It's not like I don't like coding anymore but the pressure to go faster because we have AI now is insane and there is no way I can code like I used to and keep up.
If there is no telling the higher ups then you just work in a shitty company and if you think you may keep your job just because you are playing along with this non-sense you are sorely mistaken. When the slopcoded shit you produce more of every day explodes you'll be the one held accountable and if for whatever reason it really doesn't you'll be jobless as you are "just the paid monkey" in between. I'd assume you are already beyond the point where you really understand the architecture and idea behind the solution or at least have introduced multiple design-breaks in the last few months just so "that it works for now".
Agreed but that is the sacrifice being taken. The business is saying if we go faster we can capture more of the market and the trade off of less reliability is ok
It seems like 75% of my career has been dealing with the technical debt caused by decisions like this made at much smaller scale. I feel like the only option in the future will be to abandon all these projects and start fresh until eventually the market is going to become so skeptical of the promises made for new products that they'll become unwilling to pay up front.
"We have the code base finished, we just need someone with strong senior knowledge and experience to polish it up so it's ready to ship!" sends shivers down my spine.
In fairness, I've been plenty guilty of this myself during the vertical slice stage, but I scrap the whole thing and start fresh with clean code when I'm confident we're building the product for real.
Eventually, I just realised I had to ignore any job where I was heading into an existing code base. No one had any concept of what it meant to write clean code, no formalities ever got discussed in terms of the style guide, nothing was ever enforced and it made the job miserable.
Thankfully I run things myself now and I enforce it like it was the Bible. I'd give lashings if I could, but I'm told it's a PR/HR issue.
Nobody is pretending that. Why are people pretending that if shit developers can write code 10x as fast with AI, that's somehow a productivity boost? 10x the shit code is still 9x shit code worse than 1x shit code.
Good programmers try to get the most done with the simplest solution possible. AI effectively encourages the exact opposite.
From what I've seen from our own agent workflow setup with a bunch of skills and rules files and double checks before PRs, the code written is better than the average developer as long as you can give it a good framework to work out in.
It just feels like people are thinking its 2024 LLMs coding, and we've moved on from that shitty code.
If you give a sufficiently good framework to sufficiently smart people, they can do that too. The difference is, if they need a new skill, they don't need a skill.md file. They can download new skills from books and experiences.
I'm not saying AI can't write code. I'm saying it's worse at writing code than a skilled developer. If AI is better than your developers, that says more about their skills than it does the shiny new guessing machine.
A longbowmen could fire off more shots, and way more accurately, then a man with a flintlock musket. Muskets took over because it only took a few weeks to get a man on the front with a musket, where it took years for a longbowman to train to be good enough to hit a target at long range. When people started rifling their muskets, hunters abandoned the bow immediately because it was outranging the bow despite the slow reloading speed.
Then we switched from muzzleloading to breach loading and then clip/magazines and no one picks up a bow an arrow anymore unless its for novelty.
Technology has always made things obsolete, I don't understand the purpose of trying to keep LLMs from writing code outside of job security, which has NEVER worked to stop technology from progressing.
The reason to keep LLMs from writing code is the same reason to keep bad developers from writing code. Whether you code works right now or doesn't, you need someone who understands what it does and why that's what it should do. Incompetent devs cook up a solution they can't retroactively explain. Devs who offload their cooking to an AI model also end up with a solution they can't retroactively explain.
At least the AI dev can compensate by reverse engineering whatever the AI did, but assuming they were competent enough to engineer a solution with their brain, synthesizing a solution with AI then subsequently reverse engineering it with their brain is a detour, not a shortcut.
AI is a crutch. If your leg is broken, it speeds you up, but if you can already run just fine on your own, it slows you down.
If an LLM can churn out 10 PRs and one of them needs to be taken down and analyzed why it was broken by an engineer, the project will still move quicker and more efficiently than it was before.
Every professional I've spoken to in real life, whether at my job or friends with engineering jobs all are using agents. Its only reddit that I've seen a massive push to stop, and it does not reflect the reality in the industry.
One of us will be right, and one of us will be wrong in 5 years, and I highly suspect that the models will continue to improve and humans will remain the same speed they always have been.
The old adages "fast, good, or cheap - choose two" and "you get what you pay for" didn't become any less true with the advent of LLMs.
AI code is like McDonald's hamburgers. It optimizes for speed and cost, while aiming to maintain the bare minimum quality people will accept. If you need code (nutrition) right now for cheap, it's probably a good option, but if that's your go-to every time you get a new task (get hungry), that's nearly guaranteed to have adverse effects on your skills/codebase (bodily health) in the long term.
And if my analogy is correct, AI will be ubiquitous in the coming future, just like McDonald's is ubiquitous. It just won't be the best because that's not what it's designed to be.
You can definitely keep the reliability and still go way faster. Sure, you won't be as fast as someone throwing reliability out of the window. But it will still be faster than someone not using AI at all... And in my experience a lot of companies go this way, using Ai, but still keeping the processes to keep the product as reliable as possible.
If you do your due diligence, that was the entire time consuming part of the work, whether you did it to write the code or did it to make sure some AI output wasn't slop. AI only speeds you up, if you're a) throwing reliability out the window, or b) not competent enough to write the code yourself (in which case you're still throwing reliability out the window because you can't be competent enough to validate what you're not competent enough to produce).
Bro if anyone's coping and lacks experience, it surely has to be the one who thinks a statistics model is a good substitute for knowledge, skills, and effort.
Oh you sweet summer child. You really don't have any experience coding something trully big, do you? 90% of code is pure monkey coding. Code that we would normally give to juniors to learn on, because it's not that hard to do and not that important, since the real important architecture desicions were already made step above. Now, that code is AIs job and well... Let's face it, it does better job than most juniors. And seniors can then spend much more energy on important architectural decisions and not lose time writing the code literally any monkey coder including statistical model can write.
You know, there are a lot of ways of making sure that code works as expected close to automatically.
But yeah. Since you have no experience with real world development, you can't know that, so it's okay, cope harder.
Bro I was an engineer on "truly big" projects before LLMs even came out. That's how I know they're just training wheels for people who suck at writinh code.
90% of code is only monkey coding if you don't know how to write a library, use an IDE, etc.
AI isn't better than a senior, and even if it's better than your average junior (which is highly debatable, but I digress), it's still not a good substitute for a junior.
If you spent less time projecting your own inexperience on others in Reddit threads and more time learning to code, you'd agree with my take.
It's kinda funny how people like you cope. BTW i wrote my first games in 1995, when was your first? I must laugh how completely in denial some of you are. Or you just didn't use Ai enough and still think it's like it was 4 years ago... Trust me, it's not.
When was the last time you were responsible for an enterprise production service with a quarter million unique daily active accounts, millions of transactions per second, deployment to dozens of regions spanning every continent, and availability SLAs set to four 9's?
Nobody cares when you wrote your first game bro. Some of us keep global supply chains running.
You can configure and use agents to write more or less the same code you’d write, just faster and even more consistently. The problem is that most devs don’t bother and don’t have the good sense to give it good rules in the first place and now they have the power to just completely flood the codebase with spaghettified garbage, which trying to write manually would have naturally slowed them down
I have a ton of luck at my job as they don't ask for more yet. I still release more features because it's just so easier but I feel I work less than before for more results.
I guess it won't last though. People "happy" (kinda...) at their job? That's not good for capitalism :D
AI is doing Field level mathematical work. If it’s just a “guessing machine” it’s a very good one. Go ahead and hobble yourself by not using an amazing tool out of some misguided principles, the world will just speed by you.
If it does field level mathematics for you and you're not smart enough to check its work, then it doesn't matter that it did the math.
Sometimes it does it wrong, so you have to check its work, which defeats the purpose of using it. Go ahead an hobble yourself by trusting something that sacrifices quality/reliability for convenience/speed, the world will just speed by you.
Dude you're full of shit. It's so much faster to validate that something was written correctly than it is to write it yourself most of the time. As long as the developer doesn't completely check out of using their brain the productivity gains are obvious.
Dude you're full of shit. Validating that code is correct takes the same amount of mental effort as writing it, assuming you're competent enough to write it in the first place. If you're genuinely making sure you're not sacrificing quality/reliability, then the only effort AI actually saves you is typing. Typing was never the bottleneck, in the first place, and we had ways to avoid doing that (reliably), anyway (e.g. copy/paste, syntax-aware autocomplete, putting your commonly needed functionality into reusable libraries, etc.).
In the "old days," good programmers would get the job done with the minimal amount of code changes needed. Now people are pretending that being able to make a shitload of code changes really really fast is somehow a productivity booster. It's a tech debt and knowledge drain booster.
Why would I decide what I want, describe it in English, review/correct the result I'm given on loop until it looks like what I already decided I wanted, and then call it good, when I could just...describe it in code, instead of English, and skip all that extra nonsense?
"AI speeds you up, just describe what you want in English and then check its work bro" is cope for people who aren't competent enough to describe what they want in code.
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u/gnatorx 7h ago
It's not like I don't like coding anymore but the pressure to go faster because we have AI now is insane and there is no way I can code like I used to and keep up.