Writing code was never particularly difficult in the first place.
AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
181–190 of 330 posts
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#182[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.
> The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.
Dunno man. Ideas alone aren't worth anything [0] and execution is everything [1], but good ideas and great execution will never go out of style regardless of how much competition is out there. I'm of the opinion that even if 10% of the population is now capable of creating a side project, there's still the same relatively-fixed amount of people capable of making a good side project, and even fewer who will see it through to a real product. Nothing has really changed in the aggregate. It's like architecture, there are always improvements in materials, tools and processes, and Claude and Codex can provide more laborers for almost free, but most people are still gonna be building uninspired McMansions instead of the Guggenheim.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#183[flagged]
> Because the bottleneck was never typing code. It was always understanding the problem, making architectural decisions, debugging edge cases, and most importantly - knowing what NOT to build.
The AI can help you in these tasks too, but you need to ask for the help in terms that it can help you with, and not expect it to be genuinely intelligent or to have a crystal ball. As a bonus, once you've gotten these things into the agentic context, the code itself becomes better too.
One-shotted vibe coding is an anti-pattern.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Maybe that's why the writing feels so terrible. The AI is attempting to maximize every sentence while simultaneously expanding on just a few actually meaningful points. And the net result of that dissonance is this rage-inducing vapidity. It's the written equivalent of the Uncanny Valley.
I think it has got past the uncanny valley really - it does read like a human, just a very attention-seeking one, like your typical LinkedIn salesman.
That's probably just default settings though - I asked it to rewrite, and most of the tell-tale signs are gone as I can see (apart from the em-dash)
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#185AI made programming A LOT MORE FUN for me. What I never enjoyed was looking up the cumbersome details of a framework, a programming language or an API. It's really BORING to figure out that tool X calls paging params page and pageSize while Y offset and limit. Many other examples can be added. For me, I feel at home in so many new programming languages and frameworks that I can really ship ideas. AI really helps with…
Same here. I like bringing ideas to life; code is just a means to an end. I can now give detailed designs to an AI and let it write the hundreds of lines of code in just minutes, and with far fewer typos than I would make. It's still not perfect - I have to review it all - but if I give it a proper spec in generally creates exactly what I had in mind.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#186Ah, just in time summarizing what we went through recently. Our "leaders" officially added these to our already nonsensical list of goals.
A. Measurably demonstrate that atleast 50% of code/tests are AI generated.
B. X% Faster delivery timelines due to improved productivity tools.
You can't expect to make a pizza in 50% less time just because you bought a faster doughmaker. Specially when you don't even know whether the dough comes out under kneaded, over kneaded or as plain lumps!
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#187Earlier 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.
Yeah I vibe coded an addition game for my 4 year old that lets him do addition problems where the answer is always 10 or less. It’s very “juicy”. There’s a lot of screen shake and spinning and flashy rainbow insanity going on. If I had done all that stuff myself it would have take a week because I would have been picky about each little animation. The thing that saved me the most time was just being ok with the good…
> I dug into the code and it was thousands of lines of absolute madness
Ask the AI to assess the code itself and to propose ways to gradually refactor it for better cleanliness. It can be good at that stuff, but you need to make it an explicit goal.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#188[flagged]
I get benefits with AI both on the writing the code part and the understanding the problem part. If AI disappeared tomorrow I’d probably still enter “plan mode” in my head. I like having the discussion with the AI about requirements and edge cases and all that, while it updates the plan and documents architectural decisions in CLAUDE.md. I love that I can add extra polish, such as color to terminal output, or other random features that would have not made the cut before. Instead toiling on a random one off script to fix a problem I can have a whole CLI build that is a joy to use. Explaining complex architecture is easy now because instead of a boring EDD I can slop out animations that demonstrate data moving and transforming through a system.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but you see, maybe all of that was wrong in the first place? This is just a correction of something that managed to remain in an invalid state for an impressively long time.
It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software.
Yeah but we've told ourselves that writing software was some kind of higher mathematics, where in reality it was mostly just plumbing that, surprise, a computer can do too.
Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
#190Yep, my day to day is now miserable, LLMs have ruined everything that made this field fun, and greatly enhanced everything that made it suck.