The post itself is 100% AI written https://www.pangram.com/history/6572a5c4-f548-46e2-977d-9813...
AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
131–140 of 330 posts
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#132[flagged]
Fortunately, AI can also be used to reduce complexity. The case I noticed most often is to use the slightly more ugly API, or duplicate some generic code, but avoid pulling in a dependency. Examples are avoiding UI frameworks and directly accessing the DOM in simple web projects, using the CLI arg parser from the stdlib or adding simple helper functions rather than pulling in left-pad like dependencies.
Since managing dependencies is one of the major maintenance burdens in some of my projects (updating them, keeping their APIs in mind, complexity due to overgeneralization), this can help quite a lot.
See also https://www.karl.berlin/simplicity-by-llm.html for some of my thoughts regarding this.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#133[flagged]
The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.
I think the window of opportunity to create boring also-ran software is shrinking.
I think there's more opportunity to do something novel.
AI can't do it, and the humans with the skills to do it are rapidly disappearing.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's now almost certain that every submission about LLMs will be written (or assisted) by LLMs. That this kind of writing puts a great number of us off is not important to many who seek their fortune in this industry. I hear the cry: "it's my own words the LLM just assisted me". Yes we have to write prompts.
I think it is very fair to say that in the same way that LLM's have given english majors access to programming, LLMs have also given engineers access to clear communication. I'm not shy to admit that LLMs even from 2 years ago could communicate ideas much better than me, especially for a general audience.
> LLMs have also given engineers access to clear communication.
A lot of the time, the inability to express an idea clearly hints at some problem with the underlying idea, or in one's conceptualisation of that idea. Writing is a fantastic way to grapple with those issues, and iron out better and clearer iterations of ideas (or one's understanding thereof).
An LLM, on the other hand, will happily spit out a coherent piece of writing defending any nonsense idea you throw at it. Nothing is learnt, nothing is gained from such "writing" (for either the author or the audience).
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#135Its worth mentioning that this essay has some signs of being either partially AI generated or heavily edited through an LLM. Some of the signs are there (It's not X, it's Y), With the blog having gone from nearly zero activity between 2015 and 2025 to have it explode in posts and text output since then also raises an eyebrow.
It's now almost certain that every submission about LLMs will be written (or assisted) by LLMs. That this kind of writing puts a great number of us off is not important to many who seek their fortune in this industry. I hear the cry: "it's my own words the LLM just assisted me". Yes we have to write prompts.
My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I don't let LLMs speak for me in this way.
I'll let an LLM update code documentation or even write a README for my project but I'll edit that to ensure it doesn't express opinions or say things like "This is designed to help make code easier to maintain" - because that's an expression of a rationale that the LLM just made up.
I use LLMs to proofread text I publish on my blog. I just shared my current prompt for that here: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#136For me, one thing that completely changed almost overnight was dealing with junior developers.
In the past, I would give them an assignment and they would take a few days to return with the implementation. I was able to see them struggling, they would learn, they would communicate and get frustrated by their own solution, then iterate.
Today, there are two kinds: 1) the ones who take a marginally smaller amount of time because they’re busy learning, testing and self reviewing, and 2) the ones who watch Twitch or Youtube videos while Claude does the job and come to me after two hours with “done, what’s next” while someone has to comb through the mess.
Leadership might see #2 and think they’re better, faster. But they are just a fucking boat anchor that drags down the whole team while providing nothing more than a shitty interface to an LLM in return.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is AI such a bad writer? Phrasing like this feels like reading Fox News.
I saw someone point out something like: ai makes every sentence count. There’s no building or allowing a point to breathe. Every sentence is an axiom to get the meaning across, and its so grating
It's an interesting way to view it, because what happens in fact is likely the opposite - AI is asked to expand a few bullet points into a blog post
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#138There's nothing new about this pattern. When the tractor was invented, the farmer didn't get to knock off early. He just started producing 10x more. Then the tractors got bigger and more powerful, and the things you used them with got more sophisticated too and suddenly you're producing 100x more.
And now there are 1% of the number of farmers that there used to be
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.
It's like the business of selling electric drills. People don't really want drills they want holes. But holes are difficult to sell so the selling the drills is a proxy for that. In software it's the same thing. People don't really want software they want data and data transformation. But traditionally the proxy for that has been selling the software (either as a desktop app or then later as sole kind of service). Yo…
Software is not becoming worthless.
The value of computers since its inception was that it's capable of transforming data very, very fast and autonomously. But someone has to input that data from the real world or capture it using some device, and someone has to write the rules.
What happened is that we created a whole world of information and the rules has become very complex. Now we have multiple layers stacked vertically and multiple domains spread horizontally. At one time, ASCII was enough, now we have to deal with Unicode.
Software becoming worthless will mean that everyone has learned the rules of the systems we created and capable of creating systems with good enough quality. I'm not seeing that happens anytime soon.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#140[flagged]