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Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

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Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

#21

Post by threatofrain »

furyofantares wrote: post #7

I'm doing a reasonable size project with Claude Code doing almost all of the programming, and it's quite challenging. Vibe coding is easy and fast, but you end up not being an expert in the code base or really having any idea about it. And once it reaches a certain size, the LLM isn't an expert on it either. It is only an expert on cleanly isolated sections of it, which, by the way, it's really bad at producing witho…

I've seen a different kind of usage pattern recently, which is to find a problem that the LLM is good at, something which is very local in reasoning, and do it at big scale across the whole codebase.

Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

#22

Post by b33j0r »

threatofrain wrote: post #21
furyofantares wrote: post #7

I'm doing a reasonable size project with Claude Code doing almost all of the programming, and it's quite challenging. Vibe coding is easy and fast, but you end up not being an expert in the code base or really having any idea about it. And once it reaches a certain size, the LLM isn't an expert on it either. It is only an expert on cleanly isolated sections of it, which, by the way, it's really bad at producing witho…

I've seen a different kind of usage pattern recently, which is to find a problem that the LLM is good at, something which is very local in reasoning, and do it at big scale across the whole codebase.

Could you give an example? I like almost know what you mean, but not quite

Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

#23

Post by bluedino »

furyofantares wrote: post #7

I'm doing a reasonable size project with Claude Code doing almost all of the programming, and it's quite challenging. Vibe coding is easy and fast, but you end up not being an expert in the code base or really having any idea about it. And once it reaches a certain size, the LLM isn't an expert on it either. It is only an expert on cleanly isolated sections of it, which, by the way, it's really bad at producing witho…

> Bespoke coding is easy and slow, and you end up an expert in the systems you make.

What good is that when the code gets written by a fresher from Accenture, or someone who ends up leaving the company (average job length for a software dev is just over two years)

Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

#24

Post by ljlolel »

b33j0r wrote: post #22
threatofrain wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a different kind of usage pattern recently, which is to find a problem that the LLM is good at, something which is very local in reasoning, and do it at big scale across the whole codebase.

Could you give an example? I like almost know what you mean, but not quite

refactoring

Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

#25

Post by userbinator »

denkmoon wrote: post #14
userbinator wrote: post #4

Good luck trying to debug the code you've generated without knowing anything about what it does.

Is this really any different from debugging code that has been built by hundreds of people over 10s of years and you're just the latest schmuck working on it?

Yes, because you actually had an incentive to learn about the code.

Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

#26

Post by parpfish »

chc4 wrote: post #13

While everyeone is just unilaterally asserting things, I'll jump in: no they won't. Practically every output of LLMs I've seen (even the "cutting edge" agentic ones that everyone says you have to evaluate or else your opinion don't count) has been poor quality with baffling bugs. These things do actually matter. Especially for anything that can be remotely described as "niche" or "research" they are astonishingly bad…

I started trying to vibecode over the last couple weeks, and it sucks at 90% of the stuff I have to do at work. That last 10% is nice, but not worth the cost IMO.

However, because I does show promise on a small segment of my work I could see there being an effect on industry where a certain type of dev work gets wiped out. To the extent that there are companies paying people to “be a webmaster” or maintain a basic crud-app, those teams could drastically downsize. Even if that’s just 5% of the total dev population, that’s still a lot of jobs and an entire type of work that just gets wiped out.

Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

#27

Post by chc4 »

threatofrain wrote: post #21
furyofantares wrote: post #7

I'm doing a reasonable size project with Claude Code doing almost all of the programming, and it's quite challenging. Vibe coding is easy and fast, but you end up not being an expert in the code base or really having any idea about it. And once it reaches a certain size, the LLM isn't an expert on it either. It is only an expert on cleanly isolated sections of it, which, by the way, it's really bad at producing witho…

I've seen a different kind of usage pattern recently, which is to find a problem that the LLM is good at, something which is very local in reasoning, and do it at big scale across the whole codebase.

See, using AI as the equivalet of super-IDE snippets or to generate things in isolation is probably really good! It's also categorically not the same thing as what all of the AI hypemen (including the OP) are describing, with it replacing wide swathes of software developers. It devolves into a motte and bailey argument where it is actually possible for AI to be a useful tool in a programmer's toolbox, and make people more productive in isolated ways, without also agreeing with frankly anything the OP thread is saying.

Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

#28

Post by giantrobot »

tomlockwood wrote: post #10
gwynforthewyn wrote: post #8

It’s only a feeling, but I’d swear I’ve seen variations on this post across a half a dozen software-adjacent subreddits every day for the last month. The common denominator has always been “Paying $200 for Claude Max is a steal” with absolutely no evidence of what the author did with it. I honestly think we’re being played.

Agreed. Where's the code?

Where's the 10x, 20x, or whatever increases in profit from all the AI "productivity"? Typing is not the challenging aspect of writing code. Writing boilerplate faster isn't the super power that a lot of non-technical people seem to think it is.

Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

#29

Post by vrosas »

gyomu wrote: post #18

Yeah maybe. Talk is cheap, show me the code. > Last week, I did something I’ve put off for 10 years. Built a full production-grade desktop app in 1 week. Fully reviewed. Clean code. Launched builds on Launchpad. UI/UX and performance? Better than most market leaders. ONE. WEEK. I really wonder why people who write these things never actually show these apps they vibe coded in a week that are “better than most market…

> Fully reviewed

Reviewed by a bot (that wrote it no less) is not reviewed. This person is not a software engineer.

Re: Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

#30

Post by georgeecollins »

I would really like to see the App this person is talking about. I am sure AI coding is very useful, but its so hard for me to judge without seeing the projects people are making with it. I have seen lots of toy examples in my field (not intended to be commercial) but this person claims they are making a commercial thing from scratch with AI. It's so hard to judge without seeing the work product.
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