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Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

manuel.kiessling.net

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Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#151

Post by justanotherunit »

Interesting post, but this perspective seems to be the main focus, like all the time. I find this statement to be completely wrong usage of AI:

“This is especially noteworthy because I don’t actually know Python. Yes, with 25+ years of software development experience, I could probably write a few lines of working Python code if pressed — but I don’t truly know the language. I lack the muscle memory and intimate knowledge of its conventions and best practices.”

You should not use AI to just “do” the hard job, since as many have mentioned, it does it poorly and sloppy. Use AI to quickly learn the advantages and disadvantages of the language, then you do not have to navigate through documentation to learn everything, just validate what the AI outputs. All is contextual, and since you know what you want in high level, use AI to help you understand the language.

This costs speed yes, but I have more control and gain knowledge about the language I chose.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#152

Post by SkyPuncher »

only-one1701 wrote: post #5

Increasingly I’m realizing that in most cases there is a SIGNIFICANT difference between how useful AI is on greenfield projects vs how useful it is on brownfield projects. For the former: pretty good! For the brownfield, it’s often worse than useless.

Oh, I find almost the exact opposite.

On Greenfield projects there's simply too many options for it to pursue. It will take one approach in one place then switch to another.

On a brownfield project, you can give it some reference code and tell it about places to look for patterns and it will understand them.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#153

Post by cube00 »

overgard wrote: post #136
gsibble wrote: post #4

I completely agree, as a fellow senior coder. It allows me to move significantly faster through my tasks and makes me much more productive. It also makes coding a lot less painful because I'm not making typos or weird errors (since so much code autocompletes) that I spend less time debugging too.

I dunno, I just had Copilot sneak in a typo today that took about ten minutes of debugging to find. I certainly could have made a similar typo myself if copilot hadn't done it for me, but, all the same copilot probably saved me a minute worth of typing today but cost me 10 minutes of debugging.

The vibe bros would have you believe your prompt is at fault and that you need add "don't make typos".

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#154

Post by bigpeopleareold »

dmamills wrote: post #55
conductr wrote: post #37

As a long time hobby coder, like 25 years and I think I’m pretty good(?), this whole LLM /vibecoding thing has zapped my creativity the past year or so. I like the craft of making things. I used tools I enjoy working with and learn new ones all the time (never got on the JS/react train). Sometimes I have an entrepreneur bug and want to create a marketable solution, but I often just like to build. Im also the kind of…

I can echo your sentiment. Art is the manifestation of creativity, and to create any good art you need to train in whatever medium you choose. For the decade I've been a professional programmer, I've always argued that writing code was a creative job. It's been depressing to listen to people pretend that LLM generated code is "the same thing". To trivialize the thoughtful lessons one has learned honing their craft. I…

Just think what the 19th century craftsmen were thinking! :D (i.e. they were right, but really good stuff is hard to make at scale)

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#155

Post by switch007 »

As much as I am still sceptical about AI tools, the past month has been a revolution as a senior dev myself.

I'm blasting through tickets, leaving more time to tutor and help junior colleagues and do refactoring. Guiding them has then been a multiplier, and also a bit of an eye opener about how little real guidance they've been getting up until now. I didn't realise how resource constrained we'd been as a team leading to not enough time guiding and helping them.

I don't trust the tools with writing code very often but they are very good at architecture questions, outputting sample code etc. Supercharged google

As a generalist, I feel less overwhelmed

It's probably been the most enjoyable month at this job.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#156

Post by conductr »

fragmede wrote: post #56
conductr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I see that perspective bu I guess my thought process is “what’s the point, if everyone else can now do the same” I had long ago culled many of those ideas based on my ability to execute the marketing plan or the “do I really even want to run that kind of business?” test. I already knew I could build whatever I wanted to exist so My days of pumping out side projects ended long ago and I became more selective wit…

which turns it into passion. the side project that I'm only interested in because it could maybe make some money? eh. a project in a niche where I live and breath the fumes off the work and I can help the whole ecosystem with their workflow? sign me up!

Agree, I’ve been searching for the latter for a long time

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#157

Post by nostromo »

Aurornis wrote: post #36
milicat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I browse through this, the more I agree. I feel like one could delete almost all comments from that project without losing any information – which means, at least the variable naming is (probably?) sensible. Then again, I don't know the application domain. Also… def _save_current_date_time(current_date_time_file: str, current_date_time: str) -> None: with Path(current_date_time_file).open("w") as f: f.write(…

> I feel like one could delete almost all comments from that project without losing any information I far from a heavy LLM coder but I’ve noticed a massive excess of unnecessary comments in most output. I’m always deleting the obvious ones. But then I started noticing that the comments seem to help the LLM navigate additional code changes. It’s like a big trail of breadcrumbs for the LLM to parse. I wouldn’t be surpr…

LLMs are also good at commenting on existing code.

It’s trivial to ask Claude via Cursor to add comments to illustrate how some code works. I’ve found this helpful with uncommented code I’m trying to follow.

I haven’t seen it hallucinate an incorrect comment yet, but sometimes it will comment a TODO that a section should be made more more clear. (Rude… haha)

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#158

Post by dheera »

mjr00 wrote: post #33
ramesh31 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The scary thing is: I have seen professional human developers write worse code. This is kind of the rub of it all. If the code works, passes all relevant tests, is reasonably maintainable, and can be fitted into the system correctly with a well defined interface, does it really matter? I mean at that point its kind of like looking at the output of a bytecode compiler and being like "wow what a mess". And it's not li…

> If the code works, passes all relevant tests, is reasonably maintainable, and can be fitted into the system correctly with a well defined interface, does it really matter? You're not wrong here, but there's a big difference in programming one-off tooling or prototype MVPs and programming things that need to be maintained for years and years. We did this song and dance pretty recently with dynamic typing. Developers…

> You're not wrong here, but there's a big difference in programming one-off tooling or prototype MVPs and programming things that need to be maintained for years and years.

Humans also worry about their jobs, especially in PIP-happy companies; they are very well known for writing intentionally over-complicated code that only they understand so that they are irreplaceable

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#159

Post by quantadev »

As of 2025, it's no longer the case that older developers (like me at 57) are at a disadvantage just due to potentially lessened sheer brain power, as we had in our 20s. The reason is simple: We know what all the terminologies are, how to ask for things with proper and sufficient levels of detail and context, we know what the pitfalls and common error patterns are, and on and on, from decades of experience. Working with AI has similarities to management positions. You need to be a generalist. You need to know a little about everything, more so than a lot about one thing. All this can ONLY come with age, just like wisdom can only come thru experience.

I just hope that most hiring managers now realize this. With AI the productivity of younger developers has gone up by a factor of 10x, but the productivity of us "Seasoned" developers has gone up 100x. This now evens the playing field, I hope, where us experienced guys will be given a fair shake in the hiring process rather than what's been happening for decades where the 20-somethings pretend to be interviewing the older guys, because some boss told them to, but they never had any actual intentions of hiring anyone over 40, just on the bases of age alone, even if some older guy aces the interview.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#160

Post by cess11 »

necovek wrote: post #9

The premise might possibly be true, but as an actually seasoned Python developer, I've taken a look at one file: https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co... All of it smells of a (lousy) junior software engineer: from configuring root logger at the top, module level (which relies on module import caching not to be reapplied), over not using a stdlib config file parser and building one themselves,…

wrap_long_lines shares those characteristics:

https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co...

Where things are placed in the project seems rather ad hoc too. Put everything in the same place kind of architecture. A better strategy might be to separate out the I and the O of IO. Maybe someone wants SMS or group chat notifications later on, instead of shifting the numbers in filenames step11_ onwards one could then add a directory in the O part and hook it into an actual application core.

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