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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

#271

Post by spoonfeeder006 »

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,…

Perhaps that partly because 90% of the training data used to teach LLMs to code is made by junior engineers?

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#272

Post by quantadev »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #179
quantadev wrote: post #159

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 w…

This is a great observation and a beautiful perspective. Would it be okay for you if I quote this on a revised version of the article (with proper attribution, of course)?

Sure, you have my permission. However, in my own case, I'm not currently looking for a job, and never in my life did it take more than 2 weeks to FIND a job, when looking. Been coding 24x7x365 since 1981. :)

...however I'm absolutely certain there are many interviews I've aced and not gotten the job, primarily for being in an several undesirable categories that Silicon Valley progressive wokesters despise with a passion: 1) Over 40. 2) White 3) Male 4) Straight 5) Handsome 6) Rich 7) American, speaking perfect English.

All 7 of those demographic stats about me are absolutely despicable to Silicon Valley hiring managers, and any one alone is enough for them to pass by a candidate over a different one lacking the trait.

You can also quote, this post about Silicon Valley too, and there was even a time when such rants like this would've been CENSORED immediately by HackerNews. Thankfully they've lightened up a bit.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#273

Post by quantadev »

blatantly wrote: post #183
quantadev wrote: post #159

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 w…

I think with AI my productivity had increased 1% at most. If I measure time saved per week.

If your productivity is up 1% due to AI, that only means one of two things 1) You're not a developer, or 2) Your prompts are 99% poorly written, so that's a you problem not an AI problem.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#274

Post by curiousllama »

JohnMakin wrote: post #268

I'm not quite 40 but starting to feel the effects of age, AI has been a great tool if not for the fact it saves my hands. I don't have it write the logic for me, mostly just stuff like smart autocomplete etc. I battle really severe tendonitis, I've noticed a definite improvement since I started using code complete. As far as knowledge/experience, I worry about a day where "vibe coding" takes over the world and it's o…

I would love to be a junior right now. I would just hate becoming a senior, after having been a junior right now.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#275

Post by Planktonne »

ramesh31 wrote: post #22

This maps pretty well to my experience. Other devs will say things like "AI is just a stupid glorified autocomplete, it will never be able to handle my Very Special Unique Codebase. I even spent 20 minutes one time trying out Cursor, and it just failed" Nope, you're just not that good obviously. I am literally 10x more productive at this point. Sprint goals have become single afternoons. If you are not tuned in to wh…

Have you considered that the opposite explanation might be true instead?

It could be that other developers are not benefitting from AI as much as you because they don't understand it.

It could also be that you are benefitting more than them because you're less skilled than them, and AI can fill in your gaps but not theirs.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#276

Post by necovek »

nsonha wrote: post #249
necovek wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were to really measure speed improvement of notepad vs a tricked out IDE, it's probably not much. The problem would be the annoyance caused to an engineer who has to manually type out everything. No, coding speed is really not the bottleneck to software engineer productivity.

> coding speed > the annoyance caused to an engineer No one said productivity is this one thing and not that one thing, only you say that because it's convenient for your argument. Productivity is a combination of many things, and again it's not just typing out code that's the only area AI can help.

The argument of "coding speed not a bottleneck to productivity" is not in contradiction to "productivity is a combination": it even implies it.

Again, the context here was that somebody discussed speed of coding and you raised the point of not using any tooling with Notepad.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#277

Post by gruez »

rotis wrote: post #191
gerdesj wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current favourite LLM wankery example is this beauty: https://blog.fahadusman.com/proxmox-replacing-failed-drive-i... Note how it has invented the faster parameter for the zpool command. It is possible that the blog writer hallucinated a faster parameter themselves without needing a LLM - who knows. I think all developers should add a faster parameter to all commands to make them run faster. Perhaps a LLM could cr…

How can this article be written by LLM? Its date is November 2021. Not judging the article as a whole but the command you pointed out seems to be correct. Faster is the name of the pool.

>Its date is November 2021

The date can be spoofed. It first showed up on archive.org in December 2022, and there's no captures for the site before then, so I'm liable to believe the dates are spoofed.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#278

Post by cinntaile »

saila wrote: post #103
byproxy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an actually unseasoned Python developer, would you be so kind as to explain why the problems you see are problems and their alternatives? Particularly the first two you note.

The call to logging.basicConfig happens at import time, which could cause issues in certain scenarios. For a one-off script, it's probably fine, but for a production app, you'd probably want to set up logging during app startup from whatever your main entry point is. The Python standard library has a configparser module, which should be used instead of custom code. It's safer and easier than manual parsing. The stand…

Regarding your first paragraph, we still don't understand what the issue actually is.

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#279

Post by JohnMakin »

curiousllama wrote: post #274
JohnMakin wrote: post #268

I'm not quite 40 but starting to feel the effects of age, AI has been a great tool if not for the fact it saves my hands. I don't have it write the logic for me, mostly just stuff like smart autocomplete etc. I battle really severe tendonitis, I've noticed a definite improvement since I started using code complete. As far as knowledge/experience, I worry about a day where "vibe coding" takes over the world and it's o…

I would love to be a junior right now. I would just hate becoming a senior, after having been a junior right now.

well said

Re: Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

#280

Post by cess11 »

fragmede wrote: post #239
cess11 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salesforce is and pretty much always has been a set of code generation platforms. If you can produce a decent code generation platform, do it. It's one of the most sure ways to making money from software since it allows you to deploy systems and outsource a large portion of design to your customers. Spotify is not the audio player widget in some user interface. It started off as a Torrent-like P2P system for file dis…

> Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on. Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify I'm listening. I fully admit that I was looking at Spotify as a user and thus only as a music playing widget so I'd love to hear more about this side of th…

They spend a lot of effort trying to get good at predicting user preferences, through modeling of personality, behaviour patterns and more.

You can find out quite a lot in their blogs and publications:

https://research.atspotify.com/2022/02/modeling-users-accord...

https://research.atspotify.com/user-modeling/

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