it didn't do shit
AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
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Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#142[flagged]
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Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes just not driven or owned by engineers. That's what I'm seeing from company and a few peer's companies I mean, it depends on the feature/product and how critical it is to the health of the business. Like I mentioned in my edited comment, there is a lot of dev work in companies that is a cost-center, and those are the portions that will start getting vibe coded and deployed in product with little-to-no oversight…
We are probably talking past each other but I am saying I see: Leaders thinking they will basically prompt out new revenue generating features with no human engineers to "figure it out". Not cost centers, low hanging fruit, etc. No these are not giant corps like Google or whatever and likely run by morons, but it was easier when they did not think they were "empowered". There is no opportunity for engineers to "think…
> Leaders thinking they will basically prompt out new revenue generating features with no human engineers to "figure it out"
Yeah and I'm telling you as one of those leaders that most of the leaders I am meeting with know this is unrealistic and non-tech enterprises.
I think the issue is, a lot of SWEs think their work actually matters to the bottom line (and PMs and execs will massage their ego - I'm guilty of doing this as well) but in reality they don't matter because they are working in a cost-center product or feature.
Every SWE on HN should sit down and ask themselves whether or not
1. The feature they are working on directly generates revenue for their employer.
2. If it does, does it generate revenue equivalent to at least 1% of overall revenue per year.
3. Whether the cost of your team of SWEs+PMs are putting the feature/product in the red (ie. If you are 3 Eng and 1 PM working on a product who's revenue is only $500K/yr).
If all of those questions are negative, your product/feature is at risk from LLMs but was already at risk of being offshored.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have my own side project that I vibe coded. I probably did what would take one team 6 montns and produced it myself in one month. I'm not afraid of breaking stuff because it is only a small set of users. However for my own code for my professional job no way I would go that fast because I would impact millions of users. It is insane that companies think they can replace teams wholesale while maintaining quality.
> I probably did what would take one team 6 montns and produced it myself in one month. I find it… Amusing? That’s not quite the word. That programmers—a group notoriously for making wrong estimates of how long something will take to build—continuously and confidently spew a version of this. And it’s not even estimating how long we ourselves would take to build something, now we’re onto estimating what an undetermine…
It’s not an estimate, the point was that AI produced code multiples faster than the prompter, and the prompter is in a pretty good position to make that claim. I can confirm and make the same claim, so I believe that it’s true that for some tasks, Claude makes me 10x faster than on my own without AI, where 10x absolutely is a completely made up number that’s still true in spirit.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, why? Why do you look at it that way? Why does anyone beside you have to care about what you do? Just build something for yourself. You will always have things you'd like to build for yourself. You will be in competition with yourself only and your target audience will be yourself. Market forces do not apply to side-projects, because that's what people do for fun. Just because there are chess computers, doesn't me…
Isn't it obvious? The reward that a personal project can generate for you is limited. It's not remotely close to what a successful project would give you - money, fulfillment, social capital, feeling good about yourself, etc.
Not only that, I have a feeling a lot of people are gonna be disappointed now they can implement their side projects in a week instead of 6 months. Finally - the thing is there, ready. And the likely outcome is
a) Almost no one but you cares and
b) Now that this has become trivial, there's no much joy in it. The struggle we had before A.I was the real joy; prompting agents for a few days and getting what you want isn't that joyful.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#146[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.
But the total market size (in number of products) also multiplied. For instance, as a relatively tiny example, I create a nutrition tracker. There's hundreds already out there, but they never met my specific desire for one. So I created one with Claude (took maybe 2 hours total over a few days) that completely matches my desire, plus I can tweak it as want for my needs.
No one else will want this specific piece of software. But I love it.
Sure, there will be 100x the competition, but there will be also 100x the software needs. Now, if you want to get crazy rich building software, that does get tougher, but that's a good thing, I think.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have my own side project that I vibe coded. I probably did what would take one team 6 montns and produced it myself in one month. I'm not afraid of breaking stuff because it is only a small set of users. However for my own code for my professional job no way I would go that fast because I would impact millions of users. It is insane that companies think they can replace teams wholesale while maintaining quality.
A missing link right now is automated high-quality code reviews. I would love an adversarial code review agent that has a persona oriented around all incoming code being slop, that leverages a wealth of knowledge (both manually written by the team and/or aggregated from previous/historical code reviews). And that agent should pull no punches when reviewing code. This would augment actual engineer code reviews and hel…
Cursor Bugbot is a game changer — runs on PR and finds the most subtle of bugs in enormous PRs.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Making fluff sound grandiose is probably what makes so grating.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#149Pangram detects this as a 100% AI generated article. Downvote this hustling slop to oblivion. Also, check out the dude's linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanturkovic/
Wish we could downvote articles. Is it legitimate to flag AI slop?
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#150The post itself is 100% AI written https://www.pangram.com/history/6572a5c4-f548-46e2-977d-9813...
Reminder that AI-writing detection tools are largely junk.