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Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

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Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#221

Post by ath3nd »

prodigycorp wrote: post #214
nrmitchi wrote: post #157

> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…

Thought experiment: would a junior developer armed with a modern day gpt-5.5 or opus 4.8 in 2015 would have been considered a 10x developer (assuming nobody knew they were using AI)?

[dead]

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#222

Post by prerok »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #165
Lord_Zero wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the before times, you learned a lot and walked away with knowledge on the deps needed, connections, .env secrets, and cleaned it all up and documented it so the next dev would have an easier time doing it.

Bullshit I just pasted random shit from google in until it worked and then instantly forgot which combination of the 20 things I tried got it there.

Indeed, there were plenty of people doing just that. I imagine they get the most out of vibe coding. However, when it became a problem, an engineer was still required to fix it.

It might have been you, a couple of months later, or someone else. I have dealt with slop produced by unknowing programmers most of my career. With this vibe coding I think my job is still safe. The amount, though, is increasing exponentially.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#223

Post by justanotherunit »

anonzzzies wrote: post #19

I like fixing code made by AIs and others (outsourcing code is similar as someone else said already). Last week we found out some client tried to vibe some departmental tool; the result is some massive crap in nextjs that needs 10GB mem to compile, has 1000s of lint errors, dev logs in git (very noisy ones) and so on. Now we have to fix it: its basically free 10k-50k euros over and over again for this type of work. V…

Are clients really paying for it? It’s really fascinating actually. Is it because the ”client” built it so they have sentimental value and sold it to themselves before you receive the request?

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#224

Post by ofjcihen »

anonzzzies wrote: post #19

I like fixing code made by AIs and others (outsourcing code is similar as someone else said already). Last week we found out some client tried to vibe some departmental tool; the result is some massive crap in nextjs that needs 10GB mem to compile, has 1000s of lint errors, dev logs in git (very noisy ones) and so on. Now we have to fix it: its basically free 10k-50k euros over and over again for this type of work. V…

This X a 1000.

I work in IR for small to medium sized business. The past few years have seen my business increase well beyond what I can reasonably handle and my bank account feels like a dragons pile of gold.

I will always always be on the side of security should be integrated and planned for and by no means do I want to see breaches.

That being said giving people of dubious expertise the ability to blast out an app in an hour has been an absolute windfall for me and others.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#225

Post by Yokohiii »

yesitcan wrote: post #205
kaydub wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, v1 is sloppy, then I tell the LLM to clean it up. Every 1 prompt of building tends to require 1-5 prompts of clean up. Simple, fast, clean good code. The chasm between "Software Developer" and "Software Engineer" is getting wider. Articles like this and the comments under it give away who is an Engineer and who is just a coder.

The chasm is 1-5 prompts wide?

The distinction between developer and engineer is obviously that one adds "make no mistakes!!!1."

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#226

Post by xigoi »

prodigycorp wrote: post #214
nrmitchi wrote: post #157

> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…

Thought experiment: would a junior developer armed with a modern day gpt-5.5 or opus 4.8 in 2015 would have been considered a 10x developer (assuming nobody knew they were using AI)?

Depends on whether they have one of the bosses that judge employees’ quality by the number of lines written.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#227

Post by anonzzzies »

justanotherunit wrote: post #223
anonzzzies wrote: post #19

I like fixing code made by AIs and others (outsourcing code is similar as someone else said already). Last week we found out some client tried to vibe some departmental tool; the result is some massive crap in nextjs that needs 10GB mem to compile, has 1000s of lint errors, dev logs in git (very noisy ones) and so on. Now we have to fix it: its basically free 10k-50k euros over and over again for this type of work. V…

Are clients really paying for it? It’s really fascinating actually. Is it because the ”client” built it so they have sentimental value and sold it to themselves before you receive the request?

yep. exactly that

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#228

Post by bigstrat2003 »

fooster wrote: post #156
Lord_Zero wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the before times, you learned a lot and walked away with knowledge on the deps needed, connections, .env secrets, and cleaned it all up and documented it so the next dev would have an easier time doing it.

Yeah, that totally didn't happen the majority of the time.

Yes it did. That's how I learned a great many things throughout my career. I'm sure some people didn't pay attention or try to understand what they were doing, and didn't learn. That's on them. But most of us learned a lot that way.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#230

Post by sumeno »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #22

It’s literally no different than how to clean up old projects over the last 30 years of software engineering I don’t understand why all this stuff is all of a sudden “new.” It feels like we’ve got an entire generation of people who never had to spend their time factoring or doing hard infrastructure work It’s actually pretty baffling how rare it is to find somebody who has consistent experience in refactoring that is…

It's different because LLMs can generate code that immediately needs to be refactored at speeds that were unfeasible before. There was a practical limit on the amount of technical debt that could be created in a day before, now that limit is 10x or 100x higher. It can be generated far faster than it can be fixed.
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