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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

#411

Post by pydry »

jwalton wrote: post #342
KronisLV wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Remove the dev from the equation. Suppose you need to produce circumstances for the slop machine to succeed on its own (imagine a loop). What is missing? A…

In general, when I’ve worked on projects where I’ve spent that much time planning, having a magic AI box that wrote perfect code wouldn’t have helped that much. When you spec every everything out like that, writing the code is the most trivial part of this whole process.

If you want to make it a nontrivial mess you can get Claude to write it.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#412

Post by pydry »

doctoboggan wrote: post #87
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. 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 are currently in the "centaur" phase where a human-AI combination

It's probably more accurate to call it the slop phase.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#413

Post by dwaltrip »

devin wrote: post #263
dd8601fn wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone has this, but I always felt that a significant percentage of the value I bring is in immediately recognizing what you shouldn’t do . I have a hard enough time explaining why “yet another bespoke application on some unmanaged azure resources” is a bad idea when they have more reasonable alternatives at hand. Now these goofs can (very nearly) press a button and do it anyway, with no comprehension of the co…

Yes, there is a post that made the rounds not long ago entitled Taste Is All That's Left: https://notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-all-thats-left Knowing what not to do has always been important, but it is perhaps more important than ever.

Taste, judgment, and wisdom.

Aka “actual deep understanding”.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#414

Post by Madmallard »

tayo42 wrote: post #93
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…

Ai can work through all of those questions in number 2 and design around it. I was just doing that yesterday designing a game demo lol

I meticulously described the netcode structure for my tactics game and it's simple enough to just send over on web sockets and fable was still giving me an endless hydra of sync issues

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#415

Post by apatheticonion »

I see a large emphasis placed on headless agentic/vibe coding, what I don't see people talking about is how great guided coding is.

I have over a 15 YoE writing software and guided coding sessions - that is, using an editor like Zed or VSCode with an LLM integrated, writing code how you normally would but using a flash model to prompt away the annoying parts and/or plan - is as productive as vibe coding, produces significantly higher quality, is actually enjoyable, and you actually stay sharp.

Flash models (DeepSeek v4 flash) tend to be so fast that you don't have time for parallel agents, you lock in and rapid fire prompts, building high quality software while incrementally reviewing it as you go. VETO bad edits and try again or rewrite them manually.

By contrast, I have noticed headless agentic coding tends to be an unreviewable black box. The major issues I've found is that, even with a human-in-the-loop, you accumulate defects which compound and eventually you're spending millions of tokens to make trivial changes in a ridgid codebase.

Ultimately, tiny, highly cached, fast models like Qwen's 27b/a3b range or DeepSeek flash are highly capable and relatively inexpensive to run. Hoping people realise we don't need 14 trillion parameter models and I'll be able to buy some ram for my workstation

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#416

Post by ChoGGi »

BatFastard wrote: post #314
visarga wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

10,000 LOC, hell my LLM can do that in a day! Current project has over 60,000 LOC, I find using an antagonistic agent code and architecture reviews are really handy for keeping things grounded.

How do you know things are grounded?

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#417

Post by KellyCriterion »

gghkiuv wrote: post #241
ahussain wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Its done, when its done"

;-)

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#418

Post by r_lee »

esafak wrote: post #348
r_lee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly can't tell what reward there is for this "critical thinking" since the entire world is bathing in "AI will replace you" what point is there to be a human calculator if nobody rewards you for it? and I'm not talking about wealthy Bay Area tech workers doing it so that they can write their substack blogs but rather the average person

Getting to live in a civilized society with a responsible government. Witness the counterexample.

that's not something you can accomplish just by practicing critical thinking yourself, you'd need to convince a majority of the population to do the same.

we can vent here but it's not gonna change things, a wider cultural shift is needed. and even then I don't see it guaranteeing a "responsible govermment", e.g. see PRC China for example

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#419

Post by kypro »

pianopatrick wrote: post #308
kypro wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my personal project I've found having a hard lines of code limit has been a good limit on complexity. Makes me really ask if I need things. One theory I have floating around in my head is that if a whole code base was microservices and micro front ends that were all less than 5,000 loc then you could fit the whole thing into a 100k token AI context window when working on it. And being few lines of code would force…

Yeah, I think microservices are going to see a new wave of enthusiasm for this reason in the coming years.

I've had a lot success at the company I work for shipping small contained microservices for less technical teams to maintain with agents.

Personally I think this most of what SWEs should be doing these days... Code is easy to produce now. We should be handing over the creation and shipping of code to the relevant teams.

Maybe there will be more complexity overall, but it will be constrained via well designed microservices and distributed across the organisation.

Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

#420

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

watwut wrote: post #407
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #295

Coding expertise was on a downward trend way before AI arrived. Does nobody remember how most "engineers" were literally copying and pasting snippets from StackOverflow they didn't understand, and the snippets usually had tons of bugs? How many of you know Assembly well? How many of you can decompile a program, or write your own compiler or VM? How many of you could pass a computer science course (that you didn't tak…

> Does nobody remember how most "engineers" were literally copying and pasting snippets from StackOverflow they didn't understand, and the snippets usually had tons of bugs Not in companies I worked for, no. > How many of you know Assembly well? How many of you can decompile a program, or write your own compiler or VM? How many of you could pass a computer science course (that you didn't take at Uni)? None of these w…

They used to be normal expectations. My point is the "decline" is a natural movement away from highly-skilled generalists toward specialized-and-less-skilled labor and has nothing to do with AI
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