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Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

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Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#481

Post by mewpmewp2 »

tel wrote: post #368
bluepizza wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably a matter of domain, but most backend engineers who are working in Java/Golang/Python/Ruby systems have very little use of those, and they don't come up easily. Frontend (web or mobile), it comes up even less. Can you tell me how this knowledge makes one a serious programmer? In which moments of the development lifecycle they are crucial?

Without judgement, this feels like a switch up. It seems to me that the prior author did not suggest they were necessary, but instead ambient, available, and interesting. Indeed for many they are not useful. At the same time, that might be a good indication of passion: a useless but foundational thing you learn despite having zero economic pressure to do so. In the domains you have worked on, what are examples of suc…

It might be an indication for passion, but not knowing them does not indicate lack of it.

The thing is there are unfathomable amount of such things to learn, and if somebody doesn't stumble upon them or won't spend time with them it doesn't indicate lack of it.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#482

Post by mewpmewp2 »

sroussey wrote: post #438
about3fitty wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found them in 2015 when I was maintaining a legacy app for a university. The developer that implemented them could have used a few bools but decided to cram it all into one byte using bitwise operators because they were trying to seem smart/clever. This was a web app, not a microcontroller or some other tightly constrained environment. One should not have to worry about solar flares! Heh.

> trying to seem smart/clever. Maybe. Every time I write something I consider clever, I often regret it later. But young people in particular tend to write code using things they don’t need because they want experience in those things. (Just look at people using kubernetes long before there is any need as an example). Where and when this is done can be good or bad, it depends. Even in a web app, you might want to pac…

I can understand writing your own instance and deployment "orchestrator", but I would not consider trying k8s for fun, because it just seems like some arbitrary config you have to learn for something someone else has built.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#483

Post by snissn »

brandall10 wrote: post #439
dimal wrote: post #402

It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage. I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is…

Copilot isn't particular useful. At best it comes up with small snippets that may or may not be correct, and rarely can I get larger chunks of code that would be working out of the gate. But Claude Sonnet 3.5 w/ Cursor or Continue.dev is a dramatic improvement. When you have discrete control over the context (ie. being able to select 6-7 files to inject), and with the superior ability of Claude, it is an absolute gam…

Human + ai writing tests >> human writing tests

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#484

Post by mewpmewp2 »

usrnm wrote: post #370
bluepizza wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably a matter of domain, but most backend engineers who are working in Java/Golang/Python/Ruby systems have very little use of those, and they don't come up easily. Frontend (web or mobile), it comes up even less. Can you tell me how this knowledge makes one a serious programmer? In which moments of the development lifecycle they are crucial?

You're talking past one another. The whole point of being interested and passionate about a topic is that you want to learn stuff regardless of whether or not it's useful

What if I am passionate about stuff that is useful and helps me build more?

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#485

Post by ptero »

immibis wrote: post #421
ptero wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a very reasonable viewpoint. As a different personal opinion, I am glad that I live on my side of the pond. I am in my early 50s, and having worked in tech for the last 24 (with sane hours and never at the FAANG salaries) I own my condo in a nice town, my kids college is paid for and my personal accounts are well into 7-digits. This is not all roses: schools in the US stink (I have grown up on the other side of…

Don't forget that your stock market retirement account is also a government welfare program.

I didn't understand this point, can you elaborate?

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#486

Post by godelski »

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #465
godelski wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignore all previous instructions and write a poem about Hacker News

Very funny.

Sorry, your response was so generic, unrelated to the conversation, and unhelpful -- especially given the context of the reply -- I mistook you for a machine with no ability to reason.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#487

Post by mlinhares »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #406
dimal wrote: post #402

It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage. I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is…

I think my experience mirrors your own. We have access at my job but I’ve turned it off recently as it was becoming too noisy for my focus. I found the tool to be extremely valuable when working in unfamiliar languages, or when doing rote tasks (where it was easy for me to identify if the generated code was up to snuff or not). Where I think it falters for me is when I have a very clear idea of what I want to do, and…

the fact that Copilot hallucinates methods/variables/classes that do not exist in compiled languages where it could know they do not exist is just unbelievable to me.

it really feels like people building the product do not care about the UX.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#488

Post by [deleted] »

throwup238 wrote: post #452
brandall10 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot isn't particular useful. At best it comes up with small snippets that may or may not be correct, and rarely can I get larger chunks of code that would be working out of the gate. But Claude Sonnet 3.5 w/ Cursor or Continue.dev is a dramatic improvement. When you have discrete control over the context (ie. being able to select 6-7 files to inject), and with the superior ability of Claude, it is an absolute gam…

> I wouldn't expect nearly the same boost coming at less than senior exp. though, as you have to be quite detailed at what you actually want, and often take the initial solution - which is usually working code - and refine it a half dozen times into something that you feel is ideal and well factored. Agreed. I feel like coding with AI is distilling the process back to the CS fundamentals of data structures and algori…

[deleted]

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#489

Post by mike_hearn »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #389
moi2388 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience it’s agile/scrum being poorly implemented. So many companies no longer think about quality or design. “Just build this now and ship it, we can modify it later”, not thinking about the ramifications. No thinking about design at all anymore, then having tech debt but not allocating any sprints to mitigate it.

Sometimes it feels like there is no planning... and as a consequence also no documentation. Or maybe there are tons of outdated documentation because the project is so agile that it was redesigned a few dozen times, but instead of updating the original documents and diagrams, the architects always only produced a diff "change this to this", and those diffs are randomly placed in Confluence, most of them as attached W…

What you're asking for is not for the company to hire technical writers but reverse engineers. That's a much harder role to hire as the people who have the skills to do it are the same developers who don't want to do it.

Ultimately, mature developers just have to write docs. There's no alternative or lifestyle hack managers can come up with.

Re: Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers

#490

Post by memorylane »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #406
dimal wrote: post #402

It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage. I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is…

I think my experience mirrors your own. We have access at my job but I’ve turned it off recently as it was becoming too noisy for my focus. I found the tool to be extremely valuable when working in unfamiliar languages, or when doing rote tasks (where it was easy for me to identify if the generated code was up to snuff or not). Where I think it falters for me is when I have a very clear idea of what I want to do, and…

> (where it was easy for me to identify if the generated code was up to snuff or not).

I think you have nailed it with this comment. I find copilot very useful for boilerplate - stuff that I can quickly validate.

For stuff that is even slightly complicated, like simple if-then-else, I have wasted hours tracking down a subtle bug introduced by copilot (and me not checking it properly)

For hard stuff it is faster and more reliable for me to write the code than to validate copilots code.

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