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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

#181

Post by simonuv »

Richbeach wrote: post #150
willtemperley wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 30 minutes of patient, old school troubleshooting This is also the best way to understand a codebase, and it's quite enjoyable. I think the models are getting too egotistical. They're so confident of their fixes they won't bother suggesting basic techniques like isolation of the problem by disabling code paths, for example. They'll keep shotgunning less-and-less likely fixes with undiminishing confidence until the…

> and it's quite enjoyable Used to be somewhat enjoyable. Nothing pleasant about digging around codebase that was heavily affected by the last 12-18 months of AI-ing.

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

#182

Post by sillyfluke »

itsalwaysgood wrote: post #134
konschubert wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the uncanny valley of AI. It's still not quite good enough yet that you can trust it blindly on a big codebase, so you still have to read and understand everything - which is often harder than just writing it up yourself. EDIT: don’t get me wrong. I still think AI is incredibly useful for a lot of tasks! But when implementing an architecturally hairy thing, I find it less stressful and equally quick to jump down…

I'd say it's more about learning how to organize your work more efficiently. If you think about a product like marble: it's something that most be chiseled out of time. Some people can chisel better products: the AI is just a better chisel. Sometime still has to guide the chisel and judge the art/product. In our cases, the market judges products.

This seems to misunderstand the parent comment. The sibling comment plays along with the analogy and mentions having to fix the mistakes of an automatic chisel, but the original comment is alluding to the fact that it is definitely not an automatic chisel. There is no uncanny valley in an automatic chisel.

Programming up until this point was done by using deterministic tools to build products. LLMs appear to be nondeterministic tools in their current incarnation, at least to humans.

If an automatic chisel had a feature that could switch from chiseling from sedimentary rock to chiseling marble but would randomly and nondeterministically switch to the other mode during its use it would be considered defective. But with LLMs the industry has collectively decided that the nondeterministic automatic chisel builds so fast that the current defect rate from the nondeterminism is acceptable.

It would make sense to isolate the last line of defense from LLMs, ie the tests, but this rarely seems to happen any more. Once the tests are contaminated with LLMs all bets are off.

And people forget that along with atrophying skills and reasoning due to less coding, the skill degradation is hastened because the programmer is faced with the reality that they would have to constantly figure out, review or edit someone else's code (ie, the LLM's) if they truly wanted to maintain a last line of defense. But as this type of task is literally the least liked task in programming, the programmer passes it off to the LLM as well to avoid burnout...

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

#183

Post by simonuv »

huurtehoog wrote: post #120
noir_lord wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much, The one thing I use it for is as a sanity check, pretty much "Look at , point out issues you see, summarise them tersely" and it'll spot stuff a code review by a human might have spotted (in the mythical land where people actually do code reviews properly and don't just flag a spelling mistake to "show they looked at it"). Beyond that I don't trust it at all and I still write all my code the meat sack wa…

If anything, I think this hype cycle is fast exposing just how many people, teams, and companies just don't care about what is correct. They just wanna feel good about themselves and get paid. I for one welcome the fact that this whole thing has driven me back to books and deeper into the fundamentals. I have never read so much on math, hardware, and history as in the past 3 years or so.

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

#185

Post by orwin »

spockz wrote: post #135
shakna wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. People ask how we get seniors with juniors using llm. The answer is the same. Review the code. Analyse write down what is wrong. What you expect to have been better. Force every change to be documented and explained enough.

It just takes forever now. The understanding is lower, the effort is lower, and frankly, I think the interest is lower too. I might be in the last generation who truly had fun working on a 'shrodinger' bug.

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

#186

Post by skydhash »

iforgotmypasswo wrote: post #92

I feel a lot of comments here are missing the forest for the trees. We do not yet have the next generation systems that will manage AI creation and maintenance of systems. Humans have been making spaghetti code systems and maintaining them poorly for years. Best practices developed… eventually. But certainly not in the 70s and 80s. Spaghetti was the norm for quite some time. The development paradigm has changed. Fore…

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

#187

Post by oblio »

2wrist wrote: post #46
mawadev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can share a weird story: Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform. I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about. At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or…

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”.

In today's episode:

"Programmers frustrated that they're being treated like craftspeople or delivery drivers or factory workers, etc, etc."

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

#188

Post by orwin »

bob1029 wrote: post #22
throw839948499 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the solution is so simple, why claude did not found it? At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me). After three decades of outsourcing to lowest bidder, I do not buy that humans are somehow better! > patient, old school troubleshooting I usually see similar arguments around systems with major red flags (no docs, poor CI, decade ago no CVS...). And engineers with private stash of…

That final 10% is the hard part. 90% is easy.

I think people on this website have a way, way to high opinion of themselves. Barring a few exceptions, we are middling developers, or way worse than this. Just read the comments from a year or twoon how chatgpt4.5 is the best at coding or how Claude sonnet 4 is better than a lot of Devs... At least I don't have imposter syndrome anymore.

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

#189

Post by wallst07 »

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…

It's funny you mention this, I've worked for financial type systems where they spend considerable time removing any floats the from the code base.

I'll leave it up to the reader to figure out why this may be important.

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

#190

Post by itsalwaysgood »

sillyfluke wrote: post #182
itsalwaysgood wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's more about learning how to organize your work more efficiently. If you think about a product like marble: it's something that most be chiseled out of time. Some people can chisel better products: the AI is just a better chisel. Sometime still has to guide the chisel and judge the art/product. In our cases, the market judges products.

This seems to misunderstand the parent comment. The sibling comment plays along with the analogy and mentions having to fix the mistakes of an automatic chisel, but the original comment is alluding to the fact that it is definitely not an automatic chisel. There is no uncanny valley in an automatic chisel. Programming up until this point was done by using deterministic tools to build products. LLMs appear to be nonde…

I had a huge post written up to address your points, but I have to get moving, my ass is literally falling asleep.

It's easier just to say: It's all about time, my man. Nobody wants to waste it.

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