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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

#291

Post by tempest_ »

dayvid wrote: post #229
LeafItAlone wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the prior state. For one codebase I work in, LLM written code is noticeably and measurably (we have literally measured it for bugs, performance, etc.) better than what existed before. So the LLM code is a welcome change.

It also documents itself extensively

I fucking hate it.

It encodes context it needs into doc comments and regular comments that make them in insufferable to read and so verbose because the comments contain info on other parts of the code base (that might have changed since that comment was written) but were useful to the model for its implementation. I have so far found no way to stop claude from doing this. It will sometimes do it with hand holding but the moment a task takes a slightly large amount of context its back to the word barf.

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

#292

Post by backlava12 »

mattm wrote: post #246
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You captured this phenomenon very well in this comment. Appreciate you sharing it because it’s hard to describe exactly what makes this sort of behavior so bizarre.

@backlava12 fyi your comments are all dead in this thread

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

#294

Post by backlava12 »

techpression wrote: post #142
huurtehoog wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, like caffeine is to meth

Thank you for this, the hand waving comparisons of AI and anything else is getting out of hand on HN. Your ”like caffeine is to meth” is one of the more succinct and describing sentences I’ve seen describe the difference.

[dead]

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

#295

Post by ofjcihen »

I run an IR company focused on specific security response emergencies.

AI use across my company is variable and I don’t allow any enforcement of mandatory using or not using of it.

I view and tell my employees to view their skills as that of a high-performing athlete. Consistent training of the basics, rapid fire what-if testing, weekly scenarios are all part of the upkeep.

In short, this is what it takes to keep up the skills no matter if you do or don’t use AI and I can imagine the degradation is much faster if you don’t train AND delegate all of your activity to AI.

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

#296

Post by FranOntanaya »

spicyusername wrote: post #242
mcmcmc wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when wielded competently. And what happens when the competency drains away?

That's what everyone's learning to do now, that is the skill that people will be improving.

I still remember the "Visual" craze of the 90s when everybody was going to be able to make applications without writing code.

Visual Basic 6 wasn't even too esoteric, it could have happened already if it was a thing.

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

#297

Post by newtwilly »

CBLT wrote: post #286
tracerbulletx wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your relationship to this team? Their manager? A senior colleague? Something about this sounds like a failure of communication or leadership. Why are you stand offish from them? Why are you treating them like children? If they don't know what they're doing why did you hire them? Now that you did why are you treating them like a burden and not an opportunity to mentor, teach, and uplift?

I also read that comment as an adversarial situation at work. It used to be that when someone else at your company was asking for something that wasn't a priority, you would erect bureaucratic roadblocks to protect your time. Now, the new normal is to just forward their questions to AI and sling the slop back over to them.

Someone outside the team "giving you a solution" is seldom a great thing in my experience

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

#298

Post by famouswaffles »

filoeleven wrote: post #261
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…

> We’re still roughly on year one of this transformation. OpenAI Codex was released in 2021. Artificially compressing what we see now to one year of growth is an example of why it's very hard to trust anything AI proponents say.

Codex the agent app/tui was not released in 2021. What was released in 2021 was simply a fine-tuned model.

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

#299

Post by anothereng »

krtkush wrote: post #9

I find the use of AI like quicksand. The more I use it, the more I have to rely on it to make changes/ fix things in the same system. In the end, I come out feeling empty; no intuitive knowledge of the system "I" built or fixed. Code review is important but it does not replace the mental model I am able to build when I do all the steps of software development manually without AI.

I put on AGENTS.MD a prompt that says: teach me something small something about the changes you did if the changes were < 3 tokens if it was more than that teach me more. That's helped me somwhat. So now everytime it changes something it teaches me something about the codebase
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