Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
manuel.kiessling.net
Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
1–10 of 323 posts
Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
#2This is interesting, thanks for posting. I've been searching for some sort of 'real' usage of AI-coding. I'm a skeptic of the current state of things, so it's useful to see real code.
I know Python, but have been coding in Go for the last few years. So I'm thinking how I'd implement this in Go.
There's a lot of code there. Do you think it's a lot, or it doesn't matter? It seems reasonably clear though, easy to understand.
I'd have expected better documentation/in-line comments. Is that something that you did/didn't specify?
Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
#3This is extremely fascinating and finally something that feels extremely tangible as opposed to vibes based ideas around how AI will "take everyone's jobs" while failing to fill in the gaps between. This feels extremely gap filling.
I find it quite interesting how we can do a very large chunk of the work up front in design, in order to automate the rest of the work. Its almost as if waterfall was the better pattern all along, but we just lacked the tools at that time to make it work out.
Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
#4I completely agree, as a fellow senior coder. It allows me to move significantly faster through my tasks and makes me much more productive.
It also makes coding a lot less painful because I'm not making typos or weird errors (since so much code autocompletes) that I spend less time debugging too.
Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
#5Increasingly I’m realizing that in most cases there is a SIGNIFICANT difference between how useful AI is on greenfield projects vs how useful it is on brownfield projects. For the former: pretty good! For the brownfield, it’s often worse than useless.
Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
#6This is extremely fascinating and finally something that feels extremely tangible as opposed to vibes based ideas around how AI will "take everyone's jobs" while failing to fill in the gaps between. This feels extremely gap filling. I find it quite interesting how we can do a very large chunk of the work up front in design, in order to automate the rest of the work. Its almost as if waterfall was the better pattern a…
Waterfall has always been the best model as long as specs are frozen, which is never the case.
Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
#7Increasingly I’m realizing that in most cases there is a SIGNIFICANT difference between how useful AI is on greenfield projects vs how useful it is on brownfield projects. For the former: pretty good! For the brownfield, it’s often worse than useless.
Right, but AI could change the ratio of greenfield vs brownfield then (« I’ll be faster if I rewrite this part from scratch »)
Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
#8Increasingly I’m realizing that in most cases there is a SIGNIFICANT difference between how useful AI is on greenfield projects vs how useful it is on brownfield projects. For the former: pretty good! For the brownfield, it’s often worse than useless.
My experience on brownfield projects is the opposite.
Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
#9The premise might possibly be true, but as an actually seasoned Python developer, I've taken a look at one file: https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co...
All of it smells of a (lousy) junior software engineer: from configuring root logger at the top, module level (which relies on module import caching not to be reapplied), over not using a stdlib config file parser and building one themselves, to a raciness in load_json where it's checked for file existence with an if and then carrying on as if the file is certainly there...
In a nutshell, if the rest of it is like this, it simply sucks.
Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age
#10Very good concrete examples. AI is moving very fast so it can become overwhelming, but what has held true is focusing on writing thorough prompts to get the results you want.
Senior developers have the experience to think through and plan out a new application for an AI to write. Unfortunately a lot of us are bogged down by working our day jobs, but we need to dedicate time to create our own apps with AI.
Building a personal brand is never more important, so I envision a future where dev's have a personal website with thumbnail links (like a fancy youtube thumbnail) to all the small apps they have built. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all with beautiful or modern UIs. The prompt they used can be the new form of blog articles. At least that's what I plan to do.