61–70 of 98 posts
Thing is, this is probably 99% of the programming work of a junior dev at a place where management thinks like that.
I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.
If AI writes majority of code, then we will stop seeing shortcomings of existing tools, libraries and frameworks and eventually stop having new frameworks or libraries.
Would there be rails if DHH vibe coded 25 years ago? Or would there be library like delayed_job if Tobi vibe coded back when he started Shopify?
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I am not sure if you are serious, but I literally DO this, not just for multiplication, but for lots of automatable things.
Same here. I stopped writing in cursive in high school and completely lost the ability, and it was difficult to learn again as an adult when I wanted to. I don't want to lose basic skills like multiplication, and exercising them occasionally prevents that.
Even losing programming skills to AI... I'll bet we can get them back.
Definitely easier to not lose them in the first place, though.
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Pandas is a very difficult api to use correctly and a huge swath of programs that the AIs have trained on was "programmed by accident" meaning people just typed stuff at it until they got the output they wanted. To offset all the bad code, you would have to make a Pandas fine tune and/or ablate the bad Pandas from the weights.
Does anyone have good reference material on learning how to use pandas effectively and understanding the api as a whole? Any time ive had to use pandas I am shocked at how convuluted and opaque the docs are, and end up just hacking away till something wirks alright.
I've also been wanting to play with Ibis[1] recently, but Polars has been sufficient for me.
Generating boilerplate code - getting frustrated about code is what drives new ideas and improvements, I don't want to lose that friction.
Summarizing documentation - Reading and making sense of written material is a skill.
Explaining complex concepts - I don't want explanations on a silver plate, I want to figure things out. Who knows what great ideas I'll run into on the way there.
Helping debug tricky error messages - Again, a skill I like to keep sharp.
Drafting unit tests - No one knows better than me what needs testing in my code, this sounds like the kind of unit tests no one wants to maintain.
Formatting data - Maybe, or maybe whip out Perl and refresh that skill instead.
Keep delegating everything to AI for a year and I suspect you'll be completely worthless as a developer without it...
> The phrase “reflexive AI usage” is what triggered my strongest reaction. “Reflexive” suggests unthinking, automatic reliance. It implies delegating not just tasks but judgment itself. Does it? When I trained as a schoolteacher, we were required to engage in 'reflexive practice', meaning at the end of the school day, we were expected to sit down and think about - reflect - on what had happened that day. I don't know…
> I don't know how the Shopify CEO meant I left Shopify a couple weeks ago and Tobi is very, very all-in on AI being an integral part of all jobs at Shopify. Tobi said that how you use AI is now an official part of your review, and that for any new recs, you need to show that the job can't be done by an ai. I left shortly after the memo so I do not know if things have changed. Shopify also brought in a very AI CTO a…
So, the memo seemed to baby-sit adult engineers. It goes without saying that engineers will use AI as they see fit, and the least a company would do is to make copilot subscriptions available for the staff if needed.
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There is a lot I hate about this statement. First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters. Next, at this point "IT" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. In this discussion, we're talking about…
Hate it all you want, the vast majority of "programmers" aren't working on anything novel, meaningful or hard. For the vast majority of people it's just a job, it's not a hobby, it's not a passion, it's not something they dream about, it's just a thing that they have to do 8 hours a day to make money and go do stuff in the real world. They don't want to think about it on walks, they don't want to cry about it, they d…
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This is a similar reaction folks had to autocomplete/intellisense when it came out also. "What you just press tab and get all the possible options. Psh, how about reading the docs like the rest of us did?". I think AI is a pretty big step function up in terms of the computer's capability to predict the code you want - but at the end of the day we'll still be writing code (I think. I hope).
With the difference that intelli* is usually correct - i.e. it fetches all the possible methods from actual code, and you can see the related api docs. It’s another view for the same data (more or less - of course there can be docs other than api docs) With AI you’ve got no idea whether something is right, it’s a probablistic thing That’s why I don’t buy the “AI as just another abstraction layer” argument. AI is some…
It seems like all they know is VS Code which is neither a good editor, nor a good IDE.
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I wish I could make six figures flipping burgers. Actually, why aren't most burger flippers applying for IT jobs?
I wish I was making 100k as a dev, but plot twist outside of the US this is the minority. I was comparing burger flippers to michelin chefs, not to devs. The vast majority of devs are gluing tools together and working on basic CRUD stuff, which is the burger flipping of the tech world. It's just a job, people don't want to think about code in the shower, on walks, or "cry" about tech problems as the author seems to r…
I do some of the, ahem, "romanticised" things you mentioned because even in CRUD stuff there are hard problems to solve - particularly problems introduced by other people.
We work to get paid, but you can't get around the fact that we spend so much of our lives at work that it is a part of life.
I also appreciate the craft of coding. My suspicion is that eventually it just won't be a thing anymore, even though such a future is not my preference. Not that humans will be completely removed from coding, but writing every line yourself will just be incredibly uncommon and not industry standard. I'm not good at predicting, this is just where my gut is right now.
This is a similar reaction folks had to autocomplete/intellisense when it came out also. "What you just press tab and get all the possible options. Psh, how about reading the docs like the rest of us did?". I think AI is a pretty big step function up in terms of the computer's capability to predict the code you want - but at the end of the day we'll still be writing code (I think. I hope).
Autocomplete and intellisense are tools first and foremost. AI is centralized into a handful of companies you are forced to pay every month for.
Autocomplete and intellisense don't care about your data. There's an inherent issue with data, privacy and ownership when it comes to AI.
If we can run useful models locally and make it generally available on consumer hardware... things would be different.