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The Programmer Identity Crisis

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Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#291

Post by nucleardog »

jackblemming wrote: post #207
tyleo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and I’m surprised more people don’t get this. Bad behaviors aren’t suddenly okay because AI makes them easy. If you are wasting time you may be value negative to a business. If you are value negative over the long run you should be let go. We’re ultimately here to make money, not just pump out characters into text files.

How do you know the net value add isn’t greater with the AI, even if it requires more code review comments (and angrier coworkers)?

In a scenario where what we're doing is describing and assigning work to someone, having them paste that into an LLM, sending the LLM changes to me to review, me reviewing the LLM output, them pasting that back into the LLM and sending the results for me to review...

What value is that person adding? I can fire up claude code/cursor/whatever myself and get the same result with less overhead. It's not a matter of "is AI valuable", it's a matter of "is this person adding value to the process". In the above case... no, none at all.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#292

Post by sqircles »

strix_varius wrote: post #57

To me, the most salient point was this: > Code reviewing coworkers are rapidly losing their minds as they come to the crushing realization that they are now the first layer of quality control instead of one of the last. Asked to review; forced to pick apart. Calling out freshly added functions that are never called, hallucinated library additions, and obvious runtime or compilation errors. All while the author—who cl…

How are these "engineers" maintaining jobs? How is pushing code generated by someone/something else that hasn't even as much as been looked at before acceptable in any realm?

Better yet- why are there orgs that accept this behavior? I know mine is far from it, as they should be.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#293

Post by antigremlin »

RamtinJ95 wrote: post #28

I think "Identity Crisis" is a bit over dramatic, but I for the most part agree with the sentiment. I have written something in the same vane, but still different enough that I would love to comment it but its just way more efficient to point to my post. I hope that is OK: https://handmadeoasis.com/ai-and-software-engineering-the-co...

That is a very thoughtful piece. Thank you for posting it. I especially like the idea of that new mode of programming (or problem solving, whatever you call it) when people very much enjoy getting an LLM to do what they want.

This is both new and old, because it's the same joy (or dopamine hit) of making a machine do your bidding. Honing your prompts is not that different to honing your shell scripts. I think many people overlook this aspect.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#294

Post by antigremlin »

throw_9fdf9 wrote: post #218

When I became a software engineer about two decades ago, I held a similar world view as the OP: programming is a craft, I'm an artist, a creator, a hacker. With years, as I matured, and the industry matured, I came to realize that corporate programming is assembly line work but with a much bigger paycheck. You can dance around it as much as you want, but in the end, if you truly zoom out, you will realize that it's n…

While I don't disagree that there's no craft most of the time, it's interesting to note that the anti-analogy with art and artists doesn't really work (or works in an unexpected way).

I'm visiting a lot of museums and exhibitions for a number of years now, without having any kind of art education, etc. After some time you start seeing patterns and understand more even if you still haven't read your art history. What strikes me time and time again, is that there's a huge amount of repetition even in great artists' work. It's definitely not an assembly line, but they do the same thing over and over again for years and years. That was true centuries ago and that's true today.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#295

Post by int_19h »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #288
klardotsh wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human trust has to be earned, why should AI trust be any different? If I’m supposed to yolo-approve any random code a machine spits out, it had better prove to me it’s nearly flawless, otherwise I’m applying the same review regiment I apply to any other code. To do otherwise is to shame the word “engineering” and the field thereof.

Engineering is a game of tradeoffs. Time is one of the things you have to trade off, given your strong opinions I expect this is something you've been in the industry long enough to understand intuitively. Regarding proof, if you have contracts for your software write them up. Gherkin specs, api contracts, unit tests, etc. If you care about performance, add stress tests with SLOs. If you care about code organization…

> Regarding proof, if you have contracts for your software write them up. Gherkin specs, api contracts, unit tests, etc.

We really need widespread adoption of stuff like design-by-contract in mainstream PLs before we can seriously talk about AI coding.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#296

Post by int_19h »

bloppe wrote: post #187
GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the issue isn't recognizing malign influence within your current organization... it's an issue throughout the entire industry, and I think what we're all afraid of is that it's becoming more inevitable every day, because we're not the ones who have the final say. the luddites essentially failed, after all, because the wider world was not and is not ready for a discussion about quality versus profit.

A poor quality product can only be profitable if no high quality alternative exists (at a similar price point). Every time that's the case, it's an epic opportunity for anybody with the wherewithal to raise some funding and build that high quality alternative themselves. A dysfunctional industry running on AI slop will not be able to keep you from eating their lunch unless they can achieve some sort of regulatory cap…

You don't need regulatory capture to monopolize a market.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#297

Post by johnisgood »

Izkata wrote: post #287
johnisgood wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pressing "-" and a space gets replaced by an emdash to me in LibreOffice. No extra keystrokes required.

That's an en dash, not an em dash. An em dash is longer and as far as I know Libreoffice doesn't have a built-in way to make one (though you may have added it to the autocorrect settings yourself). en dash: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2013 em dash: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2014 Edit: Ah, Libreoffice does have a built-in autocorrect for em dash, but you have to type this: :---:

Thanks! I did confuse the two despite knowing of both.

So ":---:" does work for the em dash? I thought something with fewer keystrokes work, too, at least I remember the em dash from less, but perhaps I just typed it so quickly I did not realize it was indeed ":---:".

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#298

Post by int_19h »

crazygringo wrote: post #178
Etheryte wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion this is another case where people look at it as a technical problem when it's actually a people problem. If someone does it once, they get a stern message about it. If it happens twice, it gets rejected and sent to their manager. Regardless of how you authored a pull request, you are signing off on it with your name. If it's garbage, then you're responsible.

This a million times. If you do this three times, that's grounds for firing. You're literally not doing your job and lying that you are. It's bizarre to me that people want to blame LLMs instead of the employees themselves. (With open source projects and slop pull requests, it's another story of course.)

What happens in practice is teams are made "leaner" by laying off people (and, as seen in Microsoft layoffs, the people targeted are often veterans, due to their large salaries - which means that the team loses a lot of deep knowledge of the code in the process). And then the remaining ones are told to deal with the same amount of work as before, since "AI makes you more productive". I can't blame the remaining developers for saying, "fuck you then, I'm going to do the bare minimum". The blame is entirely on the management, and every single big tech company is complicit.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#299

Post by int_19h »

yuye wrote: post #249
spicymaki wrote: post #242

I feel that for long time people coming into the industry did not really care about code as a craft, but more of code as easy money. This was first salient to me when I saw posts about opensource developers who make critical infrastructure living hand to mouth. Then the day in the life of a software engineer working in a coffee shop. Then the bootcamps or just learn to code movement. Then the leetcode grinders. Then…

Because there's a difference between a "coder" and a software engineer. Someone who finished a bootcamp might be able to write a simple program in Python, but that doesn't make them a software engineer. I've said this out loud before and have gotten told I'm an elitist, that my degree doesn't make me better at software than those without one. That majoring in computer science teaches you only esoteric knowledge that…

You don't need a degree to learn CS theory, though. Many of us who are self-taught, have learned about that as well (yes, there are people reading SCIP as a hobby).

And conversely, a CS degree doesn't necessarily mean that the person has actually learned what they were taught.

Re: The Programmer Identity Crisis

#300

Post by int_19h »

carlosjobim wrote: post #147
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like there’s a lot of tech-fetishist right now on the “if you don’t deeply love to write code then just leave!” train without somehow realizing that most of us have our jobs because we need to pay bills, not because it’s our burning passion. I would claim that I love coding quite a lot. The problem is rather that my bosses and colleagues don't care about what I love about it. It is rather appreciated if you…

Very level-headed comment. I'm one of those who sees programming as a means to an end and nothing else. If I order something to be delivered, I don't care what model of car the delivery company uses. Much less what kind of settings they have for the carburetor needles or what kind of oil they're using. Sure, somebody somewhere might have to care about this. That's also how people like me see programming. If the code…

The problem is that "code delivers what we need" usually translates to "shovel crap as fast as it sells". Combined with heavy monopolization of the software market, where users have very little recourse to being force-fed crap - what are you going to do, go to one other competitor who does the same exact thing? - this means that average software quality in the industry has declined to the point where I would consider shipping it in that state to be actively harmful to the users and to the ecosystem at large (since others then build upon that pile of crap, which of course is a GIGO problem).

Now, you might argue that it doesn't matter because it's not the users who pay you, it's the company. But, well - some people have professional standards. It's rather unfortunate that this is apparently not compatible with "doing business" in this day and age, at least outside of very narrow niches.

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