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Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

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Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#211

Post by tpdly »

nrmitchi wrote: post #157

> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…

Yeah, even though I like 'craftsmanship' here, stakeholders don't. I think "durability" is pretty good. 'Engineering standards' perhaps. I think we'll start to see the groundwork laid for software engineering as a proper engineering field, where specific performance characteristics are required for certain stakes.

Code can be like "heavy machinery", maybe needs license to operate. If an app has sensitive data in it, it becomes like a residential structure subject to building codes and inspections. I shudder to think of how this would play out it our oligarchic, anti-competitive environment though.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#212

Post by olvy0 »

saalweachter wrote: post #180
JoelMcCracken wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the things I keep thinking about. At the very least, these tools make prototyping and idea vetting remarkably cheaper. Then we go back to the old “the prototype works; I’m the boss and I’m telling you to deploy it to production”

There's like three groups of developers you need: The prototypers, who move fast and break things, who throw together shiny first versions that look great and work some of the time; The architects, who take the prototypes and take the time to build it correctly; And the gardeners, who maintain the built system for the next 10-30 years, fixing bugs, making incremental improvements to speed or resource usage, and updat…

Ha, I'm a gardener then, on my 15th year of maintenance. So halfway there according to you. Slowly, very slowly, fixing the thousands of bugs the rockstar left behind 15 years ago.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#213

Post by imetatroll »

AbbeFaria wrote: post #34
ramon156 wrote: post #7

I kind of envy people who need to clean up after others. At least you're puzzling. My current job is genuinely just boring. It's tasks that are so simple, a junior could do it. But no, instead they needed a medior. I'm not saying I'm better than this, nor that no medior will pick it up. I just cannot push myself to care about the code this company makes. It's old, dusty and it serves no one of importance. These custo…

You are not alone. I was in this exact same position at MSFT and I put in my resignation. I am an L63 but the work I was doing, was something an L60-L61 could do and I frequently felt I was in one of those Bullshit jobs (courtesy of David Graeber). I was paid handsomely but once the sign on stock ran out, I saw that I was staying in the job just for security. I felt like one of those Hooli engineers who were sunbathi…

What a flex.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#214

Post by prodigycorp »

nrmitchi wrote: post #157

> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…

Thought experiment: would a junior developer armed with a modern day gpt-5.5 or opus 4.8 in 2015 would have been considered a 10x developer (assuming nobody knew they were using AI)?

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#215

Post by Imnimo »

>Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine.

Current AI coding is certainly very lacking in the craftsmanship department. But it is not obvious to me that that will always be the case. I don't think there's some fundamental reason AI could never produce code that matches or exceeds the craftsmanship of human experts.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#216

Post by allthetime »

anonzzzies wrote: post #19

I like fixing code made by AIs and others (outsourcing code is similar as someone else said already). Last week we found out some client tried to vibe some departmental tool; the result is some massive crap in nextjs that needs 10GB mem to compile, has 1000s of lint errors, dev logs in git (very noisy ones) and so on. Now we have to fix it: its basically free 10k-50k euros over and over again for this type of work. V…

why fix it when you can just easily re-write/generate it from scratch?

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#217

Post by anonzzzies »

roboror wrote: post #115
anonzzzies wrote: post #19

I like fixing code made by AIs and others (outsourcing code is similar as someone else said already). Last week we found out some client tried to vibe some departmental tool; the result is some massive crap in nextjs that needs 10GB mem to compile, has 1000s of lint errors, dev logs in git (very noisy ones) and so on. Now we have to fix it: its basically free 10k-50k euros over and over again for this type of work. V…

How much would it have cost to start from scratch?

As some already said; the real win is into having a business driven prototype; the work to gather those specs is already done and, generally, very costly when done in the traditional way. So from scratch if having to do all of it is more expensive; technical from scratch far less so.

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#218

Post by anonzzzies »

allthetime wrote: post #216
anonzzzies wrote: post #19

I like fixing code made by AIs and others (outsourcing code is similar as someone else said already). Last week we found out some client tried to vibe some departmental tool; the result is some massive crap in nextjs that needs 10GB mem to compile, has 1000s of lint errors, dev logs in git (very noisy ones) and so on. Now we have to fix it: its basically free 10k-50k euros over and over again for this type of work. V…

why fix it when you can just easily re-write/generate it from scratch?

That is also fixing… The client does not care about technical things so indeed rewrite is usually the best way even if we do not tell we did (people are proud of what they made so they do not want to just get told it was thrown away).

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#219

Post by edukite »

KronisLV wrote: post #193
nrmitchi wrote: post #157

> Craftsmanship will always be in our hands, it's one thing we can never outsource to a machine. I'm right there with you, but this last sentence concerned me a bit. In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. You can still get hand-made leather shoes, but very few want to pay $1000+ for them. You can stil…

> In my most other "industries", craftsmanship is not _dead_, but it's been pushed to the wayside for (significantly) cheaper and more available alternatives. What if for a lot of software projects out there you don't need craftsmanship but you need something closer to real engineering: "This is what a sane PostgreSQL setup and transaction management for your app looks like, this is how you do validations and the ORM…

I still remember times when my work was mostly cleaning and refactoring old code written just to have higher LOC by devs from India paid in cents per line.

They were creating fast like AI and so mich like AI. But they were merely humans. Cleaning this slow and buggy mess took years killed many companies.

Today we have AI and industrial quantity of code without any engineering skill involved in the process

Re: Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers

#220

Post by Yokohiii »

kaydub wrote: post #183
amphitheatre wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr: "Slow down and think about what you're doing when using an LLM." Saved you five minutes. I was expecting a lot more, or a worked example, or _something_ to that effect. 90% of the text is the author complaining and defining the problem, then a hand-wavy vague solution is presented in the penultimate paragraph. Barely relevant or useful, really.

I mean, go look at the author's linkedin and github. They're a "dev" with 20 years of 1 year of experience. Not a software "engineer" There's a big difference between the two and LLMs are increasing the chasm. The Software devs are crying out because the LLMs can already do their full job. Software engineers are happy because the LLMs are removing a large chunk of the job that's low value. Software dev using an LLM i…

There is no universally accepted distinction between developer and engineer.

Even if so, dev or engineer, both can be low or high skill. Their job title doesn't tell how sloppy or good their LLM usage will be.

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