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Engineers who dismiss AI

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#31

Post by xenophonf »

alexpotato wrote: post #9

I work in crypto (L1 chain) as a DevOps engineer (LOTS of baremetal, LOTS of CI/CD etc) and it's been amazing to see what Claude can do in this space too. e.g. had an issue with connecting to AWS S3, gave Claude some of the code to connect and it diagnosed a CREDENTIALS issue without seeing the credentials file nor seeing the error itself. It can even find issues like "oh, you have an extra space in front of the buil…

What you suggested here is trivial with existing tools—linters in the first case, search-and-replace functions in editors for the second.

I have yet to see any evidence of the third case. I'm close to banning AI for my junior devs. Their code quality is atrocious. I don't have time for all that cleanup. Write it good the first time around.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#33

Post by wan23 »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #6

> The engineers refusing to try aren’t protecting themselves; quite the opposite, they’re falling behind. The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t. For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities? I use AI sparingly because, to be honest, every time I use AI, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber. I fear that excess…

This is part of the learning curve. When you vibe code you produce something that is as if someone else wrote it. It’s important to learn when that’s appropriate versus using it in a more limited way or not at all.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#35

Post by phplovesong »

The fact that i hear this mantra over and over again:

"She wrote a thing in a day that would have taken me a month"

This scares me. A lot.

I never found the coding part to be a bottle neck, but the issues arise after the damn thing is in prod. If i work on something big (that will take me a month) thats going to be anywhere from (im winging these numbers) 10K LOC to 25K LOC).

If thats a bechmark for me the next guy using AI will spew out at a bare minimun double the amount of code, and in many cases 3x-4x.

The surface area for bugs are just vastly bigger, and fixing these bugs will eventually take more time than you "won" using AI in the first place.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#36

Post by michaellee8 »

baq wrote: post #13
plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #6

> The engineers refusing to try aren’t protecting themselves; quite the opposite, they’re falling behind. The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t. For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities? I use AI sparingly because, to be honest, every time I use AI, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber. I fear that excess…

You can’t and that’s the new normal. We’re probably the only generation which was given an opportunity to get properly good at coding. No such luxury will be available in a few years optimistically; pessimistically it’s been taken away with GPT 5.2 and Opus 4.5.

i think cs students should force themselves to learn the real thing and write the code themselves, at least for their assignments. i have seen that a lot of recent cs grads that has gpt in most of their cs life basically cannot write proper code, with or without ai.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#37

Post by thisissomething »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #6

> The engineers refusing to try aren’t protecting themselves; quite the opposite, they’re falling behind. The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t. For me, however, there is one issue: how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities? I use AI sparingly because, to be honest, every time I use AI, I feel like I'm getting a little dumber. I fear that excess…

> how can I utilize AI without degenerating my own abilities?

Couldn't the same statement, to some extent, be applied to using a sorting lib instead of writing your own sorting algorithm? Or how about using a language like python instead of manually handling memory allocation and garbage collection in C?

> What I want above all is AI that helps me become better at my job and continue to build skills and knowledge

So far, on my experience, the quality of what AI outputs is directly related to the quality of the input. I've seen some AI projects made by junior devs that a incredibly messy and confusing architecture, despite they using the same language and LLM model that I use? The main difference? The AI work was based on the patterns and architecture that I designed thanks to my knowledge, which also happens to ensure that the AI will produce less buggy software.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#38

Post by gaigalas »

Author doesn't consider the possibility that engineers dismiss AI after they constantly tried it. Not once, not twice, but consistently.

I am one of those dismissers. I am constantly trash talking AI. Also, I have tried more tools and more stress scenarios than a lot of enthusiasts. The high bars are not in my head, they are on my repositories.

Talk is cheap. Show me your AI generated code. Talk tech, not drama.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#39

Post by jcpst »

My reasons for initially dismissing it is because to me it felt like it was taking the fun part of the job. We have all these tasks, and writing the code is this creative act, designed to be read by other humans. Just like how I don’t want AI to write music for me.

But I see where things are going. I tried some of the newer tooling over the past few weeks. They’re too useful to ignore now. It feels like we’re entering into an industrial age for software.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#40

Post by nottorp »

alexpotato wrote: post #9

I work in crypto (L1 chain) as a DevOps engineer (LOTS of baremetal, LOTS of CI/CD etc) and it's been amazing to see what Claude can do in this space too. e.g. had an issue with connecting to AWS S3, gave Claude some of the code to connect and it diagnosed a CREDENTIALS issue without seeing the credentials file nor seeing the error itself. It can even find issues like "oh, you have an extra space in front of the buil…

> gave Claude some of the code to connect and it diagnosed a CREDENTIALS issue without seeing the credentials file nor seeing the error itself

10 years ago google would have had a forum post describing your exact problem with solutions within the first 5 results.

Today google delivers 3 pages of content farm spam with basic tutorials, 30% of them vaguely related to your problem, 70% just containing "aws" somewhere, then stops delivering results.

The LLM is just fixing search for you.

Edit: and by the way, it can fix search for you just because somewhere out there there are forum posts describing your exact problem.

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