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AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

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Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#101

Post by gedy »

alephnerd wrote: post #97

> ...most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it... A SWE who bases their entire identity and career around only writing code is not an engineer - they are a code monkey. The entire point of hiring a Software ENGINEER is to help translate business requirements into technical requirements, and then…

You might be missing that a lot of companies are giddy that the mgmt can just vibe code stuff and there's no opportunity for engineers to be involved, (except for when it crashes?). I use AI tools and they are nice, but the mgmt are mostly not logical and need someone to sort through their bullshit.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#102

Post by amelius »

jsheard wrote: post #78
amelius wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI learned this figure of speech from humans. Even the frequency in which it is used is copied from humans. So you can't really use it to determine if something is written by an AI or not.

LLMs might follow the frequencies of the training data in their raw form, but nobody uses raw LLMs, they use models which have been RLHFed to hell and back to bias them towards specific patterns. Then newer models were trained on the output of those RLHFed models, and further RLHFed, and so on, and so on.

The H in RLHF stands for human. If humans didn't use the expression, then the LLM wouldn't.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#103

Post by prescriptivist »

fma wrote: post #50
hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I have my own side project that I vibe coded. I probably did what would take one team 6 montns and produced it myself in one month. I'm not afraid of breaking stuff because it is only a small set of users. However for my own code for my professional job no way I would go that fast because I would impact millions of users. It is insane that companies think they can replace teams wholesale while maintaining quality.

A missing link right now is automated high-quality code reviews. I would love an adversarial code review agent that has a persona oriented around all incoming code being slop, that leverages a wealth of knowledge (both manually written by the team and/or aggregated from previous/historical code reviews). And that agent should pull no punches when reviewing code.

This would augment actual engineer code reviews and help deal with volume.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#104

Post by alephnerd »

gedy wrote: post #101
alephnerd wrote: post #97

> ...most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. Not managing code. Not reviewing code. Not supervising systems that produce code. Writing it... A SWE who bases their entire identity and career around only writing code is not an engineer - they are a code monkey. The entire point of hiring a Software ENGINEER is to help translate business requirements into technical requirements, and then…

You might be missing that a lot of companies are giddy that the mgmt can just vibe code stuff and there's no opportunity for engineers to be involved, (except for when it crashes?). I use AI tools and they are nice, but the mgmt are mostly not logical and need someone to sort through their bullshit.

Yeah no. Almost all companies I've chatted with - from MSPs to C-Suite of F10s - expect and demand humans-in-the-loop. I'm also on a couple boards and we've aligned on the same expectation as well.

Look, AI/ML and especially LLMs are powerful, but there does remain a degree of instability and non-determinism which will require human intervention to remediate.

That said, there is a lot of dev work in companies that is a cost-center, and those are the portions that will start getting vibe coded and deployed in product with little-to-no oversight (eg. a support portal for SMBs at an enterprise), but the equivalent feature would have already been an afterthought even without LLMs and probably given to a couple SWEs we'd be fine re-orging in a quarter anyhow.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#105

Post by jsheard »

amelius wrote: post #102
jsheard wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs might follow the frequencies of the training data in their raw form, but nobody uses raw LLMs, they use models which have been RLHFed to hell and back to bias them towards specific patterns. Then newer models were trained on the output of those RLHFed models, and further RLHFed, and so on, and so on.

The H in RLHF stands for human. If humans didn't use the expression, then the LLM wouldn't.

In practice RLHF isn't a survey of every living humans personal style or preferences though, its purpose is to make the model more useful in the eyes of the vendor, mainly by getting cheap third-world labor to nudge the model according to the vendors instructions. You don't get a subservient, sycophantic and "safe" chat interface out of unstructured data without putting your thumb on the scale, hard.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#106

Post by gedy »

alephnerd wrote: post #104
gedy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be missing that a lot of companies are giddy that the mgmt can just vibe code stuff and there's no opportunity for engineers to be involved, (except for when it crashes?). I use AI tools and they are nice, but the mgmt are mostly not logical and need someone to sort through their bullshit.

Yeah no. Almost all companies I've chatted with - from MSPs to C-Suite of F10s - expect and demand humans-in-the-loop. I'm also on a couple boards and we've aligned on the same expectation as well. Look, AI/ML and especially LLMs are powerful, but there does remain a degree of instability and non-determinism which will require human intervention to remediate. That said, there is a lot of dev work in companies that is…

Yes just not driven or owned by engineers. That's what I'm seeing from company and a few peer's companies.

> but there does remain a degree of instability and non-determinism which will require human intervention to remediate.

I agree.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#107

Post by hparadiz »

prescriptivist wrote: post #103
fma wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my own side project that I vibe coded. I probably did what would take one team 6 montns and produced it myself in one month. I'm not afraid of breaking stuff because it is only a small set of users. However for my own code for my professional job no way I would go that fast because I would impact millions of users. It is insane that companies think they can replace teams wholesale while maintaining quality.

A missing link right now is automated high-quality code reviews. I would love an adversarial code review agent that has a persona oriented around all incoming code being slop, that leverages a wealth of knowledge (both manually written by the team and/or aggregated from previous/historical code reviews). And that agent should pull no punches when reviewing code. This would augment actual engineer code reviews and hel…

I've been asking for security audits as I go. It's not perfect but it's something. And it picks up the most obvious stuff.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#108

Post by hypfer »

RivieraKid wrote: post #89
hypfer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, why? Why do you look at it that way? Why does anyone beside you have to care about what you do? Just build something for yourself. You will always have things you'd like to build for yourself. You will be in competition with yourself only and your target audience will be yourself. Market forces do not apply to side-projects, because that's what people do for fun. Just because there are chess computers, doesn't me…

Isn't it obvious? The reward that a personal project can generate for you is limited. It's not remotely close to what a successful project would give you - money, fulfillment, social capital, feeling good about yourself, etc.

Yes but you see, maybe all of that was wrong in the first place?

This is just a correction of something that managed to remain in an invalid state for an impressively long time.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#109

Post by nehal3m »

rainmaking wrote: post #95
JimBlackwood wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? Because the bottleneck was never typing code. It was always understanding the problem, making architectural decisions, debugging edge cases, and most importantly - knowing what NOT to build. For me, this is a bit different. Writing code has always been the bottleneck. I get most of my joy out of solving edge cases and finding optimizations. My favorite projects are when I’m given an existing codebase with the…

Fascinating- I've always loved the big picture, architecture, and I've also loved stable software but have one hell of a time fixing bugs. AI helped me a ton with that. Well if you're ever in need for a complementary mind in side projects- huh, how does one connect over HackerNews?

I just put an email address in my profile. You could set up a temporary one and add it if you’re hesitant to share your real email with the internet.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#110

Post by theGnuMe »

sarchertech wrote: post #80
fma wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my own side project that I vibe coded. I probably did what would take one team 6 montns and produced it myself in one month. I'm not afraid of breaking stuff because it is only a small set of users. However for my own code for my professional job no way I would go that fast because I would impact millions of users. It is insane that companies think they can replace teams wholesale while maintaining quality.

Yeah I vibe coded an addition game for my 4 year old that lets him do addition problems where the answer is always 10 or less. It’s very “juicy”. There’s a lot of screen shake and spinning and flashy rainbow insanity going on. If I had done all that stuff myself it would have take a week because I would have been picky about each little animation. The thing that saved me the most time was just being ok with the good…

What language? JavaScript, Objective C, or Swift?
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