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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

#241

Post by gghkiuv »

ahussain wrote: post #223
jgilias wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But isn't it only a matter of time before the AI generated autocomplete will contain the correct solution? What then?

fucking is it? AI labs certainly want you to think so but they're running out of time and money. they've been telling me that the advancements of the last three months have made this a reality for the last five years. it's starting to feel a lot like Elon promising fully automated taxi services by next year... 11 years ago

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#242

Post by chris_money202 »

Revanche1367 wrote: post #235
francisofascii wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially if you are reading the code that is produced and at least understanding the flow of it. This is the key point. Should we stay vigilant and review all the code, ensuring we have a decept grasp of what it does. Or just green light everything and treat the code itself as a black box. I would hope we do the former, but many are pushing for the latter.

The issue with this in practice is that the rate at which code is produced is often substantially higher than what any human reviewer is capable of processing mentally. Example from my workplace: pull requests that were already too long before LLMs by a few hundred or a couple of thousand lines are now several thousand lines longer and they get opened much more frequently. The primary source of these PRs is a well-re…

Opening large PRs is bad engineering practice, regardless of if an LLM or human wrote the code.

Would recommend your senior team look into stacked PRs, which was made to handle this scenario exactly.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#243

Post by visarga »

kypro wrote: post #210
matsemann wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before, if I would start working / thinking on a problem and discover it was harder than anticipated, that often was a signal that the feature may not be worth it. Because implementing it doesn't fit the current model of how things work or similar. Then it was back to the drawing table and find a better way of solving the underlying issue. But an LLM just happily chugs along and does it, no one feels the friction, wh…

I first brought this up late last year – that there used to exist a kind of selection pressure against both developers and against features which would prevent certain functionality from ever being shipped, specifically: - Functionality which exceed the technical ability or knowledge of the developer which built it; and - Functionality which would require an excessive number of changes that time/cost became a constra…

There is a limit, after a few 10,000's of LOC ai projects start disintegrating and becoming unmanageable.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#244

Post by ben_w »

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)

Aye. This is true for many professions, I think.

I'm trying to write a novel, have been for a while now; one thing I hear from professional writers is that one should only do this if you are prepared to re-read whole thing six times before you even send it to the editor, and when you do send it to the editor, you and they will likely spend several months repeatedly re-reading the whole thing as you respond to a long list of changes they give you.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#245

Post by dingaling911 »

It's pretty simple.

You treat the AI like a junior.

You make it write pseudo code in the tickets.

Then you make it write code in the tickets for the tricky stuff.

Have it reference relevant documentation/APIs.

Then there is no lost knowledge.

(Still, sometimes it sneaks in some "helpful" belt and suspenders, but for the most part, I know everything that is going on in the code base with this method.)

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#246

Post by jgilias »

ahussain wrote: post #223
jgilias wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But isn't it only a matter of time before the AI generated autocomplete will contain the correct solution? What then?

For the completion to work, the source text needs to be ‘good’. That’s a basic kernel of how the thing works. Even with a perfect oracle autocomplete if the source text is ‘bullshit’, the output is too.

Or, slightly changing this. The source text needs to speak the correct vocabulary and language to produce a good completion. See the chat where Terry Tao is doing maths with an LLM. There’s _no way in hell_ I could get to his output because I just have no idea, and can’t speak the language.

Same with any field.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#247

Post by gwbas1c »

This just feels like someone whining about how ORMs result in $#1tty data access code because lazy programmers don't take the time to learn how to use a database.

When that happens, (developer thinks using an ORM means they don't need to know how to use a database,) the project eventually fails. It's the same thing with AI; just like companies learned that they need to make sure developers actually know how to use a database, companies will learn that their engineers actually need to know how to program.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#248

Post by bigstrat2003 »

ben_w wrote: post #66
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…

> 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…

> The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to write.

That is certainly not true. LLMs can't write code worth a damn still, and you have to babysit them to make sure they aren't doing stupid stuff. A human is still by far the best choice for doing programming, and when trend-chasing companies realize the damage they've done to their businesses they will stop pushing LLMs so hard.

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