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AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

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Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#311

Post by johnnyanmac »

manofmanysmiles wrote: post #160

> Here is something that gets lost in all the excitement about AI productivity: most software engineers became engineers because they love writing code. 1) I guess I am not included in the set named "most software engineers." 2) If the title is "Software Engineer," I think I should be engineering, not coding. This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro a…

>This has probably been beaten to death, but I think this is the biggest disciminating question between "pro ai" and "against ai" in the software world is: "Dp you do (this) becuase you like writing code, or because you like building things for the world?"

I do this because I want to build quality software. AI to the extent people are trying to push it cannot achieve that. So I'm pro-buildinig and anti-AI.

I spent my years in this domain learning how to optimize code, and AI meanwhile doesn't always make compileable code. Let alone correctly functioning code (step 0 in optimizing: "make sure it actually works first")

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#312

Post by johnnyanmac »

simianwords wrote: post #4

The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones. No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level. An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.

It made it harder because no one can find a job anyomre. New grads can't even get a foot in. How are they supposed to have a career if they can't start?

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#313

Post by johnnyanmac »

RevEng wrote: post #178
Deegy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now there are 1% of the number of farmers that there used to be

And yet there isn't widespread unemployment. Fewer farmers were needed so fewer people became farmers. Food became cheap and plentiful. Everyone else went on to do other things that they couldn't afford to do before. Software will do the same; we will make more software with fewer people and it will become ubiquitous to the point that people will just quickly generate whatever software they need rather than do many m…

That may work if the scope that AI wanted to takeover wasn't scoped to nearly every job that involves a screeen.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#314

Post by johnnyanmac »

markus_zhang wrote: post #176

Te be frank, a lot of companies don't need engineers. They need someone to do the jobs "quickly", "ASAP" and that's it. They are hiring coders masqueraded as programmers who masqueraded as engineers. I'd say this -- if you really want to be a real engineer, you should avoid many career paths out there. Potentially ANY positions DIRECTLY facing business stakeholders is at best not a good choice, and at worst deprive y…

Can't relate, sadly. lots of lower level domains are hit by this slop train, too. Even if they aren't, they also froze hiring.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#315

Post by bonoboTP »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #309
bonoboTP wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess talking to people and making friends helps. Online, maybe seek out discords and befriend people and they may tell you. Not unlike how you find cool underground clubs.

Can't relate to either of those. I never made a friend online.

You can also just kind of hop from blog to forum to subreddit to discord to social media account etc. passively over time based on what interesting people are talking about or mentioning. My main point is that you can't expect to find a list of good pockets of the internet with low effort, because if they are low effort to find, they will be flooded and made not good.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#316

Post by johnnyanmac »

bonoboTP wrote: post #315
johnnyanmac wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't relate to either of those. I never made a friend online.

You can also just kind of hop from blog to forum to subreddit to discord to social media account etc. passively over time based on what interesting people are talking about or mentioning. My main point is that you can't expect to find a list of good pockets of the internet with low effort, because if they are low effort to find, they will be flooded and made not good.

I spent days worth of reseach some years ago trying to find a reddit alternative (think pre-pandemic, well before consensus started to turn). I more or less found a few substitutes (which includes HN), but nothing that ever truly felt like "community".

As you implied here, the sad fact is that a lot of the niche groups live within the mainstream. on a Discord server, or a subreddit, or Facebook group. And I've moved away from most of those. Probably need to move away from Discord in time too.

Either way, still never made a friend that way.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#318

Post by _zagj »

RevEng wrote: post #173
simianwords wrote: post #4

The post is right superficially. It made being an engineer harder because it took away the easy parts that anyone can do and it forces engineers to think of the hard ones. No jobs get easier with automation - they always move a step up in abstraction level. An accountant who was super proficient in adding numbers no longer can rely on those skills once calculator was invented.

I disagree on making it easier. I'm very capable of writing code in multiple languages but it's boring and monotonous. It's getting in the way of me building the system I have in mind. I prefer the engineering (design) to writing. If I can describe my system design to something (a junior developer or an AI) and see it come to life quickly, that's great; it lets me spend more time on designing the system, or perhaps d…

To be frank, this just sounds like self-serving BS, likely from someone who's only ever done front-end stuff and hasn't ever cracked open Godbolt (or doesn't even know what that is). Describing system constraints at a high-level, whether to an AI prompt or subordinate devs, and letting them figure out the details is much more akin to system architecture than actual engineering.

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#319

Post by i_think_so »

seethishat wrote: post #94

One problem I have seen IRL is AI deployment mistakes and IMO Vibe Coders need an IT/Dev Father Figure type to avoid these simple mistakes. Here is one example: A surgeon (no coding experience) used Claude to write a web app to track certain things about procedures he had done. He deployed the app on a web hosting provided (PHP LAMP stack). He wanted to share it with other doctors, but wasn't sure if it was 'secure'…

We're probably not far away from the fully automated (no human interaction whatsoever needed) exploitation of such vulnerabilities by state level actors. At that point give it another few months and script kiddies will be doing it at significant scale.

When this happens one of them is going to use their new toy to swat somebody, resulting in serious injury or death.

How is that risk/responsibility debate going to go?

Re: AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder

#320

Post by lelanthran »

kevinsync wrote: post #298
lelanthran wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm of the opinion that even if 10% of the population is now capable of creating a side project, there's still the same relatively-fixed amount of people capable of making a good side project, and even fewer who will see it through to a real product. Nothing has really changed in the aggregate. What do you mean "nothing has changed"? Using your numbers, the SNR went off a cliff. Use HN as an example - I used read t…

Correct, but I was replying to the assertion that more slop == decreasing ability to create something good and successful. That's a common trope that people deploy with regards to everything: music, movies, books, social media accounts, brands, blogs, pizza shops, whatever, and it's consistently shown to be false. Plus, we don't live in a monoculture anymore, the SNR you're thinking of is proportional to the mainstre…

> Correct, but I was replying to the assertion that more slop == decreasing ability to create something good and successful. T

True; I misunderstood.

You are contending the assertion "more slop == decreasing ability to create quality", I am asserting that "more slop == lower overall quality".

FWIW, there's probably an argument to be made against your assertion as stated above, but it's probably going to be a long-winded and ultimately weak one. I'm not really in the mood to explore weak arguments, TBH.

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