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Is this sustainable?

jamiehurst.co.uk

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Re: Is this sustainable?

#31

Post by mpalmer »

Do not bother reading this.

The author could have written a rather incisive 800 words on this if he'd really tried.

But I will not read 2500 words of redundant, repetitive slop. It's really bad writing.

There is no pacing or conclusion to speak of. It's sort of just a loose list alternating between upsides and downsides, punctuated by the usual bullshit list-y ad-copy summations:

    The build cost collapsed, the alignment cost rose, the thinking time disappeared, and the productivity gains got captured by output volume rather than output quality.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#32

Post by cyanydeez »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #11
steveBK123 wrote: post #6

> The result, in my case, is that I code more than I have in years. Three years ago I coded maybe once a fortnight, mostly throwaway PoCs to demonstrate concepts. Now I code most days of the week, in between other work. This kind of senior engineering role really depends on the type/size of an org. I've had jobs like this on & off and generally don't stick around for long. There have always been high-impact hands-on-…

> The quantity over quality market is going to produce new opportunities for others once the linkedin anti-ai hype train starts in earnest that’ll be when there’ll be money to be made. monkey see, monkey do.

there's no anti-ai hype train. It doesn't exist. There'll merely be more and more bots crowding into every space that the only people left will not care.

The rest will be out touching grass.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#33

Post by dijksterhuis »

cyanydeez wrote: post #32
dijksterhuis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quantity over quality market is going to produce new opportunities for others once the linkedin anti-ai hype train starts in earnest that’ll be when there’ll be money to be made. monkey see, monkey do.

there's no anti-ai hype train. It doesn't exist. There'll merely be more and more bots crowding into every space that the only people left will not care. The rest will be out touching grass.

not yet. but given the growing backlash my bet is that at some point linkedin monkeys will eventually all begin posting about the importance of “human centric design” or whatever.

at that point there’ll be some money to be made for the supposedly “replaceable” software engineers they’ve been shitting on this whole time.

i’m hoping my bet pays off, cos i would like nothing more than to rinse these people for everything they’ve got. it’ll be payback time baby.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#34

Post by carlosjobim »

Thinking that memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software is like thinking that memorizing all the generals' birth days is being skilled in warfare.

Before AI, trying to program even a simple thing was an exercise in frustration from rules that had only been put in place by programmers to protect their own jobs and make it as difficult as possible for a normal person to develop. Oh! You mixed tabs and spaces, now your code will not compile and you're stuck another day. Oh! You forgot a semicolon, now the code won't run, even though the software points out your missed semicolon and thus knows how to fix it.

AI takes care of all that bagage and now I and others can make fully functional software that solves real world problem for real people.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#35

Post by mpalmer »

carlosjobim wrote: post #34

Thinking that memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software is like thinking that memorizing all the generals' birth days is being skilled in warfare. Before AI, trying to program even a simple thing was an exercise in frustration from rules that had only been put in place by programmers to protect their own jobs and make it as difficult as possible for a normal person to develop. Oh! You mixed tab…

I'm afraid you never understood the job if you think it's just "memorizing insane code rules".

Re: Is this sustainable?

#36

Post by poly2it »

xnorswap wrote: post #29
nicbou wrote: post #12

When a long article is topped by an AI-generated image, it makes me wonder if I should bother reading. Did a human write this?

When I get the sense that something might be generated I ctrl+f "honest" and "framing". These are words that humans use, but that Claude loves to use in a particular way, the kind of way used in this article. It particularly likes the phrase "The honest version".

> But the trade is real, and I don't think the industry is being honest about it.

Add "X is real".

Re: Is this sustainable?

#37

Post by NewLogic »

nathanielks wrote: post #13
jon-wood wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on this, which is almost entirely pulled out of my rear end because I last worked in a large company before the rise of agents, is that we’ll see a move from vertical teams of specialists who get pulled into projects to build a mobile app or handle infrastructure. Instead there’ll be a much stronger focus on teams of generalists, or combined teams of specialists from different fields, working on a feature or…

> Instead there’ll be a much stronger focus on teams of generalists, or combined teams of specialists from different fields, working on a feature or product end to end. > Coordination has in my experience always been the big bottleneck in getting anything done I work at a large enterprise you've heard of. They're currently re-organizing the product area to remove currently-static two pizza teams into an amorphous blo…

Where does the feature go for long term ownership? That throws you build it you own it out the window. We are going to get more time for documentation and handover right, right? Engineers are famous for generating good documentation.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#38

Post by Waterluvian »

I've always been frustrated by charlatans who do a great job advancing their own goals at the cost of those foolish enough to actually care about doing a good job. AI is a very empowering tool for these kinds as it is super effective at creating facades of productivity and thoughtfulness.

I think AI has a lot of value when used with thoughtful care. I think a lot of the conversations around it are really about frustrations with charlatans.

Re: Is this sustainable?

#39

Post by imtringued »

carlosjobim wrote: post #34

Thinking that memorizing insane code rules is being skilled in making software is like thinking that memorizing all the generals' birth days is being skilled in warfare. Before AI, trying to program even a simple thing was an exercise in frustration from rules that had only been put in place by programmers to protect their own jobs and make it as difficult as possible for a normal person to develop. Oh! You mixed tab…

I've never had a problem mixing tabs or spaces in any language that supported this, which is basically most languages.

I've spent the last three weeks working out a spec and didn't even start the development process yet.

The idea that the syntax of the language would ever be a bottleneck sounds ridiculous to me.

The gate keeping allegations are also incomprehensible. The vast majority of developers are working on making their jobs easier. There wouldn't be an endless stream of new programming languages, libraries and frameworks, if there was a software guild that you needed approval from to work on software. Even if such a guild existed, it would get obsoleted by the competition.

There are cases of people maximizing their own job security by writing terrible and incomprehensible code, but most experienced developers have gotten bitten by their own cleverness and try to make their code as easy to understand and as accessible as possible.

Things like Java Server Faces and Java Enterprise Edition died out a long time ago. The XML craze is over. Roy Fielding style REST/HATEOAS is dead and everything is an HTTP API with OpenAPI docs nowadays. People understand by now that micro service architectures only make sense for organisational purposes but not for technical reasons. NoSQL also waned and everyone is basically putting their JSON into PostgreSQL if they need to store complex hierarchical data.

Why do you even care about irrelevant things like semicolons? Like, any reasonable editor gives you squiggly lines so you can't miss them, meanwhile in practice having a line delimiter helps disambiguate hairy expressions and produce more readable error messages. For me they are an imperceptible cost that I couldn't care less about.

If you talked about null pointers, which are basically a landmine in every line you've ever written, waiting for a chance to explode, maybe you'd have a point but even nullable pointers are an idea that is being relegated to the history books.

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