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A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

sam.sutch.net

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Re: A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

#51

Post by nunez »

georgehotz wrote: post #35

How much of modern software was slop before AI? Is this really something new? I argue it's been happening in many companies since at least 2010. Made with good old fashioned humans and some help from ZIRP. Remember that time I worked at Twitter? SQLite is the most popular database in the world. It's maintained by 3 people. There's hope. AI is a great tool that's here to help you if you want, but at the end of the day…

With all due respect, this is a bit disingenuous coming from you.

GitHub's exponential growth in number of commits and PRs answers your question.

Before AI, if you wanted to contribute to OSS, you had to have _some_ idea of what the code did. At least enough of an idea to compile it so that you could test your changes.

That was the bar. Sure, lots of low quality PRs existed, but that gate kept the influx somewhat manageable.

Also, the diffs were a lot smaller, as bigger diffs meant bigger effort, a risky gamble for a PR that might not get merged. You've lived that life, so you get it.

Post AI (post Opus, really), any hooligan with $200/mo to burn can "land" a Heisenberg sized PR into any project with green tests without having the slightest bloomin' clue what their diff does or how the codebase they're integrating into works. That's impossible for humans to keep up with.

For every SQLite cathedral, there are a hundred corporate projects whose employers are mandating 100% AI generation with manual PR/MR merges.

Re: A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

#52

Post by pianopatrick »

I think this is just a moment in time. People are spending billions of dollars to figure out how to make this AI stuff work better. A lot of the smartest people in the world are working full time to improve things.

Give AI a few years and see how you feel after people have made the AI and the tools to use AI even better.

Re: A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

#53

Post by DSMan195276 »

andrekandre wrote: post #31
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #26

Why do some software engineers love AI and some hate it? I've got senior engineers (20+ yoe) who have never been having more fun and then some who feel like OP here. Why is it so decisive? There's no other tool (not even emacs) that's caused this sort of division.

> Why do some software engineers love AI and some hate it? n=1 but i'd say 3 aspects for me: 1. its forced on me at $job; its just a tool so let me use it when i need it and stop making my work-life miserable with childish tokenmaxing leaderboards 2. co-workers who send low-effort low-quality pr's that introduce tons of complexity and waste everyone's time and that they cant answer basic questions about because they…

I agree and would add to that from my experience:

1. Too many people think that having lots of text makes something impressive, really it's just inconsiderate and nobody is reading it all.

2. Helping people often feels pointless because I can tell I'm just getting a cut/paste AI response back.

Re: A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

#54

Post by stringfood »

0x20cowboy wrote: post #49
stringfood wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the people I know who hate AI have a bizarre and unrelatable love for the pure math aspect of software engineering - the elegant software architecture, the efficient programming languages. the people who only care about getting stuff done are loving AI but people who spent their life learning how to properly craft high quality software are weeping - as they should be - now they know how kasparov felt

There is room in this world for Mcdonalds and Michelin Chefs. I would also take your comment with a grain of salt. If the people you are talking about are javascript developers or people who do leetcode in interviews but never write that kind of code on the job, they are probably delusional. Ive seen many people call it a “craft” and what they produce is nothing of the sort. If you really are good, you’ll still be in…

that is so true in fact I have only heard a few people say that actually, most say it more in theory than practice. Because in practice I have always been asked to solve pretty simple and boring problems far removed from the Dijkstra algorithms i did in college. i never used a graph data structure in my entire life lol

Re: A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

#55

Post by simondotau »

deadbabe wrote: post #36
simondotau wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all sincerity, what do you mean by wholly unpleasant? 25 years in my case, by the way, and I have found this to be the most liberating and creativity-boosting period of my career. And it’s not even close. I’ve written code in more languages in the past few years than in any other period. I’m finishing more projects than ever before. I’m learning faster than ever before. I’m enjoying programming more than ever befo…

AI as helper is basically a better google search, which is not much different than what we did before AI (copy paste from stack overflow)

That’s not been my experience. Not even remotely like that. I was never much of a stack overflow block copier. AI lets me do rapid refactoring without messy search and replace. AI lets me rip through logical pinch points without pulling out a whiteboard. And I couldn’t have ever “stack overflowed” my way to diving into a project in a brand new language.

Re: A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

#56

Post by shric »

simondotau wrote: post #23
shric wrote: post #9

30 years in the industry for me. It’s been a wild last few years watching this transformation. Like the OP I find it wholly unpleasant and I also can’t deny the productivity boost. I’m very glad I’m nearly ready for retirement and I look forward to watching this “progress” from a comfortable distance.

In all sincerity, what do you mean by wholly unpleasant? 25 years in my case, by the way, and I have found this to be the most liberating and creativity-boosting period of my career. And it’s not even close. I’ve written code in more languages in the past few years than in any other period. I’m finishing more projects than ever before. I’m learning faster than ever before. I’m enjoying programming more than ever befo…

> In all sincerity, what do you mean by wholly unpleasant?

“Wholly” was too strong a word now that I think about it.

But I’ll give two main things I find unpleasant.

One: Normally I like working with other people. There is nothing more satisfying than collaborating on a complex problem with smart and conscientious colleagues. However, the bad experiences are now amplified:

- a random colleague gets sent down a wild gooose chase of an LLM claiming there is an issue with something I wrote. It’s a full blown hallucination because it found a confluence page which mentioned me and just decided to connect things together.

- another colleague is suddenly empowered with being able to vibe code websites and is now copying and pasting my replies into an LLM and pasting the LLM back at me over Slack.

- a colleague gives a quick drive by vibe coded PR to add a feature into something I own. It reimplements the same business logic that is already done elsewhere. It takes me more energy to explain all this than just do it myself.

There are dozens more examples. In isolation I can shrug each of these off, but it’s draining. Large organisations have become more “agile” with local optimisations and missing the bigger picture.

Two: while I agree that everything is getting done faster and I do get satisfaction out of that, I’m a deep in the weeds technical person. I don’t have it in me to be a big picture person or a people leader. I love having to think about algorithms, data structures, schemas, etc. While I can use AI has a pair programmer, it’s doing a lot of the thinking for me and it’s usually faster. So yes it makes me a better engineer, no I don’t enjoy not thinking as much. I don’t enjoy shifting solely to a higher level of abstraction. Maybe that makes me a bad engineer, but I cannot change how I feel about it.

Re: A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

#57

Post by tired-turtle »

az09mugen wrote: post #11
avaer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are saying they didn't use AI for it.

Yup, just a problem of a misplaced comma I think.Let me rephrase it : "AI is used for work, but my website, and all the content in it, is entirely written by hand." I wonder why your comment gets upvotes until getting to the top.

It is a great example of a garden path sentence.

Our brains’ initial parse of that sentence, while sensible and probable, is incorrect. That is, the mind really wants to interpret “...for work, my website, and all...” as a list, but that leaves a dangling clause!

The sentence is grammatical but confusing.

Re: A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

#58

Post by cognitiveinline »

georgehotz wrote: post #35

How much of modern software was slop before AI? Is this really something new? I argue it's been happening in many companies since at least 2010. Made with good old fashioned humans and some help from ZIRP. Remember that time I worked at Twitter? SQLite is the most popular database in the world. It's maintained by 3 people. There's hope. AI is a great tool that's here to help you if you want, but at the end of the day…

Software is solved. Significant amount of code written (>90% of engineers) wrote slop. And it would get merged. Overall - both floor and ceiling of quality of software has definitely been raised. Just that it's had a labor scare and impact.

Before it needed you to jailbreak a console. Today point frontier at a console, and it could also figure it out. The console folks also can do that before release and ensure it's unbreakable.

Now that software is solved, we are faced with the philsophical necessity of our vocation.

Re: A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

#59

Post by krackers »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #22
avaer wrote: post #15

For a hundred years software was inscrutable enough to normies that you could be an artisan. But most professions haven't had that luxury for a long, long time. Try making and selling pretty much anything else you built by hand. Now it's software people's turn to feel the pain of being a starving artist and watch as your attractive friends with no skills and a social media presence "make it" with their genius. We hav…

What doomerism. I really don't see it. Slop has always been cheap. Now it's even cheaper. But software that actually fucking works AND does what you want is still expensive as hell.

>But software that actually fucking works AND does what you want is still expensive as hell.

Skilled craftsmen said the same thing, and yet everyone seems to prefer $1 Temu slop that breaks in a year.

Re: A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

#60

Post by palmotea »

ehnto wrote: post #48
simondotau wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all sincerity, what do you mean by wholly unpleasant? 25 years in my case, by the way, and I have found this to be the most liberating and creativity-boosting period of my career. And it’s not even close. I’ve written code in more languages in the past few years than in any other period. I’m finishing more projects than ever before. I’m learning faster than ever before. I’m enjoying programming more than ever befo…

> Skip the vibe coding, just let AI be a helper. This I think will explain the differences in experience in industry. As pressures increase, control and power moves away from developers who have historically had a pretty strong position to dictate how they work. Not everyone is going to be able to use AI as just a tool. The reality I have seen is that AI has sped the time-to-pr up for those who don't care what they s…

> Not everyone is going to be able to use AI as just a tool. The reality I have seen is that AI has sped the time-to-pr up for those who don't care what they ship, so that gets baked into estimates and expectations.

> Eventually those working carefully with AI will be like the carpenter still using hand tools while the shop is operating CNC machines. The business can't afford the craftsmanship, no matter how right the craftsman is to point out that their work is better.

The analogy doesn't work. CNC machines can be faster and better than a guy with hand tools. AI isn't like that.

What you need is some other race-to-the-bottom situation, because that's what AI is.

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