221–230 of 532 posts
However, there's a big question as to whether these are short productivity gains vs longer lasting gains. There's a hypothesis that the AI generate code will slowly spaghetti-fy a codebase.
Is 1-2 years sufficiently long enough to take this into consideration? Or disprove the spaghettification?
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Failures of capitalism that probably need regulation. If the middle class and workers are to be protected.
The city of Seattle decided that gig delivery drivers needed to be protected. They passed a minimum wage for them. The income of gig drivers promptly dropped, as the rise in prices corresponded with a drop in customers. Who regulates the regulators?
The voters and their representatives, if they put their minds to it.
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> Are you just working on personal projects or in a shared codebase with tens or hundreds of other devs? Like - I presume almost everyone - somewhere in the middle? That was a helluva dichotomy to offer me... > how do you keep your AI generated content from turning the whole thing into an incomprehensible superfund site of tech debt? By reading it, thinking about it and testing it? Did I somehow give the impression I…
> That was a helluva dichotomy to offer me... I certainly didn't intend it that way, more like a continuum. O(1) --> O(10) --> O(100) --> ... > Did I somehow give the impression I'm cutting and pasting huge globs of code straight from ChatGPT into a git commit? Yes, a little. It seemed to me like you were advocating using the LLM to generate large amounts of tedious output.
I use AI either as an unblocker to get me started, or to write a handful of lines that are too complex to do from memory but not so complex that I can't immediately grok them.
I find both types of usage very satisfying and helpful.
I sometimes wonder about whether the decline in IT worker quality is down to companies trying to force more and more roles onto each worker to reduce headcount. Developers, Operations, and Security used to be dedicated roles. Then we made DevOps and some businesses took that to mean they only needed 2/3 of the headcount, rather than integrating those teams. Then we made DevSecOps, and some businesses took that to mea…
I think that what the MBAs miss is this phenomena of overconstraint. Once you have separate the generic role of "developer" into "developer, operations, and security", you've likely specified all sorts of details about how those roles need to be done. When you combine them back into DevSecOps, all the details remain, and you have one person doing 3x the work instead of one person doing the work 3x more efficiently. To effectively go backwards, you have to relax constraints, and let that one person exercise their judgment about how to do the job.
A corollary is that org size can never decrease, only increase. As more employees are hired, jobs become increasingly specialized. Getting rid of them means that that job function is simply not performed, because at that level of specialization, the other employees cannot simply adjust their job descriptions to take on the new responsibilities. You have to throw away the old org and start again with a new, small org, which is why the whole private equity / venture capital / startup ecosystem exists. This is also Gall's Law exists:
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> I did ML at insurance companies and got branded as an insurance ML guy. If you're an "ML insurance guy" outside of the US, it may be quite lucrative compared to other developers. It's really only in the US (and maybe China) that pure developers are demanding $200k+ salaries. In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary, and if you can provide value directly to the business, it will add a lot to…
> In most places in Europe, even $100k is considered a high salary I think it's worth adding here that US developers can have a much higher burden for things like health insurance. My child broke his arm this year, and we hit our very high deductible. I would like to see numbers factoring in things like public transportation, health insurance, etc., because I personally feel like EU vs US developers are a lot closer…
However, some US areas have competitively priced housing and jobs that would make the balance tilt in favor of America. In EU, affordable spots with lots of desirable local jobs are becoming increasingly rare. Perhaps Vienna, Wrocław and a few other places in Central/Eastern EU.
I wonder if the study includes the technical debt that more experienced developers had to tackle after the less experienced devs have contributed their AI-driven efforts. Because my personal experience has involved a lot of that in one of the companies listed in the study. Also, I've personally seen more interest in AI in devs that have little interest in technology, but a big interest in delivering. PMs love them th…
Disclaimer: I work at a company who sells coding AI (among many other things). We use it internally and the technical debt is an enormous threat that IMO hasn't been properly gauged. It's very very useful to carpet bomb code with APIs and patterns you're not familiar with, but it also leads to insane amounts of code duplication and unwieldy boilerplate if you're not careful, because: 1. One of the two big bias of the…
The study doesn't cover the long term effects of using generative AI on a project, which is the deskilling of your workforce. Because development will become an auction-like activity where the one that accepts more suggestions wins.
I think this is right. Just have to jump ship before it all explodes and people wonder what happened Similar to gaming the stock price for a couple quarters as C-level, but now with more incentive for this sort of behavior at IC level
They assimilate companies and leave a bloated hollow mess behind.
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So its not going to stop. Typical C-suite who holds real power has absolutely 0 clue about IT complexity, we are overpriced janitors to them. Their fault, their blame, but they are probably long gone when these mistakes manifest fully. In my banking corp, in past 13 years I've seen massive rise of complexity, coupled with absolutely madly done bureaucracy increase. I still could do all stuff that is required but - I…
- my laundry app (that I must use) takes minutes to load, doesn't cache my last used laundry room, and the list of rooms isn't even fucking sorted (literally: room 3, room 7, room 1, room 2, ...) - my AC's app takes 45 s to load even if I just used it, because it needs to connect. Worse, I'll bring the temp down in my house and in the evening raise it, but it'll come on even when 5F below my target value, staying on…
Do they have a place to mail your complaints? Who forces you to use the app? Annoy them. Annoy their boss. Write a flier pointing out how long it takes to use the app and leave those fliers in every laundry room you visit (Someone checks on those machines, right?). Heck, send an organization-wide email pointing out this problem. (CC your mayor, council-member, or congressional representative.) (You don't have to do all of these things, but a bit of gentle, non-violent, public name-and-shame can get results. Escalate gently accordingly as you fail to get results.)
> my AC's app takes 45 s to load even if I just used it, because it needs to connect
If I were in your shoes, assuming I had time, I might (a) do the above "email the company with a pointed comment about how their app sucks" or (b) start figuring out how to use Home Assistant as a shim / middleman to manage the AC, and thus make Home Assistant server and its phone app the preferred front-end for that system (c) write a review on your preferred review site indicating the app is a pile of garbage
> Even worse, I'll make PRs on open projects (or open issues another way and submit solutions) that having been working for months and they just go stale while I see other users reporting the same problems and devs working on other things in the same project (I'll even see them deny the behavior or just respond "works for me" closes issue before opener can respond)
Admittedly, the heavy-handed solution for this is to make a software fork, or a mod-pack, or "godelski's bag of fixes" or whatever, and maintain that (ideally automating the upkeep on that) until people keep coming to you for the best version, rather than the primary devs.
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No, I don't do this to everyone I meet or for every annoyance (it's work, and it turns people away if you complain about everything), but emails to the top of the food chain pointing out that basic stuff is broken sometimes gets results (or at least a meeting where you can talk someone's ear off for 30 minutes about stuff that is wrong), especially if that mail / email also goes to other influential people.
I'm pretty chill and kind and helpful, but when something repeatedly breaks and annoys several people every day, you might hear about it in several meetings that I attend, possibly over the next year, until I convince someone to fix it (even if it's me who eventually is tasked with fixing it).
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> That was a helluva dichotomy to offer me... I certainly didn't intend it that way, more like a continuum. O(1) --> O(10) --> O(100) --> ... > Did I somehow give the impression I'm cutting and pasting huge globs of code straight from ChatGPT into a git commit? Yes, a little. It seemed to me like you were advocating using the LLM to generate large amounts of tedious output.
I'm not sure where I said that but I certainly didn't intend to give that impression. I use AI either as an unblocker to get me started, or to write a handful of lines that are too complex to do from memory but not so complex that I can't immediately grok them. I find both types of usage very satisfying and helpful.