If it's doing 10% of chore work, I am not worried.
I don't think I'm being paid to 1:1 convert a dumb crud app or rest api from one language to another, although of course you do that once a decade in a typical job.
Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
101–110 of 209 posts
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#102Hiring is slower, salaries for open positions are down as well. But the reason is more offshoring to cheaper locations than AI.
As of AI, I've been asked to test a partial rewrite of the current UI to the new components. For a few weeks I've been logging 10+ bugs a day. The only explanation I have, they use AI tool to produce nicely looking code which does not work properly in a complex app.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#103AI does 0% of my work and we are actively hiring. As someone mentioned on another AI thread, if AI is so good why aren't people just doing 15 PRs a day on open source projects like Node.js, React, Kubernetes, Linux, Ansible, etc? AI is sometimes a productivity booster for a dev, sometimes not. And it's unpredictable when it will and won't be. It's not great at giving you confidence signals when you should be skeptica…
You don't use any AI - drafting documentation, write boilerplate code, transcribing meetings, simplifying team communications, searching product documentation, alternative to Google or StackOverflow, creating presentations, as a brainstorming partner? I would consider all of these "work". If you say AI does 0% of your work, I'd say you're either a genius, behind the curve or being disingenuous.
How can AI search into documentation, if the documentation is a thousands of obsolete and contradicting Jira tickets, few outdated Confluence pages with mail attachments and handful of excel files on SharePoint?
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#104Our last CIO bought into all the AI hype early on and pushed it hard, before we were even allowed to use it. It was an odd time. We’d go to a town hall and get told that AI is going to change everything, and then get an email telling us we weren’t allowed to use it.
Now that we can use Copilot, we have a new CIO and I don’t hear about it so much. There is still some AI hype, but it’s more about how it’s being used in our products, rather than how to use it internally to do the work.
Apparently sometime in the next year we’re getting a new version of Jira with some AI that can do user stories on its own, but I don’t see that changing much of anything.
The bottleneck has rarely been the actual writing of code, it’s been people making decisions and general bureaucracy. AI isn’t solving that. Copilot has also not impressed anyone on my team. As far as the code we work on, it’s pretty bad. There are a few niche things it helps with, mostly writing queries to pull values out of complex json. That saves a little time, but hardly 30-50%. More like 1-2%.
Management stopped giving us new people, while pressuring us to do more, for many years now. This was a trend long before AI and I haven’t noticed any major change. I’d say it’s been this way for over 10 years now, ever since they had the realization that tasks could be automated.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
and the LLM probably responded with "You're absolutely right!" to every idea they asked about.
That's one of the things I find most interesting when it comes to LLMs, a depressingly large proportion of the population seems to enjoy interacting with a deranged sycophant who treats all of their ideas and comments as a stroke of genius. Every time I read a response like "[you're right] [you're smart] [more than others]" to the most obvious observation it makes me squirm with discomfort. Especially when I just poi…
>> toxic positivity
I've once heard the company mandated more positive tone. To avoid words like "issue".
Not an issue, it's an opportunity! Okay, we have a critical opportunity in production!
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#106It is now 3 years since I was told AI will replace engineers in 6 month. How come all the AI companies have not replaced engineers?
Are you familiar with: "the year of Linux on the desktop" ? The AI will replace us all in 2028! For real this time. But before that, all the mid-managers will be replaced first, then the tech writers, the QA people, the PM, the... The devs are closing the lights behind...
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Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#107Most companies are going to have to rebuild their business entirely or die. That’s very exciting because I really think this will usher in a new wave of companies/hiring. Everything has to be rebuilt so I really don’t buy the hiring Armageddon.
1 to 5% of software can be improved with AI at the current level. For most incumbents will be even more secure as every startup will be forced to put some BS AI into their thing by investooors
This is just completely delusional.
This whole forum is basically delusional at this point.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#108I'm not working right now... kinda waiting to see if the AI hype dies off before re-entering the industry. Because the last 2 teams of execs I've worked under both went "all in" on AI, asking everyone to use it as much as possible. Both led us down paths that made no sense from a product perspective. Both failed. It is the only time in my career that I've seen an entire exec team get fired all at once, and it happened twice. I know this is one anecdote, and a rare one, but it left me uninspired to just go do it again, not until I find leadership who has a reasonable perspective on AI. To me, that means treating it is just one tool among many, to be used when it is the best tool for a job, and only then.
So to answer the original question of how my morale is? It is non-existent. I am quite open to fixing that, but haven't seen much that indicates now is the right time to search for something new.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#109Pretty pessimistic frankly. Management at all levels pushing for nearshoring SWE labor, meanwhile we’re training AI as a long term solution to fill the skill gap in the same nearshore labor. We were hired to be smart people and it’s frankly an insult to gaslight us into believing that it’s simply because it makes us more productive. Of course there’s a push for it with the intent to replace us. Why else would it be f…
> Of course there’s a push for it with the intent to replace us. Why else would it be forced down our throats? I still don’t see this, if only for the Managerial instinct for ass-covering. If something really matters and a prod showstopper emerges, can those non-technical supervisory managers be completely, absolutely, 100% sure the AI can fix the code and bring everything back up? If not, the buck would surely stop…
Savvy management know how to insulate themselves from such accountability. I've never seen anyone held accountable for large-scale f-ups.
Re: Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Stack Overflow has to be actually dead at this point. There's no reason to go there, or even Google, anymore. If, like the meme, you just copied from SO without using your brain then yes AI is comparable. If you appreciate SO for the discussion (peer review) about the answers and contrasting approaches sometimes out of left field, well good luck because AI can't and won't give you that.
There is some very deep knowledge in SO's comments and some lower rated replies. But I suspect that is not what was making Stackoverflow so popular.
I suspect the new Stack Overflow is Discord channels, at least for some platforms/frameworks. Too bad the free-form non-threaded discussion format of Discord makes things so hard to follow.