81–90 of 117 posts
At this point I literally have no idea what modern coding is supposed to look like. I still open my editor, type stuff in and run make. All these tools are released daily and they just fly over my caveman head.
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That’s fine, and you’re doing fine. In fact, in a few years you will probably be far more skilled than most “software engineers”.
Real question here, as I'm struggling with this and I'm not finding a lot of evidence to support my inclination (that you are correct). Why would this person be more skilled? And more importantly, what does it mean to be "skilled" in the era of AI? I'm trying to be open-minded to both sides, but I have senior engineers on my team with a fleet of agents, shipping code they don't fully understand, and... everything is…
I spend a lot of time reviewing code and the LLM code works for what the implementer wanted and from the outside things function the way people expected, but inside the code is becoming more and more knotted and incomprehensible.
Now maybe you could point claude at it and say "make the code easy for people to understand too" and no one is bothering to do that. Maybe it's a skill issue and the people around me should be prompting better or revising better.
The only thing I know is that I'm seeing it happen. Code quality is going down, comprehension is not just missing because people didn't author the code, it's getting worse because even when they go to read the code it's become too complex and weird. So now they have to rely on LLMs to tell them what the code they are responsible for is doing and how.
The thing that remains to be seen is if comprehensibility will matter. I can't look at the assembly the compiler outputs and comprehend it and it doesn't bother me. LLM advocates argue the same will become true for code, it won't matter if you understand the code because it only matters that the LLM can comprehend it and keep making it do the things you want.
I'm less inclined to believe that being able to reason about your codebase and make changes to it is something I really want to put into a bunch of hyperscaler company hands. Enshittification tells me that this honey moon of affordable intelligence will reach an end at some point and a lot of companies are going to clamp down on more expensive tokens and a lot of engineers are going to find that they have both let their code comprehension skills atrophy and aren't permitted to take every little question and change to the LLM because it's too costly.
They will crack open the codebase, every changeset with a full comprehensive page of LLM-speak explaining how it addresses the problem, every changeset in isolation reasonable enough, and an end state that is something only an LLM can love.
We don't need this, just add syntax highlighting in code blocks.
> This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software I imagine they smushed 2 of the most well-known AI-isms together on purpose here to troll the AI-weary. Might as well I guess, if this type of language annoys you then the whole feature probably will too.
The collective harm that this kind of language does to a human skill of writing by oneself is probably immeasurable (that is until some clever social science researcher finds a controlled way to quantifying this). The full statement: > This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software: open, collaborative, and powered by both human ingenuity and judgement and agent scale. Teams that build this way won'…
- my very late grandfather b1913, in my view warning me about people looking for suckers
Oh great, I look forward to our next Slack renewal when they foist another 125% licensing increase on us for yet another AI add-on we don't want. This year, they decided that our Enterprise plan wasn't paying for another floor on Benhioff's tower fast enough and so forced an 125% license increase. They then played the game of "if you renew early, we're going to cut you a special one-time deal because we're feeling ge…
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I dunno dude, it's getting scary fast. You tried a fable/5.6sol maximum effort on a chunky task yet? Maybe in a few years being a good coder will be like being a good taxi driver with self driving. You know the best spots and the ai can't drive the most unusual roads but effectively 95% of all driving is self driving.
Interesting that you use self driving as the metaphor here, when we've been told for years that self driving will be taking over the roads any day now... and yet...
Prolly what, 30yrs? Places like SV or other advanced locations will hit majorty faster than that. The rest of the world ~50yrs.
Hype is fast but tech is a decades rollout. AI will hit its stride in 5-10yrs. Which is scary because it's already stupidly powerful. Saturation of AI though is still a 20yr+ horizon.
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Interesting that you use self driving as the metaphor here, when we've been told for years that self driving will be taking over the roads any day now... and yet...
> and yet... 1.5 million people use it for 90%+ of their drives
I've been working on an open source project along these lines: https://github.com/chadrem/condotto I'm using it with my small team and overall these types of tools are great for enabling product managers and even operations managers to help prototype, triage, etc all sorts of features/bugs/reports that previously would go directly to the engineers.
Oh great, I look forward to our next Slack renewal when they foist another 125% licensing increase on us for yet another AI add-on we don't want. This year, they decided that our Enterprise plan wasn't paying for another floor on Benhioff's tower fast enough and so forced an 125% license increase. They then played the game of "if you renew early, we're going to cut you a special one-time deal because we're feeling ge…
Somehow they found my personal phone number. I do have my phone number on my Slack profile, so either they found it from external sources or they are able to read our private Slack data.
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I do care about my enjoyment. Or should my existence, wants and dreams solely be defined by my current employer? Are yours?
I don't understand what you want to hear. You can still code manually all you want, but people will not pay you for doing that in the near future. You can still do it for your personal projects.
Good times ahead!