121–130 of 744 posts
And obviously the cost of not upskilling in intricate technical details as much as before (aka staying at the high level perspective) will have to be paid at some point
*90% so far.. I've only been working with AI for a couple of months, but IMHO it's over. The Internet Age which ran 30 years from roughly 1995-2025 has ended and we've entered the AI Age (maybe the last age). I know people with little programming experience who have already passed me in productivity, and I've been doing this since the 80s. And that trend is only going to accelerate and intensify. The main point that…
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The theory goes very simple, you tell the agent to patch the bug. Now the practice though...
yeah, in practice: would you like to onboard a Boeing 747 where some of the bugs were patched by some agents, what is the percentage risk of malfunction you are going to accept as a passenger?
In this case, the traditional human process hasn't gone well either.
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Blind leading the blind, but my thinking is this: 1. Use the tools to their fullest extend, push boundaries and figure out what works and what doesn't 2. Be more than your tools As long as you + LLM is significantly more valuable than just an LLM, you'll be employed. I don't know how "practical" this advice is, because it's basically what you're already doing, but it's how I'm thinking about it.
Realistically, someone else + LLM at -10% compensation will be employed
Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case. This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.
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It has dropped by maybe MORE than 90%. My sons school recently asked me to build some tools for them -- I did this over a decade ago for them, for free. I did it again using AI tools (different problem though) and I had it mostly done in 30 minutes (after I got the credentials set up properly -- that took up more time than the main coding part). This was probably several days of work for me in the past.
But in the past, you knew the codebase very well, and it was trivial to implement a fix and upgrade the software. Can the same be done with LLMs ? Well from what I see, it depends on your luck. But if the LLMs can't help you, then you gotta read the whole codebase that you've never read before and you quickly lose the initial benefits. I don't doubt someday we'll get there though.
> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool. This would take me, or many developers I know and respect, days to write by hand. I'm not sure about this. The tests I've gotten out in a few hours are the kind I'd approve if another dev sent then but haven't really ended up finding meaningful issues.
People say their prompts are good, awesome code is being generated, it solved a month's worth of work in a minute. Nobody comes with receipts.
It's not just about "building" ... who is going to maintain all this new sub-par code pushed to production every day? Who is going to patch all bugs, edge cases and security vulnerabilities?
I happily got rid of a legacy application (lost the pitch, another agency now must deal with the shit) I inherited as a somewhat technically savvy person about a year ago. It was built by real people. Not a single line of AI slop in it. It was the most fragile crap I had ever the misfortune to witness. Even in my wildest vibe coding a prototype moments I was not able to get the AI to produce that amount of anti patte…