This would be true if the goal was to get good working code faster. But the actual goal is to get any code faster. So, in reality, it doesn’t matter whether you are a good or a bad engineer. It just amplified how good you are at manipulating the hiring process with your fine tuned resume and how smoothly you can talk your way through.
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
391–400 of 811 posts
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#392Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.
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Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff. A bad engineer with a good model and harness will produce something faster, but it will be worse. A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff.
Yes, but much more slowly. And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever
...as Mickey Mouse was fond of telling me as I waiting for the ride at Disney World. Or it was my drill instructor. can't remember which.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#394> The engineer opening a 25,000-line PR should have stopped the agent long before it got there. So many A car is simply a faster horse arguments being made here. The “You must review every line of code” camp are going to be in for a seriously bad time when Claude/Grok/etc starts writing machine code, and they absolutely will and you will look like a crazy person the same way as those who said we can’t trust compilers…
I'm working on this right now, will have a release probably in a week or two. Not machine code but it's essentially a custom assembler/compiler pipeline (close enough) that an LLM can operate via the CLI (you can do it too, it's just way slower) and it emits native asm optimized chunks that can then be inserted back into cpp (working on a rust et al impl). The results are _obscenely_ good. It's outright outperforming gcc vis-a-vis by a MONSTROUS margin, and it's not even close. As in, gcc can do abour 3-4 cyc/byte (arbitrary workloads on a wide variety of tests) and my tool does it in 0.5 cyc/byte if not better. It outright emits kernels that run at a flat 4 IPC for more or less _anything_. You can then have an LLM convert it back into high level C++ intrinsics (not always, gcc doesn't always expose all the levers needed to do so) if you wish. The one downside is that you need to provide fairly accurate cpu arch maps (ie agner fog instruction port/latency tables) for the tool to work right, which is what i'm focusing on right now.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#395Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#396Now the question is - no one was born good or best engineer/programmer/scientist. Often it was a long path of sleepless nights, daily grinding, failing million times, doing dumb mistakes along the way, the usual package of suffering sometimes called "experience". What is the path now for the next generation of good or best engineers? There will be no opportunities/budget to do the same anymore.
"The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill, while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth"
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#397> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…
I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that happened to our industry. Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job. The problem is our industry mostly doesn't have any sort of reasonable mentorship or apprenticeship culture, so we've always left it to the engineers to teach themselves. Sink or swim. The problem is th…
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#398No confirmation for the title, rubbish arguments and logic.
> Good engineers have become more valuable because AI lets them move much faster.
Bad prediction. This is likely another AI marketing article.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has less to do with bad engineers than bad policies and procedures. You don't performance test before shipping to prod? you get what you get.
Startups have limited resources, we prioritize the best we can. As a staff engineer it's my responsibility to bring this to my company, but it's not an overnight process.
Re: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
#400A bad engineer has been lazy for years and will never change.
You likely have experience with this already first hand. Ever had a lazy day and just hit "yes" "continue" on the AI over and over? I've had to revert entire days of work because I was so burnt out I didn't put effort into the design.
A good rule of thumb though is if an AI can't solve the bug and fixing it creates more you have a bad abstraction and architecture that needs a gutting and rebuild from near scratch.