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AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

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Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#131

Post by alsetmusic »

reconnecting wrote: post #113
Quothling wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they are opposite. We still don't let AI run anything we do. That being said, things have changed. 4 months ago I wouldn't touch the M365 Copilot thing if you paid me to, now it's basically the only AI I use professionally. Cowork changed the way we work, and I've previously spoken about how I think Microsoft sort of won the AI enterprise "war" by selling the tools and not the mode. If you'd asked me a…

What you're telling me now is that in the short period of 4 months, an American corporation took an employee of a company the EU relies on for critical matters from "wouldn't touch it if you paid me" to outsourcing thinking. Well, I'm speechless.

> What you're telling me now is that in the short period of 4 months

Not OP, but I opened the link to the comment and it was six months. I get why you're skeptical, and I think it's fair to point out. But that's sort of glaring when I opened the link to contextualize your comment.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#132

Post by NichoPaolucci »

Gigachad wrote: post #101
bwhiting2356 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does this non dev manager have perms to do this

They don't have permissions but if I don't rush to block the PR with a bunch of review comments, one of the other AI brained devs will just hit approve on it without reading or understanding anything. Yes it is hell here. But it's a new kind of problem that just showed up.

I'm experiencing similar rubber stamping around my company.

CEO hired an AI forward CTO / Head of Engineering. He said at his last company his directive was NOT to look at code anymore.

I've watched thousands of lines of misguided, verbose, brittle code (but there's 24 tests that nobody reads) go essentially straight into production. Nobody understands it, we're adding so much trash documentation that is impossible to keep up with.

It's an absolute train wreck, I feel farther away from the system than I did when I started. Commit messages / PR descriptions are to be generated by AI (and pushed).

It's only broken production code a couple of times so far, but my guess is as this continues we will be unable to maintain the codebase without AI involved.

AI can be a force multiplier, we are not using it that way.

My main issue with it is that when a human developer broke the production codebase there is generally an "A-Ha" moment, like, "oh no... I know exactly what that error means, let me run a hotfix and we can change things so that doesn't happen again."

Now we're at the full behest of Claude "do you see what happened to our codebase, robot? Can you help fix it?". Not a fun place to be...

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#133

Post by awill88 »

It almost feels like ages ago when the promise of AI was to be a sponge of knowledge, to help us dig in quicker and speed up the search process of looking up implementations on Google / Stackoverflow because the expectation was that we authored code and demonstrate it to our peers it was correct as the role of an earnest code contributor.

You cannot overstate how disruptive agentic powered development has had on the startup scene. There is clearly an embrace or loosening of that expectation which is upending the profession and also paradoxically giving superpowers to us who have been in the business a long time.

It’s hard to know where this is all going as we are being challenged by this transformative, powerful, yet problematic technology every day at work.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#134

Post by oblio »

1718627440 wrote: post #109
tlamponi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do FWIW, this is not exactly new; those same people were just using other sources like Stack Overflow, blog posts, etc. before, cobbling together random code snippets, libraries, and so on without actually understanding any of that at a relevant detail level. Sure, with LLMs, one can naturally tailor this much closer to the current need (or at…

That sounds like fraud. You claimed you have knowledge of the job you got hired for, but you don't actually have. If the company want's hire someone who doesn't have a clue and only uses SO, that's of course fine, but I doubt, that this is the case.

People gotta eat.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#135

Post by oblio »

sublinear wrote: post #90
tlamponi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are doing real paid work using LLMs that they could not otherwise do FWIW, this is not exactly new; those same people were just using other sources like Stack Overflow, blog posts, etc. before, cobbling together random code snippets, libraries, and so on without actually understanding any of that at a relevant detail level. Sure, with LLMs, one can naturally tailor this much closer to the current need (or at…

I think this is fine as long as the success criteria are strict enough that they are forced to learn something in the end. Any significant testing will inevitably create that situation. The LLM won't have enough context to handle the more precise business requirements. The dev will have to read the code carefully and make their changes by hand. Additional rounds of testing may cause thrashing between regressed states…

> I think this is fine as long as the success criteria are strict enough that they are forced to learn something in the end.

They are fired, get promoted to management, or learn the technical aspects.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#136

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

kqr wrote: post #124
sixeyes wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I tell them to try to find what part of the code doesn't work before generating the fix this makes me kinda sad. they don't do this on their own? are they not even a little curious

It's a different mindset. Has nothing to do with curiosity. For me and you, "fixing" something means finding which assumption was violated and redesigning the solution in light of that. Sometimes this means adding code, sometimes it means making the solution smaller. For a lot of people, "fixing" means adding code to make it work. This always makes the solution larger. The latter group can still be curious! But they'…

An engineer that refuses to understand how their craft is constructed is a poor engineer.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#137

Post by anthonyrstevens »

dvt wrote: post #23
coatmatter wrote: post #16

If one truly believes it's not in a bubble, then borrow and leverage an unlimited amount and bet the house & your family on creating a business with infinite growth and value. Don't know how to do your own prompts? Borrow and then hire others to do it for you. If those who you hire don't know, they can hire others too.* [* This is not financial advice. Please don't actually do this.]

You could make the converse argument, too: why don't you borrow and leverage and bet and short these AI companies, if you so vehemently think it's a bubble? The bottom line is that markets are complicated, useful technologies are often accompanied by bubbles, investors are not always rational, and people generally try to make the best decision with the information they have available. The answer is likely somewhere i…

Good point. There is too much inflammatory rhetoric on here about AI, too many opinions masquerading as facts, too much black-or-white thinking.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#138

Post by eudamoniac »

orwin wrote: post #48

I now started to us AI to help review my juniors PRs, because I couldn't keep up with the amount of code they ship. It started poorly, but now I have my method: I first read the code and flag the lines I'm not sure about, then ask any frontier model (I like Claude here for analysis, even if I don't use it for the rest) to explain the PR and to put effort on the parts I flagged (basically explain in detail the code, n…

Why are you paying them if they insist on remaining meat proxies?

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#139

Post by kqr »

acuozzo wrote: post #129
kqr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a different mindset. Has nothing to do with curiosity. For me and you, "fixing" something means finding which assumption was violated and redesigning the solution in light of that. Sometimes this means adding code, sometimes it means making the solution smaller. For a lot of people, "fixing" means adding code to make it work. This always makes the solution larger. The latter group can still be curious! But they'…

> For a lot of people, "fixing" means adding code to make it work. What if the fix requires deleting a single line of code? Is the additive fix to enshroud it in if (0) { } ?

Usually something more subtle like adding an early return somewhere before the offending line, or inheriting from that class and blanking that method, or something along those lines.

Re: AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

#140

Post by fjd »

This made me think of "1,000 True Fans". I'm sure there will be more than a few business school case studies written about competition in this era of software development. Even things like niche apps singularly tailored for small skilled trades are seeing competition. AI tooling will definitely allow new/smaller/solo players to clone apps and undercut the legacy players on price more rapidly than before. Some of these very narrow apps are fairly expensive ($100s/month), if replacements of acceptable quality can be produced they will take some market share. This may be death (shrinkage) by a 1000 cuts for some established players.
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