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Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

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Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#81

Post by bedobi »

I'm a Software Engineer and I think the author is probably right that many Software Engineers are misguidedly placing too much weight on their ability to read and write code.

The valuable part of Software Engineering isn't PARSING a solution into code and back again, taking into account all the idiosyncrasies and edge casey bugs of any given language chosen for the implementation. Of course that is a discrete and impressive skill, but it's no longer terribly valuable.

The valuable part of Software Engineering is "given this problem, what's an elegant, efficient, testable, scalable, maintainable, observable solution?".

Most of CS is already a solved problem, so even that is mostly a matter of assembling those solved-problem pieces together and choosing the flavor of how it's expressed. (for me, it's pure functions, for others, it might be OOP)

AIs are pretty good at that too, so it seems to me like the Software Engineers role is now to cultivate taste (what, in a perfect world, systems SHOULD look like) and balance it with pragmatism. (what does the system/business/time/resource constraints look like TODAY)

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#82

Post by doug_durham »

hootz wrote: post #3

But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code? Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?

Accountability is the key. You are accountable for the work product. You need to do what is necessary to make sure that the product meets standards. How you do it is of secondary importance. If reading code is what is needed to guarantee quality and you stop, that is on you.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#83

Post by blanched »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #47

Most of the AI submissions are from people who are here to self-promote their own content and have little to no other participation. It's like this stuff appeals to a different audience than made up this site 5 years ago. Everything and everyone feels so nonsubstantive now.

These blogs are AI-written. Claude/ChatGPT love a follow-up. I guarantee they’re suggesting something along the lines of “Great catch on that typo. This is looking good. Ready for plenty of upvotes on Hacker News and Reddit!”

And that’s assuming the author isn’t just prompting “I wrote a coding article. Where should I share it for attention?”

That’s all to say that I think this /is/ largely a new cohort of the community.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#84

Post by mariopt »

yehosef wrote: post #43
mariopt wrote: post #33

I’m forcing myself to write code. This idea of reviewing an architecture that you never coded is just a fantasy. At some point in time, me and a lot of people, thought that using Redux was a great idea until we had to manage verbosity and middlewares. Now we had to deal with the consequences of our decisions and we learned. I also think this article is just a rage bait

can an architect review a system he didn't design or build?

If you never coded that architecture yourself, you are not able to tell if it fits the problem, pros and cons, if the implementation is in accordance.

Imagine reviewing CQRS without having built one

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#85

Post by doug_durham »

mariopt wrote: post #33

I’m forcing myself to write code. This idea of reviewing an architecture that you never coded is just a fantasy. At some point in time, me and a lot of people, thought that using Redux was a great idea until we had to manage verbosity and middlewares. Now we had to deal with the consequences of our decisions and we learned. I also think this article is just a rage bait

You are choosing to be enraged. If a tool works it works.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#86

Post by doug_durham »

JBorrow wrote: post #20

I just can't get behind this perspective, perhaps because I am a 'bad prompter', simply due to the lack of capability from current models. I end up rejecting them, asking them to implement again, they spew out tons of crap code instead of a 10 line fix, and on, and on. Note that I'm not saying the agents are useless. They certainly write a lot of code and sometimes it is good. But I don't think you can get away witho…

There seems to be a split. There are a substantial group of people like yourself who don't get what they want from LLMs. There are folks like me who get excellent idiomatic code almost every time. Both experiences are real and should be respected. I'm hoping that future investigations will find out why that is the case.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#87

Post by doug_durham »

everyone wrote: post #40

Is anyone doing this who is not making CRUD web-apps or other very common types of programs for which there is masses of training data to copy from the net? I tend to do oddball stuff (eg. software for custom arcade machines, AR games) and any forays I've made into AI code have made it seem like a total waste of time for me. (ie. I will spend much longer trying to get AI do to a shitty job, compared to just doing it…

I write low level highly performance sensitive code and I get excellent results using LLMs. It isn't a narrow area of applicability.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#88

Post by scruple »

njovin wrote: post #62
phito wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I do ask an LLM another question about something small it will offer solutions but doesn’t offer the solution I think makes sense in the architectures I’ve written. This is my experience as well, and I've been using Claude Code a lot. Extremely impressive tools, but they're like fast food. They will solve your immediate problems quickly and cheaply, but you're going to have issues on the long term if that's all…

Have you tried drilling into the reasoning when this happens? This is why I usually leave it in "Plan Mode" and when it proposes a solution that seems unusual or unexpected, I point out why I think it is and ask it to justify it's position. Sometimes I get the "you're right!" response, but often it will also explain why it made the decision it did, and it's rational enough that I accept the new approach. It's still v…

How much time do I want to spend on this vs. just writing the old-fashioned way?

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#89

Post by mmmore »

voidUpdate wrote: post #25

What's interesting to me is how many people have found out with the LLM boom that they don't want to be developers/engineers, they want to be managers, delegating all the work to another entity and checking in occasionally to see how the coding is coming along

I don't want to be a manager, but I also don't want to be a technician (for the most part). I want to be an engineer, which means my job is to solve problems. LLMs help me solve problems faster, so I use them.

Sometimes I get the urge to write code by hand and I do it, though. Less frequently, the LLM is inept at solving my problem, so I have to resort to the old fashioned way.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#90

Post by ModernMech »

jdc0589 wrote: post #74
aselimov3 wrote: post #8

I think the main issue with this approach is that your solution space eventually narrows. You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one. I’ve noticed this recently as all my side project work is being done by hand. If I do ask an LLM another question about something small it will offer solutions but doesn’t offer the solution I think…

> You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one. totally depends on how you use the tools. Plenty of people fall in to that scenario, but plenty of others explicitly tell the LLM tools what and how to build something.

How do you make it follow your instructions though? I often an agent like Codex how to build something, and then it just ignores me.
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