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AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

evilmartians.com

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Re: AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

#11

Post by lukan »

Metaluim wrote: post #10
lukan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Writing code was slow but you understood what you built. " Yes. Definitely. I never did try and error with code snippets from the internet until something sort of worked. I never hacked things together like this till the sun rose and had no idea 2 weeks later who wrote that hacky mess and why like this. Or well, years later. And as the code piled up and side problems took over, I certainly did not reimplemented the…

You do realise this is your experience, and just outs you as a mediocre engineer and doesn't prove that slow and steady doesn't win the race, right? Or did you write your comment with an intentional self-demeaning note, and not a sarcastic tone?

Let me put it like this, I believe there are holy sacred programmers out there, who always are in total control of their code, I just have not met them yet.

And no, not all my code is written at 5 am when I am close of passing out. But I say those who never experienced that flow to also do hacky things to get something done and if it takes till the morning, maybe did not capture the full spirit of a hacker site?

Re: AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

#12

Post by m0llusk »

Working on some experimental coding it reminded me how coding in little steps then testing, documenting and coding some more is basic to making development work. Now LLMs encourage big chunks of development all at once. The interfaces, back end, tests, configuration all appear at once, fully formed. Coming to terms with the code still requires taking in minutia, but keeping up with LLMs ends up exhausting this capacity. The new method is fully the opposite of what has been known to work.

Re: AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

#13

Post by dodu_ »

lukan wrote: post #9
totalslop_ai wrote: post #2

Writing code was slow but you understood what you built. Reviewing AI code is fast but you're accumulating blind spots. Both the human cost (this article) and the codebase cost are growing together.

"Writing code was slow but you understood what you built. " Yes. Definitely. I never did try and error with code snippets from the internet until something sort of worked. I never hacked things together like this till the sun rose and had no idea 2 weeks later who wrote that hacky mess and why like this. Or well, years later. And as the code piled up and side problems took over, I certainly did not reimplemented the…

Yes. Definitely.

I didn't necessarily know everything about my code at all times before.

And that justifies my gleeful embrace of not knowing anything about my code now.

Re: AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

#14

Post by vibcdingenjoyer »

m0llusk wrote: post #12

Working on some experimental coding it reminded me how coding in little steps then testing, documenting and coding some more is basic to making development work. Now LLMs encourage big chunks of development all at once. The interfaces, back end, tests, configuration all appear at once, fully formed. Coming to terms with the code still requires taking in minutia, but keeping up with LLMs ends up exhausting this capaci…

You can certainly work on small chunks with an LLM agent. I’ve gotten the best results with 1. Small chunk with tests 2. Refactor/simplify 3. Next small chunk. - I do work on backend and front end at the same time usually but I’ll do a backend pass, then when I need a dopamine hit to keep me focused I’ll get some front end done. So it’s backend steps 1 and 2 repeated until I feel flat, front end steps 1 and 2 until I’m Neuro chemically satisfied then back to backend. YMMV

Re: AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

#15

Post by beering »

tracker1 wrote: post #6

My only thought is take your time to actually review what the LLM/Agent generates... ensure that you understand and can follow it. Give feedback and iterate as necessary. I've used this analogy a lot, but it's really a lot like managing remote development teams in a lot of ways... and even though you can also use agents for planning, it becomes a critical step as part of the communication loop when you aren't sharing…

Charming praise for Anthropic’s low rate limits. It’s a selling point over codex I hadn’t thought of.

Re: AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

#16

Post by scorpioxy »

lukan wrote: post #11
Metaluim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realise this is your experience, and just outs you as a mediocre engineer and doesn't prove that slow and steady doesn't win the race, right? Or did you write your comment with an intentional self-demeaning note, and not a sarcastic tone?

Let me put it like this, I believe there are holy sacred programmers out there, who always are in total control of their code, I just have not met them yet. And no, not all my code is written at 5 am when I am close of passing out. But I say those who never experienced that flow to also do hacky things to get something done and if it takes till the morning, maybe did not capture the full spirit of a hacker site?

"holy sacred programmers" and writing "the same functions again and again" are two extremes. There's a point in the middle where you implement the same function twice perhaps and then on the third time feel like such a thing should already be there and so go look or maybe perhaps add some documentation or centralize functionality to a utilities library etc.

I believe the point being discussed is the scale of "badness" that vibe-coding introduces.

Re: AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

#17

Post by soganess »

Metaluim wrote: post #10
lukan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Writing code was slow but you understood what you built. " Yes. Definitely. I never did try and error with code snippets from the internet until something sort of worked. I never hacked things together like this till the sun rose and had no idea 2 weeks later who wrote that hacky mess and why like this. Or well, years later. And as the code piled up and side problems took over, I certainly did not reimplemented the…

You do realise this is your experience, and just outs you as a mediocre engineer and doesn't prove that slow and steady doesn't win the race, right? Or did you write your comment with an intentional self-demeaning note, and not a sarcastic tone?

Since we out here doing ad hominems: if you don't think the code you wrote a few months ago is shit, you're already cooked, and judging by that comment, I'm betting you're crispy.

Even the best code I've ever written rots, not because it changes but because I get better. Now... I know thinking out of the box is hard... but one can get better a lot of different ways, and call me an optimist, but I'm betting folks can get better at producing tool-assisted code, too. Assuming how we do it now is how it will be forever is silly.

We're in the middle of figuring out the next level of mediated engineering. You-know-what or get off the pot, but stop pretending being a dinosaur is still in vogue. It's gauche, and trust me, we've seen it all before...

... back in my day we didn't have that fancy IDE autocomplete; we memorized every function in a library. IDEs?! ... Back in my day we didn't even have debuggers; we just knew how the code worked. Pish posh, back in my day the compiler didn't even produce error messages that made sense. Compilers? The faux luxury of it all! Back in my day, if you actually cared about your code, you wrote the assembly by hand.

Re: AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

#20

Post by lukan »

scorpioxy wrote: post #16
lukan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me put it like this, I believe there are holy sacred programmers out there, who always are in total control of their code, I just have not met them yet. And no, not all my code is written at 5 am when I am close of passing out. But I say those who never experienced that flow to also do hacky things to get something done and if it takes till the morning, maybe did not capture the full spirit of a hacker site?

"holy sacred programmers" and writing "the same functions again and again" are two extremes. There's a point in the middle where you implement the same function twice perhaps and then on the third time feel like such a thing should already be there and so go look or maybe perhaps add some documentation or centralize functionality to a utilities library etc. I believe the point being discussed is the scale of "badness…

"There's a point in the middle where you implement the same function twice perhaps and then on the third time feel like such a thing should already be there and so go look or maybe perhaps add some documentation or centralize functionality to a utilities library etc."

Yes, my point was exactly about the middle ground. (And the double implemented functions were of a rather small kind, where rewriting them was faster than looking for the old ones. And it was hyperbole of course, I don't routinely do the same again and again for no reason. I remember maybe 2 or 3 instances of that happening)

I wrote bad code and good code in my life, depending on the project and depending on myself.

And where I wrote bad code in the past, AI is actually great with helping that. Finding duplicates, documentation out of order, etc.

"I believe the point being discussed is the scale of "badness" that vibe-coding introduces."

The point I was discussing is that code is not automatically understood, or good, just because a human wrote it.

So all in all, sure, Vibe coding enables a new universe of bad code (that pretends to look good). But if done right, it can also raise the bar. It is a powerful tool and up to us on how we use it.

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