131–140 of 178 posts
Just wanted stop here to say that I find myself lucky to be able to retain employment as a gamedev engineer without using any AI or agent in my daily process. I work remote, so I don't know what the experience of my collegues entails. Am I really slipping into antiquity?
If you use zero AI, I would say yes
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly what the OP and I argue against, people insisting that it must be good for everyone. By the way the 'painful' part does more heaviy lifting there, not the boring. I've really tried a LOT during therapy and in some other situations. And it just doesn't work for me. Same with traditional exercise by the way. I can't do exercise in a gym (too empty) or have those 'gamification' goals, it must be more nat…
That’s all reasonable, and everyone is different , but I do think your original comment needed pushback, because meditation is often portrayed as enjoyable and easy at least in certain kinds of media. And I do think a lot of people give up when they find it boring and painful on their first practice. And for me, it is boring and painful AND useful. And took weeks to start to show any benefits at all. Sort of like goi…
Meditation is great, but there might also be other options available when it comes to dealing with the effects of context switching. For me, I find the Pomodoro technique really effective, but there's a key caveat, which is that you try to focus on one thing at a time (which flies in the face of using multiple AI agents working on x number of things at the same time). Another angle to explore is how much of the proce…
Get your vibe coded software with zero human reviewers away from the public infrastructure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m trying to get a bit away from the business stakeholders, into more technically required roles. Eventually my goal is to get into a system programming role. The issue with roles close to business is that it doesn’t provide the right soil for good engineering . Your stakeholders have no concept of engineering and wants everything ASAP; Your manager is just a yes man who takes all tickets, and want you to use AI for…
In my company it's a bit more complicated, but I have the spirit of your thoughts. I think business software (such as the ERP-like software I work on) is often an entropy magnet from the complexity point of view. It doesn't strive to be simple and elegant because business / finance world is messy. Whether all the complexity and messiness of the financial world is accidental or justified, this is irrelevant for me bec…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. GPT 5.4 was perfectly happy to help me write some 8051 assembly and integrate it into a weird vendor-specific Eclipse/Keil C51 build system. I would never have had the time or patience to figure it out. Embedded isn’t ready for full vibe coding to the extent that web development is, but it’s certainly not going to be an escape from AI.
The issue with AI isn't that it can't write embedded code (though it is noticeably worse at it), the issue is specifically with the safety certification of code the AI produced. There is a lot of paper trail to show that you followed all relevant standards, a lot of which pertains to your development process. It is not just what you do or don't do in the code (e.g. MISRA or CERT C) but there is also a lot about how y…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Joel still disagree today? Worth noting that this article is 25 years old. The world was very very different back then, especially when it comes to software engineering. Context switching is a problem when the cost of switching contexts is non-negligible -- but in the age of agentic development is that still really true? Surely yes for some problems, but for many others I would argue it no longer is. A personal…
What is also lower is your understanding of the change. So yes, if you are now essentially only doing the final mile of paper pushing for the LLM, then the mental burden is lower but so is the assurance of what has just transpired. Whether this mode of working is going to be long-term viable is going to depend on how important it is for you to be aware of what has happened for the system in question, how viable the e…
> Whether this mode of working is going to be long-term viable is going to depend on how important it is for you to be aware of what has happened for the system in question
This is the million dollar we'll see answered in our lifetime. Software engineering exists to automate work, are we arrogant to think we are not destined to the same fate? Is this truly a job befitting of a human over an agent?
Ever since I discovered my dad's C++ book in highschool I've absolutely loved coding, but i'm not convinced I have a long stable career ahead of me in SWE -- I'm 30 now and have already seen so much change in the industry during my professional career.
> how viable the economics are for the LLM usage at this level of assurance and how much ownership you exert over the LLM used or another similarly powered one
This piece scares me the most, a world where the next generation models are capped behind capital infeasible for the common person to access, further separating the ultra wealthy from what little remains of the middle class.
My hope is that open source models will fill the moat all of these AI companies so desperately want to dig, aready models like Qwen and Kimi are unfathomably better than what we had just a year or two ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my company it's a bit more complicated, but I have the spirit of your thoughts. I think business software (such as the ERP-like software I work on) is often an entropy magnet from the complexity point of view. It doesn't strive to be simple and elegant because business / finance world is messy. Whether all the complexity and messiness of the financial world is accidental or justified, this is irrelevant for me bec…
Yeah I agree. And sometimes it is not really the complexity. For example, kernel or compilers are very complicated in certain way, too, but whichever company makes those products probably is way more stringent about the quality comparing to other companies that are happy to move forward with tons of bugs and tech debts.
IMHO, the complexity of kernel and compilers is usually more justified and less accidental. At least non technical people are rarely the cause.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. GPT 5.4 was perfectly happy to help me write some 8051 assembly and integrate it into a weird vendor-specific Eclipse/Keil C51 build system. I would never have had the time or patience to figure it out. Embedded isn’t ready for full vibe coding to the extent that web development is, but it’s certainly not going to be an escape from AI.
The issue with AI isn't that it can't write embedded code (though it is noticeably worse at it), the issue is specifically with the safety certification of code the AI produced. There is a lot of paper trail to show that you followed all relevant standards, a lot of which pertains to your development process. It is not just what you do or don't do in the code (e.g. MISRA or CERT C) but there is also a lot about how y…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I agree. And sometimes it is not really the complexity. For example, kernel or compilers are very complicated in certain way, too, but whichever company makes those products probably is way more stringent about the quality comparing to other companies that are happy to move forward with tons of bugs and tech debts.
>> For example, kernel or compilers are very complicated in certain way, too, but whichever company makes those products probably is way more stringent about the quality comparing to other companies that are happy to move forward with tons of bugs and tech debts. IMHO, the complexity of kernel and compilers is usually more justified and less accidental. At least non technical people are rarely the cause.