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Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
541–550 of 575 posts
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
they probably mean deterministic in the sense of traditional computer programs consisting of if-else decision points and ordinary cpu logic, as opposed to numerical models (which can of course be deterministic too, as you pointed out)
Model inference is just that same logic but faster. I think the point is determined . No-one can determine what the LLM might do.
> Model inference is just that same logic but faster.
This statement is nonsensical.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#543100% 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…
The AI-maximalist on my team does a lot of work to setup fancy loops and burn tokens like crazy. It feels a lot like guitar players who get all these fancy pedals and forget that they can plug a nice guitar into a nice amp and it actually sounds better.
I guess that is taste?
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then I think I'd rephrase you: There's a reason we trust trusted systems. :) Even their fans agree, LLMs are inherently unreliable. The fact some people trust them regardless is due to a deep flaw in human psychology that I believe has not been significantly exploited by any previous tech. There will be tears.
I think two things contribute to the trust in LLMs: 1. Decades of generally reliable systems (I trust my calculator because it always says 1+1=2) has trained people to believe what computers say. 2. LLMs "speak" with great confidence, which has, as you say, a psychological effect.
I agree.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#545Earlier 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…
> 1) The coding part of my career is over. LLMs are capable of doing everything I've ever been paid to write . Horrible if you got into this industry because you loved to code. Amazing if you only ever saw the code as a means to an end.
I think this can be generalized even more:
Horrible if you got into engineering because you wanted to solve problems.
Amazing if you only ever wanted to see the problem solved.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#546I fall into the category of senior engineers who benefit from LLMs for all the reasons mentioned in this post. I find it's possible to agree completely with sentiments like this and still feel as if this is all written in the sand below the high tide line, and ten years from now nobody will care about this. Horsemanship and sailing were both specialized skills of high value to society, and now they're not. But in eac…
This analogy breaks down because computers aren't going away unlike horse drawn carriages or sailing vessels. Computers aren't being replaced by something. It's that fewer people will understand how they work while the efficiency and reach of computers extends into areas of life previously unreachable due to the scale of having humans build it or the refusal of humans. I could wax philosophical about what that leads…
Quite a lot of people do competitive sailing and horse riding so the skills are there but amongst less people.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#547On the review part, we all know that github could be part of the problem, did you use other solutions for reviewing code like graphite or pyor.review?
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#548Forcing friction the way this post describes won't work because the genie is out of the bottle. A much easier way to force friction is to expect everyone to read the code they are producing. Yes read all of it and understand what it's doing. A lofty bar sadly.
And not just the high level language output, or even the assembly. No no, every single piece of microcode produced.
Why would you read the microcode or assembly?
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is EXACTLY how I am working with these tools, you summarized everything about why I use this approach perfectly. Zed + OpenCode + Mimo/GLM/Kimi models are incredible. I haven't touched a "frontier model" for months. I really treat them as "delegation layer". They're systems that sit right alongside your stack, and at this point, at every level in it, like a connective tissue that intersects at all points. I can…
I had a job interview at Canva where they had an "AI coding round". They wanted to see how I used AI in my workflow. Because I was using DeepSeek flash, the interviewer was confused at how fast I was getting edits - he'd only used Claude and was used to it thinking for 40 minutes to update a function. We were building a frontend application and I was able to do that whole guided prompt/review loop. I finished the tas…
> the feedback on the AI round was that "I didn't delegate enough to the AI and was too hands on" lol.
the real feedback they couldn't say is that you were a threat to his position.
Re: Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why you first ask the LLM: "tell me how you would do this, and ask me any clarifications and questions you may have, and share any other thoughts you may have. Don't implement yet." The LLM will look through the codebase, think, and tell you what it would do and if there's any design decisions you would have to make, as well as other things you probably need to be aware of. Then you go through the LLM's output…
Sure, but I'm only able to do that because I'm intimately aware of everything in the code base. The more I do this where the LLM ends up writing the code (even based on my decisions), the less good critique I'll be able to give in the future.
Is that the experience you had? What if you ask it questions about the codebase?
I find AI agents really great for codebase exploration and understanding how it works. In some ways even moreso than from manual implementation since it's easier to get a global picture.
You can also ask it questions like "are there recurring patterns of how X is done in the codebase?" to which it might answer sometime like "there are actually three competing patterns" and tell you what they are and the exact files, and then you can choose to refactor them if you want.