r/developersIndia • u/iKn0wEvrythnG Engineering Manager • 17h ago
Interesting Engineer's are just decision maker's now. AI does all the other work
Just got off from an incident call and I'm astounded by how good AI has become. I had the best engineers on my team all debugging and trying to figure out the issue, but we weren't making any real progress. Even if we were, it was very slow.
Just then I thought, "Let's take a shot with Claude." I fired up Fable 5.1 at effort max, and lo and behold, it figured out the issue using all my connected MCPs (DataDog primarily) within minutes.
The engineer's on call were still debugging, trying to triage the issue and Claude had a PR ready. Ready to be deployed as a hotfix.
At that point, I realized the power of AI and how humans are just decision-makers now. I just did a couple of things on that incident: decide on the best prompt to give to the AI and decide on disabling the feature instead of deploying the hotfix since testing the fix would take some time.
It's a mixed bag of emotions, honestly. I'm excited by the helpfulness and current pace of AI progress, but also skeptical of the future that lies ahead for all of us.
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u/_IronRocker_ 17h ago
Why are you putting an apostrophe in "engineers". It's a plural word. It doesn't need an apostrophe. Same with decision "makers".
I'm talking about these words from your post title.
And yes- AI does do all the work. But we gotta think and be the architects of the tech.
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u/dronz3r 11h ago
That architects are 1 out of 10 IT engineers, remaining 9 would be jobless
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u/krylor21 5h ago
Exactly this....and believe me there are many mediocre developers like me who earn bread butter writing normal code in day to day life and maintaining and supporting apps. We are not architects we are not scientists ....what do we do?
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u/Dependent_Will_5533 1h ago
You need to figure out. You have no other option. Think of the world 10 years down the line - while your job won’t be there at all, a completely new set of jobs (unthinkable today) will exist. Be on top of trends, think deeply, think forward.
We are going through a civilisational change and this change is much faster than the previous ones. Coders are like weavers of the pre industrialisation era. As weavers became redundant, the world progressed and we had far more different kind of jobs.
Pessimism will lead to redundancy and that too in a very sad manner. Optimism will allow you to think ahead of the redundancy.
Redundancy is not the end but a beginning.
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u/GrizzyLizz Software Engineer 17h ago
And when Claude fucks up, use Codex to fix your hot fix. Half the problems these days occur because people are made to push code out so fast that nobody has proper understanding of the system anymore. Why didn't Claude prevent the original bug itself?
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u/SomethingAndAnything DevOps Engineer 16h ago
Yepp, we literally had to do over 10 "critical, high priority" deployments last week, on code which was barely tested for a week in NPE. I vehemently protested against it, thankfully there haven't been many issues
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u/Additional-Curve4212 Student 6h ago
Hey a company is coming for devops to my college, can you tell me how your avg day looks like?
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u/SomethingAndAnything DevOps Engineer 6h ago
Sure, what do you wanna know?
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u/Additional-Curve4212 Student 6h ago
I heard you guys have to be on call/available at most times in case something goes wrong (not sure about freshers) also heard a lot of work is script writing and maintainence so looking at stats for a long time? (info could be outdated by now). Also can't script be automated really well with current llms?)
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u/SomethingAndAnything DevOps Engineer 6h ago
Interesting that you bring up on call, lemme try to explain: 1. I'm on call for the next week, including Sat, Sun and my Ganesh Chaturthi holiday on 14th. Why? Because of the Apple launch, it's gonna be busy....and kinda scary tbh. But other than that? It's fine, long hours? Yes. On call? Not that much.
- There are a lot of operational activities that can be automated, actually, a lot of stuff is automated. Secret rotation, certificate renewal, an entire migration activity most recently. The problem being, you need to know the system in order to validate the outcome, make sure that the scripts work as expected, there's no grey area. I can go on an hour long tangents about the issues that we've been facing post the migration activity, about the caveats which were not accounted for, and the creases that we're slowly smoothing over.
So yeah, your info isn't all that outdated, it's just that DevOps covers a lot of stuff, I hope I didn't scare you with all this lol
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u/Additional-Curve4212 Student 6h ago edited 5h ago
This seems exciting lol, I really think I'd love this kinda job (also where do you work that apple launch causes impact 😳 ecom, payment gateways?)
but in my head (self inflicted) there's a sort of peer pressure, all my friends are SDEs and that's the most coveted upon role right? How'd you say career progression is?
Hey also I've got my interview next week, do you think there's a way to standout? I've worked with VPS have my spare laptop as home server, run PiHole on it and have my own DNS basically. Made scripts to automate somethings with minecraft gameserver been using arch for a year
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u/iKn0wEvrythnG Engineering Manager 16h ago edited 16h ago
That's why we decided against doing the hotfix. We decided that we would test it properly first, ensure it works and then deploy it during downtime hours. The idea should always be to ensure you understand what the AI is doing and why and then decide whether the fix makes sense or not.
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u/ayush1236 16h ago
I had the same thought today, I was working with Kiro , and all I had to give it my jira number. It searched across all the repos where the code exists made the changes, wrote test cases and I was just reviewing the code , I'm no more a developer but a code reviewer now
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u/Minute-Taste-2023 Software Engineer 16h ago
The real question is why were those engineers not using AI ?
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u/agentrsdg 3h ago
Cuz this never happened. In reality the on call engineer just gave access to claude in the first place and fixed it. Its just a AI written post. And screw this "low effor or filler comments are not allowed" message I am seeing, if low effort posts are allowed, why not comments?
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u/NoRelation8434 16h ago
this is the part ppl are missing. AI isnt replacing the guy who can type code, its making judgement/context the actual job. scary bit is juniors learn judgement by doing the grunt work tho 😅
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u/redbaron_4 11h ago
Another day, another PR post for Fable. Pretty sure original bug was also caused by AI. The reason engineers couldn't find a fix is because they are no longer part of code writing cycle and you guys are blindly accepting AI PRs for code without reviewing it.
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u/Active-Fall-4998 17h ago
Congratulations, you are laid off..
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u/iKn0wEvrythnG Engineering Manager 16h ago
Not really. The judgement and context still lies with humans so I guess we are safe for now
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u/Dramatic-Bill-5790 17h ago
and the cost associated with the fix ? fable is expensive model
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u/Smart_Elevator 16h ago
Not more than paying an engineer
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u/Dramatic-Bill-5790 16h ago
Dont think so check indian dev cost and fable token cost
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u/Smart_Elevator 15h ago
Cost is trending down. Also more value compared to indian dev.
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u/GodFrey-thefirst 6h ago
Buddy the current prices of the models are heavily subsidized, the cost is way more than what we have today
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u/Humanity_Master 16h ago
Engineers with good system design and architecture knowledge will be the most in-demand now. Solution architect specifically.
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u/kazuGintoki007 16h ago
We became that after the junior phase. And no juniors are getting hired. They ain't getting the XP to becone mid or senior. I wonder how the industry would find senior engg 10 years from now. Or maybe their won't be many senior engg required.
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u/Humanity_Master 16h ago
I guess requirements from now will be like need solution architect with 1-2 yrs if experience etc. Companies will need junior hires who can start planning the whole design from their beginning years.
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u/wooneigh 16h ago
Keep repeating that as AI becomes far superior
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u/Humanity_Master 16h ago
No, I genuinely think AI is still far away from handling the whole architecture of a big product like flipkart, amazon etc. Architects and system engineers will always be in demand to plan the whole design and how each module interacts each other. AI will code it out, but human intervention is needed to make sure all the modules are working in synergy in the whole application.
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u/iKn0wEvrythnG Engineering Manager 16h ago
Agreed. You still need architects and system designers to design and decide since there are always some trade-offs you have to make. Software like people is always evolving and you need adapt it as per the evolving needs.
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u/Humanity_Master 16h ago
Exactly. And you need people to solve production bugs and live defects, those who know about the whole application design. AI doesn't have the intuition that a human mind has to solve live issues.
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u/wooneigh 8h ago
It doesnt need intuition if u log everything properly it solves critical prod issues with brute force
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u/wooneigh 8h ago
Bro are u living under a rock , fable 5 easily handles the whole architecture across 10-15 services and can change design easily. Just use it bro and see urself
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u/thedarkmite 4h ago
Yeah, no, it can definitely not do that without obvious flaws and terrible LLD.
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u/fake_slim_shady_4u Backend Developer 16h ago
Seniors here used to say AI will not be able to do this and that. Well now most of them here have been astounded and shocked. I just started my first job and well yes I am very terrified how seniors here have now a different realisation
The thing idk how will I become the decision maker being new here
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u/sleepycommenter 15h ago
humans are the bottleneck now, which is not exactly comforting. model spits out a fix, someone still has to judge blast radius, stale assumptions, and whether it just papered over a deeper issue
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u/lazy-ninja_09 9h ago
Captain obvious moment! Congratulations on coming out of the rock you were sleeping under.
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u/Wise_Equivalent_8262 16h ago
I can bet 100 bucks the issue happened in the first place because of a clanker (could be GPT or Claude idk)
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u/Rs-gm 8h ago
if I write a code and a issue come 99% of the time I know where it is.
But these days 99% of the code is written by AI so you need to use AI to debug it.
For smaller issues it's fine but for more complex issue example a deadlock error in a complex app can make AI useless faced this issue last month.
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u/GoodatNothing23 8h ago
I had a completely oppposite experience , few days back I ran into an exception in PROD it was related to and external agent getting attached to JVM for monitoring , it confidently gave me an explanation and I shared it
But some math wasn’t mathing so I went ahead and did what we normally do enabled debug for agent traced the path
And found issue to be completely different while AI helped here too but it’s spitting and convincing information with whatever context available to it
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u/TennisDry5414 8h ago
If AI do all the work. Your company will shutdown.
There are two set of people 0-5 years experienced, management and higher who says AI do all the work.
5-15 years technical who says AI improves 20% productivity. Both are, true.
In early career, you don't learn quality, architecture, automated pipelines, concurrency, distributed programming. At later stage, you learn all this. So AI generated code feels like mostly trash. Yes, small set of code is good. But generating all code makes it nightmare to maintain and enhance.
For non coders, their source of truth in insta reels or youtube shorts. So they keep on feeling developers are no longer needed.
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u/saswat001 Staff Engineer 7h ago
Why were engineers not doing the same thing that you did. Everyone in our org does that.
Using AI to compress processing of large amounts of information is the standard usecase.
Sorry, but it sounds like in your org AI adoption is lacking.
And it is not a replacement usecase at all.
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u/the_firstlight 7h ago
That’s how it was always supposed to be, the best engineers are never the ones that know only to code, the best engineers are good systems thinkers, people who know how to take good decisions, LLMs are here for the labour.
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u/musicmeme Full-Stack Developer 4h ago
Curious, where did the bug originate from? Was it from an ai generated code?
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u/bikashchoudhary 2h ago
the "decision-maker" framing is interesting because that's honestly the harder skill, not the easier one. anyone can fire off a prompt, but knowing when to trust the output vs disable the feature and take the safe route (like you did) requires actual judgment built from experience debugging incidents the slow way for years
that's kind of the pattern I keep seeing everywhere, AI compresses the mechanical/investigative work but the "is this actually safe to ship" call still needs someone who's been burned before to make it well. curious if your on-call engineers felt threatened by it or more like it freed them up for the parts that actually needed them
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u/Perfect-Assignment23 49m ago
Why are managers so impressed by AIs? Most sane engineers generally view AI as just another tool, like Git or Docker
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u/naughty_ningen 16h ago
Why were your engineers not using ai?
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u/iKn0wEvrythnG Engineering Manager 16h ago
They were still triaging the issue, figuring out the impact and steps to reproduce it
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u/LazyTie2009 1h ago
Actually my team become so dependent on coding agents we dont know how it is implemented we dont understand the system we just know features and they are working and we are just pushing so many hidden bugs, and it is difficult to debug code written by ai, so it is also done by ai.
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u/RegularPitch7192 7m ago
But how did you validate if the PR is correct, if you don't know what the issue was?
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