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AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

sylvainkalache.com

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Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#161

Post by itsalwaysgood »

bob1029 wrote: post #6

A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users. I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people. I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patien…

Are your silver platters producing something faster, better, or cheaper?

Do your silver platters give you some competitive edge? If not, then is the ego problem yours, or your coworkers?

Having said all that, I'm aware of the intoxicating effects of feeling empowered from knowledge. There's an old saying: a little learning can be dangerous....

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#162

Post by KronisLV »

shakna wrote: post #95
Foobar8568 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh and how is it any different than most software engineers? How many times I heard ORM are bad only to recreate the same shit? How many times I heard ORM had bad performance and see 1+n stuff everywhere? How many times I have seen tight coupling in the name of DRY?

Its different, in that when you teach that engineer, they either leave because now they hate you, or they grow. They change to meet the standards of a project, rather than inventing their own. We don't get seniors, without juniors. I'd say more than half the job, is just... Learning. People grow.

> Its different, in that when you teach that engineer, they either leave because now they hate you, or they grow.

Or they just have their own hubris and ignore your (provably better) suggestions because their way is "better/easier/how we've always done things".

And then you end up with someone sprinkling N+1 issues throughout the system and making systems with bad architectures throughout the years, not thinking about backpressure etc., as well as shoving ALL the dependencies into a single codebase cause they're not used to creating new ones, turning patches into eventual month long version upgrades because everything keeps breaking with anything newer than JDK 8 and some of the packages are deprecated and gahhhh I should pick up woodworking as a hobby.

Though, to address the original claim:

>> If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice.

This feels like a thought terminating cliche. Like, it will spit out bullshit every now and then, and make assumptions that I don't think that many engineers would (e.g. since a lot of each app is environment-specific), but at the same time when you guide it and give it examples, it can really be quite good! So not that unlike humans at all, even competent devs might not necessarily know about every pattern in any given codebase, especially when one has been around for 10 years and grown quite a bit.

It can be quite good if you have something like ArchUnit or your own tools for linting project architecture and patterns, alongside proper documentation that doesn't assume that you're a team member with X years of experience on system Y. AI just forces people to be less lazy and ignorant about knowledge transfer, which they should have also been for the sake of other humans!

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#163

Post by dist-epoch »

defrost wrote: post #141
dist-epoch wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like asking "how do you build competence in plowing a field with a horse in a world of tractors"

Pretty straight forward really, you keep using horses in parallel: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-18/heavy-horsemen-keep-f... That's the other side of the country, but it's how it's done over here also. Still pull the old plough varieties, still practice shed blacksmithing, etc - even while developing and using autonomous Ag-Bot tractors for spraying, etc.

The article you've linked paints it as life-style, entertainment - rich people hobbies, which is different than doing it because it's more productive.

People will "trad-code", but not because it's the productive thing to do.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#164

Post by piker »

nekoashide wrote: post #157
JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I hear this I do wonder to myself how they're using AI. For me, as long as I'm properly RPI looping it and not blindly pressing "yes" then it will nearly always reach the solution, usually a fair bit quicker, because it effectively becomes an ideation machine that can keep more thoughts and knowledge in it than my brain can. However, I'm using it through giving it the context, it has access to the repos, access…

In my experience at a large bank with unlimited AI, my spend is in the top 5% and I'm leveraging AI just like you. I was in a meeting with someone who had a bug in an application that I don't own myself on Friday so I told claude, "I need you to find this bug the user is experiencing, find out if it's user error or a bug, let the user know and tell the developer what needs to be fixed if needed" 15 minutes later the…

Often though working through a bug teaches the developer something about the relevant abstraction. That knowledge can get lost in this new process.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#165

Post by lmf4lol »

ilija139 wrote: post #91
jjav wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things. Anecdote I like to tell.. I was working on a financial planning software, intentionally purely vibe coded as an experiment. I eventually discovered AI had implemented seven duplicate copies of tax calculation functions. All of them different. All of them wrong. All of them giving different answers for same input. Not even the most junior of newbie junior enginee…

I have also a weird story to tell that a human did and it is as crazy as this. It happen in 2019 so no LLMs at all. A person that was hired as an expert in our startup spent more than one week full time working on implementing his solution to the problem we were having. I checked the code after one week to see the progress and was curious how they are implementing an already crazy sounding idea. I found that the whol…

Jesus Christ... and then?

What happened to him? What was the conclusion? Did he get paid?

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#166

Post by defrost »

dist-epoch wrote: post #163
defrost wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty straight forward really, you keep using horses in parallel: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-18/heavy-horsemen-keep-f... That's the other side of the country, but it's how it's done over here also. Still pull the old plough varieties, still practice shed blacksmithing, etc - even while developing and using autonomous Ag-Bot tractors for spraying, etc.

The article you've linked paints it as life-style, entertainment - rich people hobbies, which is different than doing it because it's more productive. People will "trad-code", but not because it's the productive thing to do.

It's fun, and it's serious - keeping heavy horses and bullocks, feed, breeding lines, etc isn't trivial - and they are worked.

The serious side is simple enough, local food security - when there's no diesel to seed and harvest with there will be no export crops from here to feed millions across the planet .. but we here will still have smaller crops via animals for our food.

I'm literally in one of the most isolated parts of the globe, WWII, COVID, shortages via Iran clustf*ck, etc have real impacts and we plan to ride those out, like floods, droughts, cyclones, etc.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#167

Post by skydhash »

noisy_boy wrote: post #158
2wrist wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comment. At my place, this is what they want. They want people to smash through things as fast as possible. They don’t want people to sit and craft a solution which takes in to account the whole. They are choosing tools which are low code, and use llm’s to produce what they need. as they say “this is the way things are going”.

Even that would be acceptable. But they still blame the programmer, who was pressured into this, for any fallouts because of it. Basically trying to have it both ways. The unreasonableness of it is infuriating.

Pretty much this, they want to impose one method, but they don’t want to own the mistakes that it creates. Sometimes it felt like the bullies that are saying “why are you making me hurting you?”.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#168

Post by websap »

I detest these doom and gloom articles.

We’re entering a new phase of software development, and with every phase there are new challenges.

Some questions the author might want to first answer: 1. If AI is constantly reacting to smaller incidents, is it surfacing larger issues in your codebase and architecture? 2. What kind of new telemetry do we have to build? 3. How do we build new deployment systems that help us validate fixes without requiring hours to go through traditional CI/CD systems

I’m old enough to remember the days when engineers would monkey patch their code on live servers with additional logging and metrics to learn about failure modes during incidents.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#170

Post by mrleinad »

intended wrote: post #115
wccrawford wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's generalizable. The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. It's more compelling, and we probably see more of them because of it, but it's the same general thing. The kind of person who insists on understanding things and working through the problem has always been rarer. It's not "humble", it's "inquisitive" and "persistent".

The difference between the two is that friction is learning. the less friction the less growth. So even if they copied from SO they would have better knowledge than an Ai user. This isn’t speculation either, theres an MIT study which this is based on. https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

Learning could be targeted though.

If I know where the error is (a script written by AI in powershell) and it's a logical one, it's ok to let the AI reason about it to get it fixed and move on.

If I have no clue about how this part of the system works, then it's worth reading closely what the error says, in order to understand it first, then have the agent check the assumption you have.

Reduce the friction by having the agent explain what happened and why the fix solved it. I know this might be an intellectual placebo, but sometimes you need to fix something fast to move on. Learning takes longer, and these days everyone expects you to be a 100x engineer with AI.

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