141–150 of 304 posts
What about those professional software developers still refusing to use AI / LLMs? I know a couple and they're still churning out code completely 100% manually. Heck, I even know a guy who refuses to use an IDE with Java and the indenting is a mess, but he gets there.
Some of them don’t even do trivial stuff very well.
> Today, I use Claude Code for almost all non-trivial programming tasks and have spent $500+ on it just last December. Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. The money investment that person did, already leaves me with tons of questions.
> Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. If you sleep on this, these people are going to take your job. I've been writing serious systems code for 15 years. Systems that handled billions of dollars of transaction volume a day and whose hourly outages cost billions of dollars. These are systems you have to design carefully. Active-active, beyond five nines reliable. I'm te…
> I'm easily getting twice my workload done with AI, and I'm not even leveraging the full extent of the tools. I've only just started to do more than fancy tab-autocomplete.
Are you getting 2x the money?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Truthfully, I don't want to get advice from people who become addicted to AI, sorry. If you sleep on this, these people are going to take your job. I've been writing serious systems code for 15 years. Systems that handled billions of dollars of transaction volume a day and whose hourly outages cost billions of dollars. These are systems you have to design carefully. Active-active, beyond five nines reliable. I'm te…
Totally agree. The uncomfortable truth is that the skill of _writing_ code is becoming commoditized. Reading, understanding, designing efficient systems, and planning changes based on that, at least for now, will still be for human experts (and AI already a great assist here). But churn out yet another webpage/website? People doing this will need to move on from this as their primary job.
People exaggerate how many people work on just simple websites / webpages. Anyone needing a website has been able to get it for very cheap for a long time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's more like requirements come in, and results come out. Wow someone is very good at setting requirements. I have never seen that in 25 years of dev life.
Of course, sometimes people realize that what they asked for wasn't actually what was needed.
People almost never know what they want, so put SOMETHING in front of them, fast, and let's go from there
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That really sounds like a PM complaining that "I have to do my actual job of being the bridge between the business and the engineering team" ALL PMs are expected to be doing some translation, otherwise what's the point of their job?
> otherwise what's the point of their job? Who else is going to move a box from one column to another?
Why not?
I always find these articles funny. There's someone almost triumphantly declaring that AI is able to take over the hard skills tasks from oh so dreaded engineers, but the authors can somehow not imagine that their soft skills - which are often they only ones they have - could be done by AI as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have 13 years of professional experience, and I work in a small company (15 people). Apart from one or two weekly meetings, I mostly just work on stuff independently. I'm the solo developer for a number of projects ranging from embedded microcontrollers to distributed backend systems. There's very little handholding; it's more like requirements come in, and results come out. I have been part of some social circles…
> it's more like requirements come in, and results come out. Wow someone is very good at setting requirements. I have never seen that in 25 years of dev life.
It's not so hard if you're an expert in the field or concept they're asking the solution for, especially if you've already implemented it in the past, in some way, so know all the hidden requirements that they aren't even aware of. If you're in a senior position, in a small group, it's very possible you're the only one that can even reason about the solution, beyond some high level desires. I've worked in several teams with non-technical people/managers, where a good portion of the requirements must be ignored, with the biggest soft skill requirement being pretending they're ideas are reasonable.
It's also true if it's more technical than product based. I work in manufacturing R&D where a task might be "we need this robot, with this camera, to align to align to and touch this thing with this other thing within some um of error."
Software touches every industry of man. Your results may vary.
It won't help. LLMs are good at soft skills, too. There's a whole "AI girlfriend" industry, and it's quite successful.
LLMs are not good at soft skills, just the girlfriends you can get in this society are even worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the vibe coders who would love to pretend that the opposite end of the spectrum from them is "artisinal coding." They honestly have no idea what "software engineering" in a professional context even looks like. So they come up with this prattle.
Blaming people who use technology to make a valuable process accessible to themselves and then invoking a a no-true-Scotsman in order to defend the status quo is a good example of a lack of soft skills.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of highly performing teams don't even use tickets.
Do any highly performing teams use tickets? A fly-by-night charlatan successfully pushed ticking into our organization in the past year and I would say it was a disaster. I only have the experience of one, but from that experience I am now not sure you can even build good software that way. I originally hoped it was growing pains, but I see more and more fundamental flaws.
Maybe I had greenfield glasses but I came in for the last 3 months and it was still humming.