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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

#71

Post by gerdesj »

necovek wrote: post #9

The 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,…

My current favourite LLM wankery example is this beauty: https://blog.fahadusman.com/proxmox-replacing-failed-drive-i...

Note how it has invented the faster parameter for the zpool command. It is possible that the blog writer hallucinated a faster parameter themselves without needing a LLM - who knows.

I think all developers should add a faster parameter to all commands to make them run faster. Perhaps a LLM could create the faster code.

I predict an increase of man page reading, and better quality documentation at authoritative sources. We will also improve our skills at finding auth sources of docs. My uBlacklist is getting quite long.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#72

Post by fragmede »

caseyohara wrote: post #66
fragmede wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 succes…

The rest of the business is the issue. I can whitelabel a Spotify clone but licensing rights and all that business stuff is outside my wheelhouse. An app that serves mp3s and has a bunch of other buttons? yeah, done. "shifting goalposts?" no, we're having a conversation, I'm not being deposed under a subpoena.

My claim is that in a week you could build a thing that people want to use, as long as you can sell it, that's competitive with existing options for a given client. Salesforce is a CRM with walled gardens after walled garden. access to each of which costs extra, of course. they happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right bunch of assholes.

A serious contender doesn’t have to start with everything. It starts by doing the core thing better—cleaner UX, clearer value, easier to extend. That’s enough to matter. That’s enough to grow.

I’m not claiming to replace decades overnight. But momentum, clarity, and intent go a long way. Especially when you’re not trying to be everything to everyone—just the right thing for the right people.

as for Spotify: https://bit.ly/samson_music

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#73

Post by fragmede »

caseyohara wrote: post #64
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 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

you don't get to choose why you get Internet famous, it chooses you.

thankfully, I'm not important enough for my comment to amount to the same thing.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#74

Post by byproxy »

necovek wrote: post #9

The 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,…

As an actually unseasoned Python developer, would you be so kind as to explain why the problems you see are problems and their alternatives? Particularly the first two you note.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#75

Post by Perizors »

necovek wrote: post #9

The 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,…

How do you properly configure a logger in application like that?

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#76

Post by ramesh31 »

nsonha wrote: post #67
dilyevsky wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>No one says you have to code like those influencers. You are a software engineer, use AI like one, iteratively.

This is my issue with all the AI naysayers at this point. It seems to all boil down to "haha, stupid noob can't code so he uses AI" in their minds. It's like they are incapable of understanding that there could simultaneously be a bunch of junior devs pushing greenfield YouTube demos of vibe coding, while at the same time expert software engineers are legitimately seeing their productivity increase 10x on serious codebases through judicious use.

Go ahead and keep swinging that hammer, John Henry.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#77

Post by carpo »

Denzel wrote: post #32
ramesh31 wrote: post #22

This maps pretty well to my experience. Other devs will say things like "AI is just a stupid glorified autocomplete, it will never be able to handle my Very Special Unique Codebase. I even spent 20 minutes one time trying out Cursor, and it just failed" Nope, you're just not that good obviously. I am literally 10x more productive at this point. Sprint goals have become single afternoons. If you are not tuned in to wh…

Can you talk through specifically what sprint goals you’ve completed in an afternoon? Hopefully multiple examples. Grounding these conversations in an actual reality affords more context for people to evaluate your claims. Otherwise it’s just “trust me bro”. And I say this as a Senior SWE who’s successfully worked with ChatGPT to code up some prototype stuff, but haven’t been able to dedicate 100+ hours to work throu…

If you do want to get more into it, I'd suggest something that plugs into your IDE instead of Copy/Paste with ChatGPT. Try Aider or Roo code. I've only used Aider, and run it in the VS terminal. It's much nicer to be able to leave comments to the AI and have it make the changes to discrete parts of the app.

I'm not the OP, but on your other point about completing sprint goals fast - I'm building a video library app for myself, and wanted to add tagging of videos. I was out dropping the kids at classes and waiting for them. Had 20 minutes and said to Aider/Claude - "Give me an implementation for tagging videos." It came back with the changes it would make across multiple files: Creating a new model, a service, configuring the DI container, updating the DB context, updating the UI to add tags to videos and created a basic search form to click on tags and filter the videos. I hit build before the kids had finished and it all worked. Later, I found a small bug - but it saved me a fair bit of time. I've never been a fast coder - I stare at the screen and think way too much (function and variable names are my doom ... and the hardest problem in programming, and AI fixes this for me).

Some developers may be able to do all this in 20 minutes, but I know that I never could have. I've programmed for 25 years across many languages and frameworks, and know my limitations. A terrible memory is one of them. I would normally spend a good chunk of time on StackOverflow and the documentation sites for whatever frameworks/libraries I'm using. The AI has reduced that reliance and keeps me in the zone for longer.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#78

Post by echelon »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #25
echelon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a similar analogy here for products in the AI era. Bolting AI onto existing products probably doesn't make sense. AI is going to produce an entirely new set of products with AI-first creation modalities. You don't need AI in Photoshop / Gimp / Krita to manipulate images. You need a brand new AI-first creation tool that uses your mouse inputs like magic to create images. Image creation looks nothing li…

Just for the record, Photoshop's first generative 'AI' feature, Content Aware Fill, is 15 years old. That's a long time for Adobe not to have figured out what your are saying.

Photoshop is unapproachable to the 99%.

A faster GPT 4o will kill Photoshop for good.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#79

Post by denkmoon »

Senior developer skills haven't changed. Wrangling paragraphs of business slop into real technical requirements, communicating these to various stakeholders, understanding how all the discrete parts of whatever system you're building fit together, being responsible for timelines, getting the rest of the team coordinated/aligned and on-track, etc.

Actually coding is a relatively small part of my job. I could use an LLM for the others parts but my employer does not appreciate being given word salad.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#80

Post by dilyevsky »

nsonha wrote: post #67
dilyevsky wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is because it generally produces crap code you have to one shot or else iteration becomes hard. Similar to how a junior would try to refactor their mess and just make a bigger mess
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