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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

#171

Post by skydhash »

nz wrote: post #98
skydhash wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the good book about writing I read was William Zinsser's "On Writing Well". Striving for simplicity and avoiding clutter was the two first principles described in the book. AI writing feels more like ramblings than communication.

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about florid and elaborate writing (e.g. Faulkner, Lispector, Mieville, Mossman, Joyce, Austen, etc)?

I'm a French speaker and florid and elaborate writing is something I've grown up with. It can be difficult if you don't know the word or are not used to the style, but it's not boring. AI writing is just repetitive.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#172

Post by WarmWash »

wibbily wrote: post #130
WarmWash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not “clear communication” though. The prose that comes out of LLMs is awful - long, vapid paragraphs with distracting tropes. You can ask them to be concise but then they file down all the wrong bits of the sentence and lose meaning. There’s a reason people bother clocking it and complaining about it, it’s *bad* It’s like everything else that AI can do - looks fine at a glance, or to the inexperienced, but colla…

>By your own admission you’re not a great communicator… how can you tell then?

Thankfully we don't have to know how to write well to enjoy a well written book.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#173

Post by RevEng »

simianwords wrote: post #4

The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones. No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level. An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.

I disagree on making it easier. I'm very capable of writing code in multiple languages but it's boring and monotonous. It's getting in the way of me building the system I have in mind. I prefer the engineering (design) to writing. If I can describe my system design to something (a junior developer or an AI) and see it come to life quickly, that's great; it lets me spend more time on designing the system, or perhaps designing more systems.

That said, there are plenty of amateurs who find coding to be approachable and system design to me daunting. For them, eliminating coding and moving the focus to system design would be a nightmare.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#174

Post by antaviana »

This is what hapenned 10 years ago, when machine translation entered the professional translation business. Post-editing the translation was often slower than human translating sentences from scratch. Now nearly the whole industry is post-editing machine translations, and there is more and more content that is not even post-edited.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#175

Post by Aurornis »

citizenkeen wrote: post #167
Aurornis wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've shipped 7 side projects in the past year using AI heavily. But I've noticed something counterintuitive: the total time from idea to shipped product barely decreased. > Why? Because the bottleneck was never typing code. Were you also shipping side projects every 2 months before AI? If not, this comment just reads like cognitive dissonance. Your core claim is that AI has enabled you to ship 7 projects in 12 mont…

For me, it allows me to ship more projects in parallel, but not any given project faster, which is how I take your parent’s comment.

I could see that being the case in a company where you’re waiting on stakeholders and other people, but the parent commenter was talking about their personal side projects.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#176

Post by markus_zhang »

Te be frank, a lot of companies don't need engineers. They need someone to do the jobs "quickly", "ASAP" and that's it. They are hiring coders masqueraded as programmers who masqueraded as engineers.

I'd say this -- if you really want to be a real engineer, you should avoid many career paths out there. Potentially ANY positions DIRECTLY facing business stakeholders is at best not a good choice, and at worst deprive your already remote chance to be a good engineer. The lower level you move into, the better, because the environment FORCES you to be a true engineer -- either you don't and fail, or you do and keep the job.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#177

Post by FpUser »

ihaveajob wrote: post #67
hypfer wrote: post #52

Earlier 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…

Ironically I had a very smart and otherwise reasonable math professor who, shortly after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, said in class that chess was no longer interesting.

In that sense running competition is no longer interesting since I can jut ride in the car

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#178

Post by RevEng »

Deegy wrote: post #138
mark-r wrote: post #114

There'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

And yet there isn't widespread unemployment. Fewer farmers were needed so fewer people became farmers. Food became cheap and plentiful. Everyone else went on to do other things that they couldn't afford to do before. Software will do the same; we will make more software with fewer people and it will become ubiquitous to the point that people will just quickly generate whatever software they need rather than do many monotonous tasks manually.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#179

Post by RevEng »

jghn wrote: post #8
simianwords wrote: post #4

The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones. No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level. An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.

> it took away the easy parts This is the key. I haven't found that things have become harder. The hard parts are still hard, and those have been the most important and prominent parts of my job once I reached a certain level.

Exactly. I'm a principal software engineer. My job is a lot less about writing code and a lot more about planning, designing, reviewing, and training.

However, I do wonder how we will train juniors to become seniors. Perhaps the answer is that the curriculum changes from coding and data structures to architecture and design which was typically a last minute addition in college.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#180

Post by __bjoernd »

> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code.

This resonates somewhat, but for a different reason. My mental model is that there are two kinds of developers, the craftsmen and the artists.

The artist considers the act of writing code their actual fulfillment. They thrive on beautifully written code. They are often attached to their code to a point where they will be hurt if someone criticizes (or even deletes) it.

The craftsman understands that code exists to serve a purpose and that is to make someone's life easier. This can be a totally non-technical customer/user that now can get their work done better. It could be another developer that benefits from using a library we wrote.

The artist hates LLMs as it takes away their work and replaces their works of beauty with generic, templatized code.

The craftsman acknowledges that LLMs are another tool in the toolbelt and using them will make them create more benefits for their customers.

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