81–90 of 256 posts
> 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 gets particularly tricky when the task requires a competency that you yourself lack. But here too the question is - would you be willing to delegate it to another human whom you don't fully trust (e.g. a contractor)? The answer for me is in many cases "yes, but I need to learn about this enough so that I can evaluate their work" - so that's what I do, I learn what I need to know at the level of the tech lead managing them, but not at the level of the expert implementing it.
> 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…
That said, as long as there’s the potential for AI to hallucinate, we’ll always need to be vigilant - for that reason I would want to keep my programming skills sharp.
AI assisted software building by day, artisanal coder by night perhaps.
Just normal Luddite things, which attracts those most threatened in their personal identity by the new technology. You see it obviously with the artists and image/video generators too. We did this with Dadaism and Impressionism and photography before this too with art. Ultimately, it's just more abstraction that we have to get used to -- art is stuff people create with their human expression. It is funny to see every…
The early Industrial Revolution that the original Luddites objected to resulted in horrible working conditions and a power shift from artisans to factory workers.
Dadism was a reaction to WWI where the aristocracy's greed and petty squabbling led to 17 million deaths.
> "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. The first group is shipping faster, taking on bigger challenges. The second group is… not." Honest question for the engineers here. Have you seen this happening at your company? Are strong engineers falling behind when…
A guy will proudly deploy something he vibe coded, or “write the documentation” for some app that a contractor wrote, and then we get someone in the business telling us there’s a bug because it doesn’t do what the documentation says, and now I’m spending half a day in meetings to explain and now we have a project to overhaul the documentation (meaning we aren’t working on other things), all because someone spent 90 seconds to have AI generate “documentation” and gave themselves a pat on the back.
I look at what was produced and just lay my head down on the desk. It’s all crap. I just see a stream of things to fix, convention not followed, 20 extra libraries included when 2 would have done. Code not organized, where this new function should have gone in a different module, because where it is now creates tight coupling between two modules that were intentionally built to not be coupled before.
It’s a meme at this point to say, ”all code is tech debt”, but that’s all I’ve seen it produce: crap that I have to clean up, and it can produce it way faster than I can clean it up, so we literally have more tech debt and more non-working crap than we would have had if we just wrote it by hand.
We have a ton of internal apps that were working, then someone took a shortcut and 6 months later we’re still paying for the shortcut.
It’s not about moving faster today. It’s about keeping the ship pointed in the right direction. AI is a guy a guy on a jet ski doing backflips, telling is we’re falling behind because our cargo ship hasn’t adopted jet skis.
AI is a guy on his high horse, telling everyone how much faster they could go if they also had a horse. Except the horse takes a dump in the middle of the office and the whole office spends half their day shoveling crap because this one guy thinks he’s going faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A year ago I could get o1-mini to write tests some of the time that I would then need to fix. Now I can get Opus 4.5 to do fairly complicated refactors with no mistakes. These tools are seriously starting to become actually useful, and I’m sorry but people aren’t lying when they say things have changed a lot over the last year.
It might even be true this time, but there is no real mystery why many aren't inclined to invest more time figuring it out for themselves every few months. No need for the author of the original article to reach for "they are protecting their fragile egos" style of explanation.
Yeah it boggles my mind all the people on here constantly dismissing LLMs. It's very clearly getting better and better rapidly. I don't think this train is stopping even if this bubble bursts. The cold ass reality is: We're going to need a lot less software engineers moving forward. Just like agriculture now needs way less humans to do the same work than in the past. I hate to be blunt but if you're in the bottom hal…
Responsible use of ai means reading lots and lots of generated code, understanding it, reviewing and auditing it, not "vibe coding" for the purpose of avoiding ever reading any code.
Just normal Luddite things, which attracts those most threatened in their personal identity by the new technology. You see it obviously with the artists and image/video generators too. We did this with Dadaism and Impressionism and photography before this too with art. Ultimately, it's just more abstraction that we have to get used to -- art is stuff people create with their human expression. It is funny to see every…
This guy's knowledge of art history is the Dada wikipedia page and the Banksy movie from 20 years ago. Allow me to repeat myself: AI is for idiots.