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Engineers who dismiss AI

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#201

Post by mazswojejzony »

rurp wrote: post #197
Tripping5292 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sheer number of projects I've completed that I truly would never have been able to even make a dent in is evidence enough for me. I don't think research will convince you. You need to either watch someone do it, or experiment with it yourself. Get your hands dirty on an audacious project with Claude code.

It sounds like you're building a lot of prototypes or small projects, which yes LLMs can be amazingly helpful at. But that is very much not what many/most professional engineers spend their time on, and generalizing from that former case often doesn't hold up in my experience.

We use both Claude and Codex on a fairly large ~10-years old Java project (~1900 Java files, 180K lines of code). Both tools are able to implement changes across several files, refactor the code, add unit tests for the modified areas.

Sometime the result is not great, sometimes it requires manual updates, sometimes it just goes into a wrong direction and we just discard the proposal. The good thing is you can initiate such a large change, go get a coffee, and when you're back you can take a look at the changes.

Anyway, overall those tools are pretty useful already.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#202

Post by skeledrew »

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…

I haven't driven a car constantly for ages, but a few months ago when I went behind the wheel for a bit, pretty much everything came rushing back, and my primary issue was adjusting to driving on the left side of the road in a right-side drive car. This is how it is with skills; they never really go away, though it may feel like it. And so it is with programming skills (knowledge is a different thing, since the field is constantly changing).

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#203

Post by danielbln »

palmotea wrote: post #188
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…

> 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 excessive use of AI will lead to the loss of important skills on the one hand and create dependencies on the other. Who benefits if we end up with a generation of software developers who can no longer program without AI? The shareholders benefit this quarter. Look man, I know you probably have a high…

Do we think less because we use C++ vs assembly? Less because we use assembly over punching cards? Less because we use computers over pen and paper? And so on. You can put a strong local coding model on your local hardware today and no investor will be involved (unless you mean investors on the company you work for, but the truth is,n those were never in any way interested in how you build things, only that you do).

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#204

Post by alecco »

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?

"Coding in the Red-Queen Era" https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/ (2025)

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#205

Post by OptionOfT »

michaellee8 wrote: post #36
baq wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They can't. Universities will eventually catch up to the demand of companies, just like how the one I attended switched from C/C++ to only managed languages.

With that the students were more directly a match for the in-demand roles, but reality is that other roles will see a reduction of supply.

The question here is: Will there be a need in the future for people who can actually code?

I think so. I also believe the field is evolving and that the pendulum always swings to extremes. Right now we are just beginning to see the consequences of the impact of AI on stability & maintainability of software. And we have not seen the impact of when it catastrophically goes wrong.

If you, together with your AI buddy, cannot solve the problem on this giant AI codebase, pulling in a colleague probably isn't going to help anymore.

The amount of code that is now being generated with AI (and accepted because it looks good enough) is causing long-term stability to suffer. What we are seeing is that AI is very eager to make the fixes without any regard towards past behavior or future behavior.

Of course, this is partially prevented by having better prompts, and human reviews. But this is not the future companies want us to go. They want us to prompt and move on.

AI will very eagerly create 10,000 pipes from a lake to 10,000 houses in need of water. And branch off of them. And again.

Until one day you realize the pipes have lead in them and you need to replace them.

Today this is already hard. With AI it's even harder because there is no unified implementation somewhere. It's all copy pasted for the sake of speed and shipping.

I have yet to see a Software Engineer who stands behind every line of code produced to be faster on net-new development using AI. In fact, most of the time they're slower because the AI doesn't know. And even when they use AI the outcome is worse because there is less learning. The kind of learning that eventually pushes the boundaries in 'how can we make things better'.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#206

Post by palmotea »

danielbln wrote: post #203
palmotea wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 excessive use of AI will lead to the loss of important skills on the one hand and create dependencies on the other. Who benefits if we end up with a generation of software developers who can no longer program without AI? The shareholders benefit this quarter. Look man, I know you probably have a high…

Do we think less because we use C++ vs assembly? Less because we use assembly over punching cards? Less because we use computers over pen and paper? And so on. You can put a strong local coding model on your local hardware today and no investor will be involved (unless you mean investors on the company you work for, but the truth is,n those were never in any way interested in how you build things, only that you do).

> Do we think less because we use C++ vs assembly? Less because we use assembly over punching cards? ...

Apologists love to make such analogies. "From 30,000 feet, doesn't the new things kinda look like some old thing? Then they're the same and you should accept the new thing!" But the analogies are never apt, and the "argument" is really only one of glossing over the differences.

The whole point of AI is for people to think less. It's basically the goddamned name. If people aren't thinking less, AI isn't doing its job. All of those things you listed are instances of mechanical translation, and aren't thinking..

> You can put a strong local coding model on your local hardware today and no investor will be involved (unless you mean investors on the company you work for, but the truth is,n those were never in any way interested in how you build things, only that you do).

Don't pretend you can cosplay a capitalist with AI. You need money, and if you can build something with a local model, the people with money can do it too, so they don't have to pay you. We work for a living.

Also it's a fantasy your local model with be anything but a dim candle to the ones the rich have. Real life is not a sci-fi novel.

Your employers are hoping to use you up making this current imperfect iteration of the technology work, because the hope is the next version won't need you. Don't be cheerful about it. It's a bad end for you.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#208

Post by danielbln »

palmotea wrote: post #206
danielbln wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we think less because we use C++ vs assembly? Less because we use assembly over punching cards? Less because we use computers over pen and paper? And so on. You can put a strong local coding model on your local hardware today and no investor will be involved (unless you mean investors on the company you work for, but the truth is,n those were never in any way interested in how you build things, only that you do).

> Do we think less because we use C++ vs assembly? Less because we use assembly over punching cards? ... Apologists love to make such analogies. "From 30,000 feet, doesn't the new things kinda look like some old thing? Then they're the same and you should accept the new thing!" But the analogies are never apt, and the "argument" is really only one of glossing over the differences. The whole point of AI is for people…

You say that with such conviction "the whole point is to think less". Why do you think that? I think no less now that I use AI agents all day long, I just think about different things. I don't think about where I place certain bits of code, how certain structures look like. Instead I think about data models, systems, and what the ideal deliverable looks like and how we can plan its implementation and let it execute by the willing agent. I think about how I best automate flows so that I can parallelize work, within a harness that reduces the possibilities for mistakes. I think a whole lot more about different technologies and frameworks, as the cost of exploring and experimenting with them has come down tremendously.

Will what I do now be automated eventually or before long? Probably, we keep automating things, so one has to swim up the abstraction layers. Doesn't mean one has to think less.

Re: Engineers who dismiss AI

#210

Post by ffsm8 »

palmotea wrote: post #206
danielbln wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we think less because we use C++ vs assembly? Less because we use assembly over punching cards? Less because we use computers over pen and paper? And so on. You can put a strong local coding model on your local hardware today and no investor will be involved (unless you mean investors on the company you work for, but the truth is,n those were never in any way interested in how you build things, only that you do).

> Do we think less because we use C++ vs assembly? Less because we use assembly over punching cards? ... Apologists love to make such analogies. "From 30,000 feet, doesn't the new things kinda look like some old thing? Then they're the same and you should accept the new thing!" But the analogies are never apt, and the "argument" is really only one of glossing over the differences. The whole point of AI is for people…

Current "AI" are statistical models, not AGI - that's why you're wrong there.

To use them well you still need to know everything - whenever you prompt lazily you're opening yourself up to a fuckton of technical debt.

That might be acceptable to some, but is generally a bad idea

If it was AGI, you'd be right though...

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