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Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

codingwithjesse.com

301–310 of 401 posts

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#301

> 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…

Yeah someone should train these LLMs on straight compiled machine code/binaries and the output so they can start writing directly in binary.

That is like running Photoshop reliably on an encrypted image.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#302
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's like three groups of developers you need: The prototypers, who move fast and break things, who throw together shiny first versions that look great and work some of the time; The architects, who take the prototypes and take the time to build it correctly; And the gardeners, who maintain the built system for the next 10-30 years, fixing bugs, making incremental improvements to speed or resource usage, and updat…

Ha, I'm a gardener then, on my 15th year of maintenance. So halfway there according to you. Slowly, very slowly, fixing the thousands of bugs the rockstar left behind 15 years ago.

This comment made me imagine what would the guy maintaining my first deployed project at my first company thinks about me. Never had this thought ever cross my mind.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#303

I've met a handful of people across my life that i'd call truly brilliant. Like, holy heck how in the world is this person this smart? Two things I've noted about really smart people are (usually mutually exclusively) 1) Sometimes they do not realize how smart they are, because it's simple to them, or because they know the subject they assume everyone else, say with a computer science degree, knows and recalls and un…

It's lonely being an outlier, especially in a trait that's so fundamental to how you see the world. Despite best effort, it's hard to relate to most people, and they especially find it hard to relate to you. The delta of lived experience is quite wide, often insurmountable.

[deleted]

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#304

I've met a handful of people across my life that i'd call truly brilliant. Like, holy heck how in the world is this person this smart? Two things I've noted about really smart people are (usually mutually exclusively) 1) Sometimes they do not realize how smart they are, because it's simple to them, or because they know the subject they assume everyone else, say with a computer science degree, knows and recalls and un…

It's lonely being an outlier, especially in a trait that's so fundamental to how you see the world. Despite best effort, it's hard to relate to most people, and they especially find it hard to relate to you. The delta of lived experience is quite wide, often insurmountable.

My smart friend said it's like everyone around you is slightly drunk.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#305

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…

Nice the market is real and the problem is growing with the muti-agent work, The mess that AI do also create a nice opportunities until someone actually solves the ai result.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#307
post #26

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…

In some ways they are giving you a spec and UI mocks to implement.

Not in some ways. The value of working code that meets the requirements and generates revenue is very high, it's a gift.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#308

These two sentences hit home: > The flow of data was so hard to follow, it seemed like someone was trying to cover up a murder. > Just getting the code to run on your laptop took a week. I always thought I’m the only one having problem understanding the data flow, or setting up a proper dev environment. Impostor syndrome (and sometimes toxic environments that pushed for “velocity”) didn’t help either. Felt good to kn…

You're not alone on this, I've also felt the same way, and those knowledge often lives in people's heads or random slack threads, and with AI code it's even worse It just generated what looked reasonable at the time.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#309
post #7

I kind of envy people who need to clean up after others. At least you're puzzling. My current job is genuinely just boring. It's tasks that are so simple, a junior could do it. But no, instead they needed a medior. I'm not saying I'm better than this, nor that no medior will pick it up. I just cannot push myself to care about the code this company makes. It's old, dusty and it serves no one of importance. These custo…

At first I thought "medior" was a strange typo for "senior", but on seeing it twice I had to check - apparently it's used in some parts of Europe to mean "mid-level"

Very normal in The Netherlands, was kinda surprised to learn it's not a thing in English speaking countries?

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#310
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no universally accepted distinction between developer and engineer. Even if so, dev or engineer, both can be low or high skill. Their job title doesn't tell how sloppy or good their LLM usage will be.

This isn't about distinction between literal titles. But continue missing the point.

Yeah it is. The meat of your post is textbook gatekeeping. "This is a dev, not an engineer."
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