Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

manuel.kiessling.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 323 posts

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#231

Post by yapyap »

> Context on Code Quality (via HackerNews): The HackerNews discussion included valid critiques regarding the code quality in this specific Python project example (e.g., logger configuration, custom config parsing, potential race conditions). It’s a fair point, especially given I’m not a Python expert. For this particular green-field project, my primary goal was rapid prototyping and achieving a working solution in an unfamiliar stack, prioritizing the functional outcome over idiomatic code perfection or optimizing for long-term maintainability in this specific instance. It served as an experiment to see how far AI could bridge a knowledge gap. In brown-field projects within my areas of expertise, or projects demanding higher long-term maintainability, the human review, refinement, and testing process (using the guardrails discussed later) is necessarily much more rigorous. The critiques highlight the crucial role of experienced oversight in evaluating and refining AI-generated code to meet specific quality standards.

We all know how big companies handle software, if it works ship it. Basically once this shit starts becoming very mainstream companies will want to shift into their 5x modes (for their oh so holy investors that need to see stock go up, obviously.)

So once this sloppy prototype is seen as working they will just ship the shit sandwhich prototype. And the developers won’t know what the hell it means so when something breaks in the future, and that is when not if. They will need AI to fix it for them, cause once again they do not understand what is going on.

What I’m seeing here is you proposing replacing one of your legs with AI and letting it do all the heavy lifting, just so you can lift heavier things for the moment.

Once this bubble crumbles the technical debt will be big enough to sink companies, I won’t feel sorry for any of the AI boosties but do for their families that will go into poverty

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#232

Post by hansmayer »

Skimming through the article, it lacks clear structure and I am not sure what is the author attempting to show? Some new skills he had to use? Formulating requirements? That he can write extremely long prompts? The Conclusion section looks just like something a GenAI tool would produce. Or a first-year student in an essay.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#233

Post by bsdimp »

I yesterday set chatgpt to a coding task. It utterly failed. Its error handling was extensive, but wrong. It didn't know file formats. It couldn't write the code when i told it the format. The structure of the code sucked. The style was worse. I've never had to work so hard for such garbage. I could have knocked it out from scratch faster with higher quality.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#234

Post by raxxorraxor »

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,…

In my opinion this isn't even too relevant. I am no python expert but I believe defining a logger at the top for the average one file python script is perfectly adequate or even very sensible in many scenarios. Depends on what you expect the code to do. Ok, the file is named utils.py...

Worse by far is still the ability of AI to really integrate different problems and combine them into a solution. And it also seems to depend on the language. In my opinion especially Python and JS results are often very mixxed while other languages with presumably a smaller training set might even fare better. JS seems often fine with asynchronous operation like that file check however.

Perhaps really vetting a training set would improve AIs, but it would be quite work intensive to build something like that. That would require a lot of senior devs, which is hard to come by. And then they need to agree on code quality, which might be impossible.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#235

Post by SkyBelow »

XorNot wrote: post #193
dheera wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Humans also worry about their jobs, especially in PIP-happy companies; they are very well known for writing intentionally over-complicated code that only they understand so that they are irreplaceable

I'm not convinced this actually happens. Seems more like somthing people assume happens because they don't like whatever codebase is at the new job.

The challenge is that sufficiently bad code could be intentional or it could be from a lack of skill.

For example, I've seen a C# application where every function takes in and outputs an array of objects, supposedly built that way so the internal code can be modified without ever having to worry about the contract breaking. It was just as bad as you are imagining, probably worse. Was that incompetence or building things to be so complicated that others would struggle to work on it?

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#236

Post by fragmede »

petersellers wrote: post #124
fragmede wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The way I see it, the core user experience is that the user listens to music. There's playlist management on top of that and some other bits, sure, but I really don't see it as being that difficult to build those pieces. This is a no code widget I had lying around with a track that was produced last night because I kept asking the producer about a new release. I linked it because it was top of mind. It allows the user to listen to music, which I see as the core of what Spotify offers its users.

Spotify has the licensing rights to songs and I don't have the business acumen to go about getting those rights, so I guess I could make Pirate Spotify and get sued by the labels for copyright infringement, but that would just be a bunch of grief for me which would be not very fun and why would I want to screw artists out of getting paid to begin with?

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#237

Post by sivaragavan »

manmal wrote: post #162
sivaragavan wrote: post #138

Aah.. I have been repeating this to my team for several days now. Thanks for putting this together. I start every piece of work, green or brown, with a markdown file that often contains my plan, task breakdown, data models (including key fields), API / function details, and sample responses. For the tool part, though, I took a slightly different approach. I decided to use Rust primarily for all my projects, as the co…

> I have noticed many more errors are detected in AI-generated Rust code than in any other language. Is that because the Rust compiler is just a very strong guardrail? Sounds like it could work well for Swift too. If only xcodebuild were less of a pain for big projects.

Yes, exactly. AI isn’t gonna check things like memory management, data type overflows and such, during generation. It would be great if we catch them at compile time.

Regarding swift, totally hear you :) Also I haven’t tried generating swift code - wondering how well that would be trained as there are fewer open source codebases for that.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#238

Post by tediousgraffit1 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #199
carpo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm on this boat. I can use LLMs to skip the boring bits like generating API glue classes or simple output functions. Example: I'm building a tool to grab my data from different sites like Steam, Imdb, Letterboxd and Goodreads. I know perfectly well how to write a parser for the Goodreads CSV output, but it doesn't exactly tickle my brain. Cursor or Cline will do it in minutes. Now I've got some data to work with, wh…

this is the key idea right here. LLMs are not replacing good coders, they're electric yak shavers that we should all learn how to use. The value add is real, and incremental, not revolutionary.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#239

Post by fragmede »

cess11 wrote: post #230
fragmede wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Salesforce is and pretty much always has been a set of code generation platforms. If you can produce a decent code generation platform, do it. It's one of the most sure ways to making money from software since it allows you to deploy systems and outsource a large portion of design to your customers. Spotify is not the audio player widget in some user interface. It started off as a Torrent-like P2P system for file dis…

> Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on. Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify

I'm listening. I fully admit that I was looking at Spotify as a user and thus only as a music playing widget so I'd love to hear more about this side of things. What is user prediction?

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#240

Post by noisy_boy »

nottorp wrote: post #181
noisy_boy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how toxic the culture is in your workplace. This could have been an opportunity to "work" on another JIRA task showing 600% improvement over AI generated code.

I'll write that down for reference in case I do ever join an organization like that in the future, thanks. 600% improvement is worth what, 3 days of billable work if it lasts 5 minutes?

Series of such "improvements" could be fame and fortune in your team/group/vertical. In such places, the guy who toots the loudest wins the most.
Post reply on HN