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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

larsfaye.com

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Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#151

Post by skydhash »

warmedcookie wrote: post #102
ben_w wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year. Nor even €50k/year. Two things are true: 1) The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to *write*. 2) My actual job also included non-coding work: Does this attempted solution even work at all? Is this solving the…

I feel like there is also the "Nerd Factor" to consider which is this unrelenting passion to type away at a screen all day, whether that is yesterday's code or tomorrow's prompt. Few non-technical people have the attention span to suffer such monotony. (Even most devs don't have that to varying extents)

It's only monotone from someone looking, not from someone doing. If you look at digital painting tutorial, you'll see a lot of timelapse, because it's a very slow process where you spend the majority of time correcting stuff. But if you're the one doing it, each individual brush stroke is the result of a conscious decision.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#152

Post by jgilias »

ryandvm wrote: post #48

100% We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong." Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read t…

We have a product guy on the team who was in a deeply not technical role before AI who is trying to do the “hey Claude, read this Jira ticket, implement” thing.

It doesn’t work for the vast majority of tickets he attempts because he doesn’t have the necessary understanding to even start thinking about if the solution that the autocomplete generates is even remotely workable. And that’s with fancy dev loops and whatnot.

The spacer between the keyboard and the chair still matters in my experience.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#153

Post by hombre_fatal »

While true, I'm not sure it matters.

It kinda seems like wishful thinking on our part as software engineers that one day we'll be able to go "Hah, miss me now?" but that just isn't the writing that I see on the wall.

Over the past year, I've AI-generated two large pieces of software over 2000 commits without having much depth in either domain, and my ability to deliver value as a veteran software engineer has only shrunk over the months or it can be trivially extracted into a reusable markdown file like "design bar: ensure things 'by construction' where possible", a lesson I learned viscerally over decades.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#155

Post by superdisk »

chojeen wrote: post #46

I'm looking forward to having the same experience as COBOL engineers did after retirement: companies backing up the brinks truck to anyone with the skills to keep the lights on.

If you actually look at Cobol job listings, they pay like 50k and want a master's degree. The myth of them being paid really well is not true at all.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#157

Post by dan_ggggg »

jgilias wrote: post #152
ryandvm wrote: post #48

100% We're already seeing this at the enterprise level. Companies have dictates from leadership that "if you're writing code manually, you're doing it wrong." Okay, that kind of works for a while. We are indeed producing a shit-ton of code, but the reality is that engineers are pumping out code faster than the humans can understand and (honestly) review it. That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read t…

We have a product guy on the team who was in a deeply not technical role before AI who is trying to do the “hey Claude, read this Jira ticket, implement” thing. It doesn’t work for the vast majority of tickets he attempts because he doesn’t have the necessary understanding to even start thinking about if the solution that the autocomplete generates is even remotely workable. And that’s with fancy dev loops and whatno…

[flagged]

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#158

Post by [deleted] »

dan_ggggg wrote: post #148
tayo42 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't design things with never ending details though. If your developing a feature there's a limited scope to it. If your designing the direction of a large project you're working with higher level concepts. The point is that AI is aware of constraints and can manage a round it. You've got to keep in mind the size of a typical software project and plan. Most people aren't writing a kernel. They're writing some ba…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#159

Post by LPisGood »

svachalek wrote: post #134
doctoboggan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That sounds great until you realize that "hey Claude, read this Jira ticket and implement the feature in this code base" isn't really worth $200K/year. When you factor in overhead and benefits, many companies were regularly paying that much for someone (many someones) to "read this Jira ticket and implement the feature". We are currently in the "centaur" phase where a human-AI combination produces the best output,…

We've gone through this with chess, and the days when a human can do anything to help AI there are long past; the human can only drag it down. It seems to me to be a form of the bitter lesson. I expect this will happen in every field where we don't add guardrails to require humans in the network. I have a hard time seeing regulation happening around this in the US but vanity may also serve, will CEOs be satisfied rul…

At some point the whims of the CEOs don’t win. The shareholders demand more growth.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#160

Post by larsfaye »

Daishiman wrote: post #133
larsfaye wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think LLMs and compilers have a lot of overlap?

Almost nobody knows how to program in assembly but we're doing fine.

That's because the institutional knowledge was passed along through the act of coding. Skills that I learned in Assembly and FORTRAN are applicable to even modern programming languages...but not to "natural language."
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