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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

#251

Post by ManuelKiessling »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #146
noodletheworld wrote: post #45

> Once again, the AI agent implemented this entire feature without requiring me to write any code manually. > For controllers, I might include a small amount of essential details like the route name: [code] Commit history: https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co... Look, I honestly think this is a fair article and some good examples, but what is with this inane “I didn’t write any of it myself” c…

True, this needs to be fixed. What I wanted to express was that I didn’t do any of the implementation , that is, any logic . I need to phrase this better.

Wait, I just saw what you meant: so no, for the Python tool my message stands. I did not write any code for it myself.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#252

Post by necovek »

jstummbillig wrote: post #188
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. That's not the scary part. It's the honest part. Yes, we all have (vague) ideas of what good code looks like, and we might know it when we see it but we know what reality looks like. I find the standard to which we hold AI in that regard slightly puzzling. If I can get the same meh-ish code for way less money and way less time, that's a…

I do believe it's amazing what we can build with AI tools today.

But whenever someone advertises how an expert will benefit from it yet they end up with crap, it's a different discussion.

As an expert, I want AI to help me produce code of similar quality faster. Anyone can find a cheaper engineer (maybe five of them?) that can produce 5-10x the code I need at much worse quality.

I will sometimes produce crappy code when I lack the time to produce higher quality code: can AI step in and make me always produce high quality code?

That's a marked improvement I would sign up for, and some seem to tout, yet I have never seen it play out.

In a sense, the world is already full of crappy code used to build crappy products: I never felt we were lacking in that department.

And I can't really rejoice if we end up with even more of it :)

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#253

Post by hansmayer »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #241
hansmayer wrote: post #232

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.

I've taken this feedback to heart and tried to improve the structure a bit. The main message I want to bring across is two-fold: 1. Senior developers are in a great position to make productive use of AI coding tools 2. I have (so far) identified three measures that make AI coding sessions much more successful I hope the reworked version makes these more central and clear. I'm not a native English speaker, thus it's p…

Hey, thanks for not being offended about an honest comment, not a lot folks could take it as maturely, as you did :) May I suggest to add a short summary, half page max, of the important results that you consider to have achieved at the beginning of the article? Kind of like how scientific articles prepend the content with an abstract. I think it would help a lot in building the expectations for reading the rest of it.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#254

Post by dijksterhuis »

fragmede wrote: post #236
petersellers wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 use…

> The way I see it

i think ive detected the root cause of your problem.

and, funnily enough, it goes a long way to explaining the experiences of some other commentators in this thread on “vibe coding competitive SaaS products”.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#255

Post by barotalomey »

ramoz wrote: post #118

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.

> The gap between Sr and Jr skills with close as AI gets better.

Sorry, but as the wind blows, we only have indications of the opposite so far and it's wildly reported as a generating losing their ability for deep thought, relying too much on automated code generation. This is especially damaging for juniors, who never get the chance to learn the tricks of the trade in the first place, and they're the ones having a hard time explaining what the code the LLM generated even does.

Seniors will be few and far between, and we will charge premium for fixing up the crap LLM created, which will fit us great before retirement.

Good luck when we are retired.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#256

Post by globnomulous »

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,…

Thanks for doing the footwork. These TED talk blog posts always stink of phony-baloney nonsense.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#257

Post by merrywhether »

jstummbillig wrote: post #188
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. That's not the scary part. It's the honest part. Yes, we all have (vague) ideas of what good code looks like, and we might know it when we see it but we know what reality looks like. I find the standard to which we hold AI in that regard slightly puzzling. If I can get the same meh-ish code for way less money and way less time, that's a…

I think there’s a difference in that this is about as good as LLM code is going to get in terms of code quality (as opposed to capability a la agentic functionality). LLM output can only be as good as its training data, and the proliferation of public LLM-generated code will only serve as a further anchor in future training. Humans on the other hand ideally will learn and improve with each code review and if they don’t want to you can replace them (to put it harshly).

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#258

Post by overgard »

miningape wrote: post #213
overgard wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I just had Copilot sneak in a typo today that took about ten minutes of debugging to find. I certainly could have made a similar typo myself if copilot hadn't done it for me, but, all the same copilot probably saved me a minute worth of typing today but cost me 10 minutes of debugging.

Even if you made a similar typo you'd have a better understanding of the code having written it yourself. So it likely wouldn't have take 10 minutes to debug.

Conceptually it was a really simple bug (I was returning a bounding box and it returned (min, min) instead of (min, max)). So, I mean, the amount that AI broke it was pretty minor and it was mostly my fault for not seeing it when I generated it. But you know, if it's messing stuff up when it's generating 4 lines of code I'm not really going to trust it with an entire file, or even an entire function.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#259

Post by vessenes »

This post is pretty much my exact experience with the coding tools.

Basically the state of the art right now can turn me into an an architect/CTO that spends a lot of time complaining about poor architectural choices. Crucially Claude does not quite understand how to greenfield implement good architectures. 3.7 is also JUST . SO. CHATTY. It’s better than 3.5, but more annoying.

Gemini 2.5 needs one more round of coding tuning; it’s excellent, has longer context and is much better at arch, but still occasionally misformats or forgets things.

Upshot — my hobby coding can now be ‘hobby startup making’ if I’m willing to complain a lot, or write out the scaffolding and requirements docs. It provides nearly no serotonin boost from getting into flow and delivering something awesome, but it does let me watch YouTube on the side while it codes.

Decisions..

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#260

Post by overgard »

cube00 wrote: post #153
overgard wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I just had Copilot sneak in a typo today that took about ten minutes of debugging to find. I certainly could have made a similar typo myself if copilot hadn't done it for me, but, all the same copilot probably saved me a minute worth of typing today but cost me 10 minutes of debugging.

The vibe bros would have you believe your prompt is at fault and that you need add "don't make typos".

True, I didn't have five paragraphs on the proper way to handle bounding boxes and the conceptual use of bounding boxes and "please don't confuse lower for upper". All my fault!
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