101–110 of 404 posts
I just do not want to deal with other people's AI-generated code.
Your AI can rewrite it to your own standards for free. You can tell your AI to read their code, and create a new requirements document for a clean-room implementation. Then you have your AI implement using your own requirements document.
I went for a job in AI in the late 1980s and realised from the bonkers spin of the company founders that it really wasn't the 5 to 10 years away as I was being told. I went looking something that was going to deliver a result.
I came back to it maybe 6 years ago when while on the bench at a consultancy. I got into trying to do various Kaggle challenges. Then the boss got the bug and wanted to predict the answers to weird spurious money-making questions. I tried but even when there was good data, I didn't know how to do better anyone else. When there wasn't good data it just produced complete shit.
Since then the world has changed. Everything I touch has AI built in. And it's really good. When you don't know your way around something or you've got stuck it really gets you moving again. Yeah, if it regurgitates a stupid negative example from the documentation as if it is "the way to do it", you just ignore it because you have already read that.
Now, every week I'm subjected to lectures by people who don't know how to code about how productive AI is going to make me. Working in the financial sector every Californian pipe dream seems to be an imperative, but all must verified by an adult. My IDE tries to insert all sorts of crap into my production code as I type, and then I'm supposed to be allow it to generate my unit tests.
I know it will get better, but will it be another 5 to 10 years?
Are we 80% of the way there yet?
I’ve heard this thesis a lot, but it’s almost always from the result chasers. It doesn’t resonate with me because I am a result chaser. I like woodworking because I like building something that never existed before. I don’t mind using a CNC router or a 3 printer to help me out. I don’t care about the process, I care about the result. But I care deeply about the quality of the result. I don’t care about the beauty of…
You seem to be conflating code quality with product integrity. All those problems are caused by business decisions, not the developers. You do make a good point though that AI may enable more people to build their own when they can.
But yes many of those problems were caused by business decisions. But engineers are perfectly cable of creating those problems on their own. If an engineer doesn’t realize that the function they called buffers messages in memory because someone made a wrapper function around sendAsync() and called it send(), that’s a code quality issue not a business issue (except as in the broader sense where every problem is ultimately a business issue).
Or if an engineer writes a naive implementation of some algorithm and adds a spinner so that an operation takes 5s to finish when it could be instantaneous if they’d thought about the problem more.
You can use gen AI entirely in the spirit of craft. For instance if you need to consume, implement or extend some open source software you can load it up in an agent IDE and ask “How do I?” questions or “how is it that?” questions that put you on a firm footing.
And contribute your changes back upstream, right?
A handful of well intentioned slop piles might be manageable, but AI enables spewing garbage at an unprecedented scale. When there's a limited amount of resources to expend on discussing, reviewing, fixing, and then finally accepting contributions a ton of AI generated contributions from random people could bring development to a halt.
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Yeah I’ve used it for that and it use useful. But it’s kind of like listening to a math audiobook vs working out math problems. I still need to work out the math problems to really understand what’s going on. I’m also nervous about the inevitable cognitive decline of relying on AI to explain everything to me.
> But it’s kind of like listening to a math audiobook vs working out math problems. I don't see it that way. I'm solving the math problem, but after coming with a solution I start asking for alternative approaches or formulas I don't even know about. In fact, calculus is full of suck gotchas tricks or formulas, think of integrals or limits. Took who found those decades/centuries to find them. It's not a black/white d…
Throughout college I would see a pretty stark divide, where most people would use vscode on mac or on Windows + WSL. But there was a small minority who would spend alot of time 'tinkering' (e.g, experiment with OS like nix/gentoo, or tweaking their dev environment). Maybe i'm misunderstanding what a 'craft lover' means here but it seemed to me, at the time, that the latter camp had more technical depth just based on conversation. Can't speak to the result in terms of test scores. Though it would be interesting to see any data on that if it exists.
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> If we end up in a place where the craft truly is dead, then congratulations, your value probably just dropped to zero I think, then that the value of all knowledge work will have dropped to zero. Software engineering is, to my mind, “intelligence complete.” If you can do it with knowledge work, you can have software do it.
That’s not the point of nor the reason for knowledge work. The fundamental mechanism of knowledge work is people. They haven’t changed at all. And what they need to understand and learn hasn’t changed. All the agents in the world and all of the methane guzzling data centres can’t tell you what to write in the specification nor if what the computer has generated faithfully implements that specification.
I have an idea for an “evidence editor.” Claude is waiting for me to tell it exactly what I want this thing to be. But I don’t know. I haven’t figured out how to square the various circles, even in my fantasies. Until I do, Claude sits and waits. And waits…
This sounds right to me: > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Helps explain why some people are d…
I strongly disagree. There's always been two camps ... on everything! Emacs vs. vi. Command-line editor vs. IDE. IntelliJ vs. VS Code. I could do like twenty more of these: dev teams have always split on technology choices. But, all of those were rational separations. Emacs and vi, IntelliJ and VS Code ... they're all viable options, so they boil down to subjective preference. By definition, anything subjective will…
LLMs are not a tool like an editor or an IDE, they make up code in an unpredictable way; I can't see how anyone who enjoyed software development could like that.
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Just out of the popularity of the claim, I’ll bite. Both big tech and startups are now full of people working at 10x, features are written as fast as PMs can think them, monoliths self heal with agents buzzing over them. 10x means 10 times the outcomes in a given amount of time, so did you see the last iOS version pack a decade worth of features in a single release? Do you remember when meta moved their backend to ru…
10x is definitely possible at a startup level. I suppose not in a big tech world (seems obvious to me, and it's not like development speed was the bottleneck there either, right?) You can choose not to believe what I say (and I genuinely understand if you do), and I can simply keep on doing it. I'm not taking it out of thin air either. tuesday I did in 8h the work I scheduled for roughly 65h. Ok, so maybe it's not 10…
Lots of mentions of the term mourning... As they say in my country, don't sell the skin until you kill the bear. All I'm seeing around me is people dropping best practices in a FOMO driven push for speed: let's stop reviews, let's drive 5 agents in parallel, let's not even look at the code! This is going to blow up. Only after we pick up the remains we'll find a more sustainable approach for AI usage. I suspect that…
I think the craft is going to die and am not thrilled about it. I dont feel like there is a contradiction there