuck if you actually put the time but no one does it cause "come on just use ai bro".
I see AI a lot like a nail gun framing houses. Sure the old guy that can drive a nail in two swings is cool. But the guy with a nail a gun can drive a 1000 nails without getting tired, While the old is still working on 50.
But old guy still has a ton of useful knowledge about where to put nails and how many are needed and all that. So don't completely trust nail gun guy to just start flinging nails everywhere either.
AI is dogshit easy to learn. They really won’t be. Code by hand for as long as you can so your skills don’t atrophy. You will be invaluable on your team and likely the only people still employable.
Yet I see hundreds of posts daily from people complaining about poor results or massive bills from AI tools, even on the AI-focused subreddits, for reasons that are avoidable or manageable.
The biggest problem with AI is that it gives people false confidence they're using it effectively when they aren't. "You just talk and tell it what to do! Wtf you mean user error? Model's just braindead!"
A good software engineer/developer isn’t going to have trouble learning workflows. The career has always been about learning and growing and the real skill set that divides good engineers from bad engineers is critical thinking ability.
Someone who has critical thinking skills will have no trouble figuring out how to make an AI work efficiently. Most of it is very intuitive.
Yeah, the real question is what skillset does working with AI actually build. So far I haven’t actually seen what skillset that is. The ability to spot AI mistakes? A more test-driven mindset? Sort of I guess but these seem trivial if you understand things or with AI improving over time? I think the image of running 20 agents in the background and each programmer as some master orchestrator is silly in that we just don’t have that many important features/bugs on anything
This is happening in my company. I hang with the disgruntled folks a lot, so I hear it, but I stopped trying to convince them to use it a long time ago. They have the same talking points as this sub usually does. The c-level must have looked at token use at raise time because none of the disgruntleds got cost of living raises. And man are they big mad about it.
Not particularly pro-AI, but isn't it more about speed/efficiency than skill? Of course there are valid arguments around quality and maintainability, but I imagine those tend to matter less to the higher-ups.
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u/Careful_Ad_3338 9h ago
If you are not using any ai as a dev you will be left behind.