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Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

manuel.kiessling.net

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Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#61

Post by fragmede »

Aurornis wrote: post #60
fragmede wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. it's gone the other way for me. because I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week, it's made everything more fun, not less.

I followed a lot of Twitter people who were vibecoding their way to SaaS platforms because I thought it would be interesting to follow. So far none of them are having a great time after their initial enthusiasm. A lot of it is people discovering that there’s far more to a business than whipping up a SaaS app that does something. I’m also seeing a big increase in venting about how their progress is slowing to a crawl…

absolutely! It turns out that the code is just this one little corner of the whole thing. A critical corner, but still just one piece of many.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#62

Post by Aurornis »

only-one1701 wrote: post #5

Increasingly 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.

It’s also interesting to see how quickly the greenfield progress rate slows down as the projects grow.

I skimmed the vibecoding subreddits for a while. It was common to see frustrations about how coding tools (Cursor, Copilot, etc) were great last month but terrible now. The pattern repeats every month, though. When you look closer it’s usually people who were thrilled when their projects were small but are now frustrated when they’re bigger.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#63

Post by carpo »

conductr wrote: post #37

As a long time hobby coder, like 25 years and I think I’m pretty good(?), this whole LLM /vibecoding thing has zapped my creativity the past year or so. I like the craft of making things. I used tools I enjoy working with and learn new ones all the time (never got on the JS/react train). Sometimes I have an entrepreneur bug and want to create a marketable solution, but I often just like to build. Im also the kind of…

I'm the complete opposite. After being burnt out and feeling an almost physical repulsion to starting anything new, using AI has renewed my passion. I've almost finished a side project I started 4 weeks ago and it's been awesome. Used AI from the beginning for a Desktop app with a framework I'd never heard of before and the learning curve is almost non-existent. To be able to get the boring things done in minutes is amazing.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#64

Post by caseyohara »

fragmede wrote: post #40
conductr wrote: post #37

As a long time hobby coder, like 25 years and I think I’m pretty good(?), this whole LLM /vibecoding thing has zapped my creativity the past year or so. I like the craft of making things. I used tools I enjoy working with and learn new ones all the time (never got on the JS/react train). Sometimes I have an entrepreneur bug and want to create a marketable solution, but I often just like to build. Im also the kind of…

Fascinating. it's gone the other way for me. because I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week, it's made everything more fun, not less.

> I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week

This reminds me of the famous HN comment when Drew Houston first announced Dropbox here in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#65

Post by carpo »

conductr wrote: post #49
fragmede wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. it's gone the other way for me. because I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week, it's made everything more fun, not less.

Yeah, I see that perspective bu I guess my thought process is “what’s the point, if everyone else can now do the same” I had long ago culled many of those ideas based on my ability to execute the marketing plan or the “do I really even want to run that kind of business?” test. I already knew I could build whatever I wanted to exist so My days of pumping out side projects ended long ago and I became more selective wit…

I guess it depends why you're writing the code. I'm writing a local video library desktop app to categorise my home and work videos. I'm implementing only the features I need. No one else will use it, I'll be finished the first version after about 4 weeks of weekend and night coding, and it's got some pretty awesome features I never would have thought possible (for me). Without AI I probably never would have done this. I'm sold, even just for the reduction of friction in getting a project off the ground. The first 80% was 80% AI developed and the last 20% has flipped to 80% coded by me. Which is great, because this part is the meat of the app and where I want most input.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#66

Post by caseyohara »

fragmede wrote: post #44
cglace wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can create a serious contender to Salesforce or Zapier in a week?

like an Eventbrite or a shopmonkey. but yeah, you don't think you could? Salesforce is a whole morass. not every customer uses every corner of it, and Salesforce will nickel and dime you with their consultants and add ons and plugins. if you can be more specific as to which bit of Salesforce you want to provide to a client we can go deep.

But you said "I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week".

Any SaaS business. In a week. And to be a "serious contender", you have to have feature parity. Yet now you're shifting the goalposts.

What's stopping you? There are 38 weeks left in 2025. Please build "serious contenders" for each of the top 38 most popular SaaS products before the end of the year. Surely you will be the most successful programmer to have ever lived.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#67

Post by nsonha »

dilyevsky wrote: post #57
ramesh31 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The scary thing is: I have seen professional human developers write worse code. This is kind of the rub of it all. If the code works, passes all relevant tests, is reasonably maintainable, and can be fitted into the system correctly with a well defined interface, does it really matter? I mean at that point its kind of like looking at the output of a bytecode compiler and being like "wow what a mess". And it's not li…

what are you going to do when something suddenly doesn't work and cursor endlessly spins without progress no matter how many "please don't make mistakes" you add? delete the whole thing and try to one-shot it again?

Why do you HAVE TO one-shot? No one says you have to code like those influencers. You are a software engineer, use AI like one, iteratively.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#69

Post by [deleted] »

imiric wrote: post #18
rybosome wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok - not wrong at all. Now take that feedback and put it in a prompt back to the LLM. They’re very good at honing bad code into good code with good feedback. And when you can describe good code faster than you can write it - for instance it uses a library you’re not intimately familiar with - this kind of coding can be enormously productive.

> They’re very good at honing bad code into good code with good feedback. And they're very bad at keeping other code good across iterations. So you might find that while they might've fixed the specific thing you asked for—in the best case scenario, assuming no hallucinations and such—they inadvertently broke something else. So this quickly becomes a game of whack-a-mole, at which point it's safer, quicker, and easie…

[deleted]

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#70

Post by pphysch »

I'm skeptical that

1. Clearly define requirements

2. Clearly sketch architecture

3. Setup code tool suite

4. Let AI agent write the remaining code

Is better price-performance than going lighter on 1-3 and instead of 4, spending that time writing the code yourself with heavy input from LLM autocomplete, which is what LLMs are elite at.

The agent will definitely(?) write the code faster, but quality and understanding (tech debt) can suffer.

IOW the real takeaway is that knowing the requirements, architecture, and tooling is where the value is. LLM Agent value is dubious.

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