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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

#111

Post by dghlsakjg »

echelon wrote: post #78
dghlsakjg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Photoshop is a tool designed for the 1% of people who want that level of control for their vision. Adobe has several other tools for other markets.

Even the latest model from this week, which is undeniably impressive, can’t get close to the level of control that photoshop gives me. It often edits parts of the image I haven’t asked it to touch among other issues. I use photoshop as a former photojournalist, and AI manipulated images are of no use to me. My photos are documentary. They represent a slice of reality. I know that AI can create a realistic simulacrum of that, but I’m not interested.

This is like saying we won’t need text editors in the future. That’s silly, there are some things that we won’t need text editors for, but the ability of ai to generate and edit text files doesn’t mean that we won’t ever need to edit them manually.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#112

Post by Henchman21 »

taurath wrote: post #105
Henchman21 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think this was created by an LLM? I suspect they might actually have a pool named faster -- I know I've named pools similarly in the past. This is why I now name my pools after characters from the Matrix, as is tradition.

This really gets to an acceleration of enshittification. If you can't tell its an LLM, and there's nobody to verify the information, humanity is architecting errors and mindfucks into everything. All of the markers of what is trustworthy has been coopted by untrustworthy machines, so all of the way's we'd previously differentiated actors have stopped working. It feels like we're just losing truth as rapidly as LLMs c…

You know, things looked off to me, but thinking it was the output of an LLM just didn't seem obvious -- even though that was the claim! I feel ill-equipped to deal with this, and as the enshittification has progressed I've found myself using "the web" less and less. At this point, I'm not sure there's much left I value on the web. I wish the enshittification wasn't seemingly pervasive in life.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#113

Post by NewsaHackO »

selcuka wrote: post #91
NewsaHackO wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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... Explain the issue with load_json to me more. From my reading it checks if the file exists, then raises an error if it does not. How is that carrying on as if the file is certainly there?

There is a small amount of time between the `if` and the `with` where another process can delete the file, hence causing a race condition. Attempting to open the file and catching any exceptions raised is generally safer.

OK, that does make sense. Thanks!

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#114

Post by johnfn »

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,…

Not all code needs to be written at a high level of quality. A good deal of code just needs to work. Shell scripts, one-offs, linter rules, etc.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#115

Post by stemlord »

ramesh31 wrote: post #28
milicat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I browse through this, the more I agree. I feel like one could delete almost all comments from that project without losing any information – which means, at least the variable naming is (probably?) sensible. Then again, I don't know the application domain. Also… def _save_current_date_time(current_date_time_file: str, current_date_time: str) -> None: with Path(current_date_time_file).open("w") as f: f.write(…

>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…

Right, and the reason why professional developers are writing worse code out there is most likely because they simply don't have the time/aren't paid to care more about it. The LLM is then mildly improving the output in this brand of common real world scenario

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#116

Post by jayd16 »

johnfn wrote: post #114
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,…

Not all code needs to be written at a high level of quality. A good deal of code just needs to work. Shell scripts, one-offs, linter rules, etc.

It'll be really interesting to see if the tech advances fast enough that future AI can deal with the tech debt of present day AI or if we'll see a generational die off of apps/companies.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#117

Post by Aperocky »

johnfn wrote: post #114
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,…

Not all code needs to be written at a high level of quality. A good deal of code just needs to work. Shell scripts, one-offs, linter rules, etc.

Having seen my fair share of those, they tend to work either until they don't, or you need to somehow change it.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#118

Post by ramoz »

The gap between Sr and Jr skills with close as AI gets better. AI is coming for the SR developer, be assured.

Also, Keyframing can be done in a more autonomous fashion. Sr Engineers can truly vibe code if they setup a proper framework for themselves. Key framing as described in the article is too manual.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#119

Post by crm9125 »

carpo wrote: post #63
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…

Similar sentiment here. I taught myself python a decade ago after college, and used it in side projects, during my masters degree, in a few work projects. So it's been handy, but also required quite a bit of time and effort to learn.

But I've been using Claude to help with all kinds of side projects. One recently was to help create and refine some python code to take the latest Wikipedia zipped XML file and transform/load it locally into a PostgreSQL DB. The initial iteration of the code took ~16 hours to unzip, process, and load into the database. I wanted it to be faster.

I don't know how to use multiple processes/multi-threading, but after some prompting, iterating, and persistent negotiations with Claude to refine the code (and an SSD upgrade) I can go from the 24gb zip file to all cleaned/transformed data in the DB in about 2.5 hours. Feels good man.

Do I need to know exactly what's happening in the code (or at lowers levels, abstracted from me) to make it faster? not really. Could someone who was more skilled, that knew more about multi-threading, or other faster programming languages, etc..., make it even faster? probably. Is the code dog shit? it may not be production ready, but it works for me, and is clean enough. Someone who better knew what they were doing could work with it to make it even better.

I feel like LLMs are great for brainstorming, idea generation, initial iterations. And in general can get you 80%+ the way to your goal, almost no matter what it is, much faster than any other method.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#120

Post by Marsymars »

atemerev wrote: post #42

This is excellent, and matches my experience. Those lamenting the loss of manual programming: we are free to hone our skills on personal projects, but for corporate/consulting work, you cannot ignore 5x speed advantage. It's over. AI-assisted coding won.

This is actually a pretty compelling reason for me to suggest that my company not hire consultants/contractors to write code for us. A ton of our dev budget is already spent on untangling edge-case bugs from poorly written/understood code.
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