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

ivanturkovic.com

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

#111

Post by addaon »

nz wrote: post #98
skydhash wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the good book about writing I read was William Zinsser's "On Writing Well". Striving for simplicity and avoiding clutter was the two first principles described in the book. AI writing feels more like ramblings than communication.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about florid and elaborate writing (e.g. Faulkner, Lispector, Mieville, Mossman, Joyce, Austen, etc)?

I do not think Faulkner would write very good C++ library documentation.

I would read the hell out of Joyce’s Perl 5 documentation, but only after six or seven beers.

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

#113

Post by alephnerd »

gedy wrote: post #106
alephnerd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I mean, it depends on the feature/product and how critical it is to the health of the business.

Like I mentioned in my edited comment, 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 because we cannot justify spending $500K-750K a year (the backend cost of 3 FT SWEs or Contractors for a company) on a customer form which nets $0 in revenue and is not directly tied with pipeline generation.

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

#114

Post by mark-r »

There's nothing new about this pattern. When the tractor was invented, the farmer didn't get to knock off early. He just started producing 10x more. Then the tractors got bigger and more powerful, and the things you used them with got more sophisticated too and suddenly you're producing 100x more.

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

#115

Post by dana321 »

seethishat wrote: post #94

One problem I have seen IRL is AI deployment mistakes and IMO Vibe Coders need an IT/Dev Father Figure type to avoid these simple mistakes. Here is one example: A surgeon (no coding experience) used Claude to write a web app to track certain things about procedures he had done. He deployed the app on a web hosting provided (PHP LAMP stack). He wanted to share it with other doctors, but wasn't sure if it was 'secure'…

Claude is crazy good at coding but it won't hold your hand when it comes to the unknown unknowns that the regular joe like this doesn't know.

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

#116

Post by lezojeda »

Spide_r wrote: post #11

Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.

[dead]

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

#117

Post by sh3rl0ck »

hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I think there's a reward for finesse too.

As you mentioned, scope definition and constraints play a major role but ensuring that you don't just go for the first slop result but refine it pays off. It helps to have a very clear mental model of feature constraints that doesn't fall prey to scope creep.

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

#118

Post by sda2 »

RivieraKid wrote: post #27

Regarding expanding role: The scenario I'm somewhat worried about is that instead of 1 PM, 1 designer and 5 developers, there will be 1 PM, 1 designer and 1 developer. Even if tech employment stays stable or even slightly increases due to Jevons paradox, the share of software developers in tech employment will shrink.

1 PM, 1 designer, 1 developer, and 10 SREs to clean up the mess.

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

#120

Post by victorzidaroiu »

hackersk wrote: post #6

[flagged]

When I got to the part where it said that developers chose software engineering as a job because they like to code not because they want to review or "manage" code I really felt that. But while I enjoy coding & building as solo developer on my projects I can't really say I've ever enjoyed it as a job. Or are you not supposed to like your job? Is that how the world works?
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