41–50 of 209 posts
When code autocomplete first came out everyone thought software engineering would become 10x more productive.
Then it turned out writing code was only a small part of the complex endeavor of designing, building, and shipping a software system.
AI does 0% of my work and we are actively hiring. As someone mentioned on another AI thread, if AI is so good why aren't people just doing 15 PRs a day on open source projects like Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, etc? AI is sometimes a productivity booster for a dev, sometimes not. And it's unpredictable when it will and won't be. It's not great at giving you confidence signals when you should be skeptica…
If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous.
AI helps here and there but honestly the bottleneck for output is not how fast the code is produced. Task priorization, lacking requirements, information silos and similar issues cause a lot of 'non-coding work' for developers (and probably just waiting around for some who don't want to take initiative). Also I think the most time consuming coding task is usually debugging and AI tools don't really excel at that in my experience.
That being said, we are not hiring at the moment but that really doesn't have anything to do with AI.
Its a nice productivity and capability boost that feels on the same magnitude as, for example, React. The "dream" of it being able to just take tickets and agentically get a PR up for review is possible for ~5% of tickets. That goes up to ~10% if your organization has no standards at all, including even a self-serving standard like "at least make sure the repository remains useful to future AI usage". My organization…
If, like the meme, you just copied from SO without using your brain then yes AI is comparable.
If you appreciate SO for the discussion (peer review) about the answers and contrasting approaches sometimes out of left field, well good luck because AI can't and won't give you that.
Morale is low because leaders think AI can do that amount of work, but it can’t actually (at least not yet). This both means that they don’t hire enough people to do the work needed, while also “drive by” insulting the intelligence of the people they are overworking.
This has been my observation as well. To add, I'm seeing leadership and stakeholders use their chats with LLMs to justify claims like "what I'm asking for is incredibly simple according to ChatGPT, and it should be done by end of today." Of course it rarely is, because the prompt is underspecified, the LLM solution is oversimplified, and it lacks context on the complexities of existing codebase, and the team's develo…
Worried about the next generation who - I think - will not learn normally (incl whatever it does to the brain) and may never reach the degree of engineering capability some of us have. Tired of leadership who think productivity will raise. Tired of AI summaries sent around unreflected as meeting minutes / action items. Tired of working and responding on these.
It can kickstart new projects to get over the blank page syndrome but after that there's still work, either prompting or fixing it yourself.
There are requirements-led approaches where you can try to stay in prompt mode as much as possible (like feeding spec to a junior dev) but there is a point where you just have to do things yourself.
Software development has never been about lines of code, it has always required a lot of back and forth discussion, decisions, digging into company/domain lore to get the background on stuff.
Reviewing AI code, and lots of it, is hard work - it can get stuff wrong when you least expect it ("I'll just stub out this authentication so it returns true and our test passes")
With all that in mind though, as someone who would pay other devs to do work I would be horrified if someone spent a week writing unit tests that I can clearly see an AI would generate in 30 seconds. There are some task that just make sense for AI to do now.
I feel like I suddenly have a superpower. I'm wearing glasses that tell me who all the fucking assholes and impostors are.