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Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

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141–150 of 209 posts

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#141
> AI doing 30-50% of your work

I use AI for taking info and restructuring it for me. Rewrite a Linear ticket in a proper format, take an info dump and turn it into a spike outcome or ADR doc that I can then refine. I also like it for the rote stuff I haven't memorized the structure of: building OpenSearch queries, writing boto3 snippets, etc. Other than that, my job is the same as it was pre-LLM hype. And from talking to other engineers, it seems that my experience is fairly standard.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#142
I am waiting for all these "vibe-coded" startups to ultimately fail or need a total rewrite and in we come.

No-Code Low-Code Vibe-Code

I have seen it all before

Great for 0 to 0.1

Soon as you have real domain problems to solve and any complexity the mess that is being created to create a solution is going to need fixing.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#143
So far, my employer is putting zero pressure on devs to use genAI. Their official policy is "use it is you want to, but we're not going to pay for it".

About 10% of the devs in my location are using genAI as a dev tool to some degree, but for most of those devs, that degree is pretty small.

Ironically(?), our primary products are deep learning systems, so this is a very AI-savvy group.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#144
post #42

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…

You don't use any AI - drafting documentation, write boilerplate code, transcribing meetings, simplifying team communications, searching product documentation, alternative to Google or StackOverflow, creating presentations, as a brainstorming partner? I would consider all of these "work". If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous.

Very few people where I work are using genAI for any of those things at all.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're not alone I find it wastes my time more than it helps Everyone insists I must be using it wrong I was never arrogant enough to think I'm a superior coder to many people, but AI code is so bad and the experience using it is so tedious that I'm starting to seriously question the skills of anyone who finds themselves more productive using AI for code instead of writing it themselves

Agreed, but I'm also open to the likely possibility that LLMs genuinely work quite well in a few niches that I don't happen to work in, like writing run-of-the-mill React components where open source training data is truly abundant. In day to day work I could only trust it to help me with the most conventional problems that the average developer experiences in the "top N" most popular programming languages and framew…

> LLMs genuinely work quite well in a few niches that I don't happen to work in, like writing run-of-the-mill React components where open source training data is truly abundant

I write run of the mill React components quite often and this has not been my experience with AI either so I really don't know what gives

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#146
AI is way too slow when searching docs, debugging issue etc. Also falls short with anything new or poorly documented. Even with Cerebras speed I do think I can search docs faster than asking AI a question, waiting for response and checking if it is valid or not.

It's nice as a passive thing like meeting transcription, or extra brainstorm head but that's about it.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#147

Hiring is slower, salaries for open positions are down as well. But the reason is more offshoring to cheaper locations than AI. As of AI, I've been asked to test a partial rewrite of the current UI to the new components. For a few weeks I've been logging 10+ bugs a day. The only explanation I have, they use AI tool to produce nicely looking code which does not work properly in a complex app.

Just a comment: One of the reasons why offshoring is increasing and will likely increase in the following year, is because CXOs are being sold that a cheap Mexican, Tico, or Indian using AI can be as performant as a local.(also Language barriers are decreasing also due to AI)

I'm Mexican (in Mexico) and I've seen this firsthand. There may be some truth to it, but soon enough these new companies will find out what several others found in the 90s (when the first wave of tech outsourcing came): The bottleneck is in communication and culture, not performance.

Anyway, point is, in a way AI is pushing the outsourcing trend a bit.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and the LLM probably responded with "You're absolutely right!" to every idea they asked about.

That's one of the things I find most interesting when it comes to LLMs, a depressingly large proportion of the population seems to enjoy interacting with a deranged sycophant who treats all of their ideas and comments as a stroke of genius. Every time I read a response like "[you're right] [you're smart] [more than others]" to the most obvious observation it makes me squirm with discomfort. Especially when I just poi…

> As an European who worked with US companies, my experience with work communication there can only be summed up as being heavily biased towards toxic positivity

This is definitely true, and is something that I've noticed that really annoys me. I have noticed that it varies quite a bit by region and industry, so not universal to the US or monolithic. The west coast of the US seems to be the most extreme in my experience

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#149
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those "experienced" actually are just senior code monkeys if u ask me, it's trivial right Well, it seems you are not open for discussion. There is no reason to disparage the senior devs that participated in the study just because you don't like the results of the study. But the study happened, and it is clear: experienced developers are the ones that suffered from using LLMs. > but it's just illogical for a junior…

Productivity could just be simple automation. U just describe one part of the whole process. My point stands still. If u cannot get llm to benefit u, u are the problem.

That's like saying if you cannot get a boat to fly, you're a bad pilot.

Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?

#150
I find AI helpful when coding in unfamiliar languages or topics, as it generates initial code that roughly works, that I can then iterate on.

Even so, I have to constantly hound the AI to write concise code, to reuse code, to consolidate duplicate code blocks. When I ask it to remove the useless comments, it also removes the useful comments, so I have to goad it back into adding back individual helpful comments.

I had AI write some Python unit tests and it showed me how to mock, which I had never done in Python. That's great! But when I examined the tests, they were so "white box" and brittle that almost any change in implementation would break the tests.

When coding in a familiar language (C++), I tried turning on the auto-AI assistant (for our one project where security rules allowed it) and while I was impressed that it would auto-complete whole blocks of text based on my actual code base, not once was I able to accept those blocks as-is.

So for me at this point AI is at best a net +2% productivity improvement, though I surely have lots to learn about other ways in which it could be useful.

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