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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

#121

Post by owebmaster »

jonnycoder wrote: post #10

Very 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…

> Building a personal brand is never more important

the low-hanging fruit is to create content/apps to help developers create their personal brands through content/apps.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#122

Post by mmazing »

When working with AI for software engineering assistance, I use it mainly to do three things -

1. Do piddly algorithm type stuff that I've done 1000x times and isn't complicated. (Could take or leave this, often more work than just doing it from scratch)

2. Pasting in gigantic error messages or log files to help diagnose what's going wrong. (HIGHLY recommend.)

3. Give it high level general requirements for a problem, and discuss POTENTIAL strategies instead of actually asking it to solve the problem. This usually allows me to dig down and come up with a good plan for whatever I'm doing quickly. (This is where real value is for me, personally.)

This allows me to quickly zero in on a solution, but more importantly, it helps me zero in strategically too with less trial and error. It let's me have an in-person whiteboard meeting (as I can paste images/text to discuss too) where I've got someone else to bounce ideas off of.

I love it.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#123

Post by hombre_fatal »

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 know what you mean. It takes the satisfaction out of a certain class of problems knowing that you can just generate the solution.

On the other hand, most tasks aren't fun nor satisfying and frankly they are a waste of time, like realizing you're about to spend the afternoon recredentializing in some aspect of Webpack/Gradle/BouncyCastle/Next.js/Combine/x/y/z just to solve one minor issue. And it's pure bliss when the LLM knows the solution.

I think the best antidote to the upset in your comment is to build bigger and more difficult things. Save your expertise for the stuff that could actually use your expertise rather than getting stuck wasting it on pure time burn like we had to in the past.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#124

Post by petersellers »

fragmede wrote: post #72
caseyohara wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here - that this website is comparable to Spotify? Even if you are talking about just the "core experience", this example supports the opposite argument that you are trying to make.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#125

Post by woah »

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…

Try being a drummer!

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#126

Post by plandis »

scandox wrote: post #68

One of the possibly obsolete things I enjoy about working with a human junior dev is that they learn and improve. It's nice to feel all this interaction is building something.

It’s common practice to put your preferences and tips/advice into a readme solely for the LLM to consume to learn about what you want it to do.

So you’d set things like code standards (and hopefully enforce them via feedback tools), guides for writing certain architectures, etc. Then when you have the LLM start working it will first read that readme to “learn” how you want it to generally behave.

I’ve found that I typically edit this file as time goes on as a way to add semi-permanent feedback into the system. Even if your context window gets too large when you restart the LLM will start at that readme to prime itself.

That’s the closest analogy I can think of.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#127

Post by bcoates »

mjr00 wrote: post #33
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…

> 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? You're not wrong here, but there's a big difference in programming one-off tooling or prototype MVPs and programming things that need to be maintained for years and years. We did this song and dance pretty recently with dynamic typing. Developers…

I think the productivity gains of dynamic typed languages were real, and based on two things: dynamic typing (can) provide certain safety properties trivially, and dynamic typing neatly kills off the utterly inadequate type systems found in mainstream languages when they were launched (the 90s, mostly).

You'll notice the type systems being bolted onto dynamic languages or found in serious attempts at new languages are radically different than the type systems being rejected by the likes of javascript, python, ruby and perl.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#128

Post by plandis »

The main questions I have with using LLMs for this purpose in a business setting are:

1. Is the company providing the model willing to indemnify _your_ company when using code generation? I know GitHub Copilot will do this with the models they provide on their hardware, but if you’re using Claude Code or Cursor with random models do they provide equal guarantees? If not I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before that landmine explodes.

2. In the US, AFAICT, software that is mostly generated by non-humans is not copyrightable. This is not an issue if you’re creating code snippets from an LLM, but if you’re generating an entire project this way then none or only small parts of the code base you generate would then be copyrightable. Do you still own the IP if it’s not copyrightable? What if someone exfiltrates your software? Do you have no or little remedy?

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#129

Post by nsonha »

dilyevsky wrote: post #80
nsonha wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I find it hard to believe that when the AI generates crap code, there is absolutely nothing you can do (change the prompt, modify context, add examples) to make it do what you want. It has not been my experience either. I only use AI to make small modules and refactor instead of one-shoting.

Also I find "AI makes crap code so we should give it a bigger task" illogical.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#130

Post by necovek »

ramesh31 wrote: post #76
nsonha wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> expert software engineers are legitimately seeing their productivity increase 10x

It's funny you would say this, because we are really commenting on an article where a self-proclaimed "expert" has done that and the "10x" output is terrible.

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