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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

#31

Post by DanHulton »

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?

It really depends on if the 10-year-old code in question was put together by a talented team with high standards, doesn't it?

But regardless, on a large project, you're always going to have some version of this problem. At least when you yourself are getting in there and writing and understand the code, you have a half-decent shot at debugging in a reasonable period of time. When even you are vibe coding your additions to the pile, you're all the way back at square one when shit hits the fan, trying to learn it all from scratch.

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

#32

Post by stego-tech »

I’m not a developer, just an IT dinosaur, but one comment in the thread stuck with me:

> it has felt like a movement of “code first, think and ask questions later” took over the narrative during the past decade

That, I believe, is the real “hard reset” nobody is really talking about. Because the outcome is the same regardless of how AI goes:

* If AI is real, this progress continues, and magically half of my technical grievances are addressed, then thinking through the actual long-term problems, project planning, and technology architecture skills will explode in value overnight and the next millionaires will be Architects who can orchestrate and integrate complex systems with AI tooling…

OR

* This AI is just a fad, the bubble pops, and suddenly everyone who has “bandwagoned” into tech but not cultivated a growing skill set beyond coding problems will be forced out of a job. Those left behind will be the ones who kept their skills sharp and growing while everyone else drank the Kool-Aid, and no amount of community college programs or ITT Tech schemes will be able to create the amount of talent needed.

Just my two cents, and why I’ve been punching my way into architecture since COVID. I’m no dummy.

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

#33

Post by gwynforthewyn »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #20
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.

Yeah, I was about to say, it sounds a lot like this guy is just riding an intense high from getting Claude to build some side-project he's been putting off, which I feel is like 90% of all cases where someone writes a post like this. But then I never really hear any update on whether the high is still there or if it's tapered off and now they're hitting reality.

For sure.

Fwiw, I use Claude Pro in my own side project. When it’s great, I think it’s a miracle. But when it hits a problem it’s a moron.

Recently I was fascinated to see it (a) integrate swagger into a golang project in two minutes with full docs added for my api endpoints, and then (b) spend 90 minutes unable to figure out that it couldn’t align a circle to the edge of a canvas because it was moving the circle in increments of 20px and the canvas was 150px wide.

Where it’s good it’s a very good tool, where it’s bad it’s very bad indeed.

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

#35

Post by apical_dendrite »

I'm curious what software engineering is like inside companies like Anthropic. How much of their work is done using Claude Code and how much more productive are they? I'm not looking for something like an engineering blog that's been crafted for marketing purposes. I would really like an honest appraisal from a developer working there.

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

#36

Post by zeroCalories »

bluedino wrote: post #23
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)

Maybe job mobility goes down as expertise is valued over job hopping?

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

#37

Post by furyofantares »

ljlolel wrote: post #24
b33j0r wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

refactoring

LLMs are terrible at that in my experience. In what world is refactoring "very local in reasoning"?

Switching libraries/frameworks or switching piecemeal to a new language for a codebase that's already well structured seems like it would be noticeably less costly though.

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

#38

Post by tomlockwood »

giantrobot wrote: post #28
tomlockwood wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah the current Vibe for me seems to be: Congratulations, you trained a giant machine that makes copying code from Stackoverflow marginally faster.

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

#39

Post by hnthrow90348765 »

>Honestly, I’m questioning why I’d need a designer in a year.

Idk my guy maybe you should sit down with them and ask them how they're using AI and if they aren't, maybe be cooperative and introduce them to it instead of getting a stiff one fantasizing about firing them.

This whole hype cycle has some serious arrogance and sociopathic undertones about unemploying a lot of technical people suddenly (like they had it coming or something).

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

#40

Post by georgemcbay »

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…

> Yeah maybe. Talk is cheap, show me the code.

Or even just link the app (which the poster is presumably eager to market, right?) as a bare minimum.

If LLMs for coding were half as productive at cranking out production quality software unassisted as the astroturfed hype around them suggests we should have seen a large unmistakable wave of better, faster-released software by now just in the output of software companies, startups, etc, but beyond the hype blogs (or reddit posts) I'm not seeing anything other than the status quo.

I'm not saying LLMs are worthless, they are pretty useful as advanced autocomplete and documentation that you can also happen to ask things in natural languages and get reasonable results (so long as you already have a solid enough base of knowledge to recognize when they are going off the rails). They can be very useful productivity speed-up tools, especially when you start working in a new realm.

But there's a long way from that to the "replaces 90% of all developers in writing 100% of their code" that is being sold in the hype.

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