When will we understand that not everybody works in a FAANG?
Assuming that the way to put some food in the table for all software developers is always a matter of creating a new magical algor. in a mystical programming language deployed in an unicorn architecture is so childish.
99% of all software development today is simply creating a crud or refactoring a codebase because React guys decided to change everything again.
I quit. The clankers won
311–320 of 515 posts
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see this line of thought put out there many times, and I've been thinking: why do people do anything at all? What's the point? If no one at all is even reviewing the output of coding agents, genuinely, what are we doing as a society? I fail to see how we transition society into a positive future without supplying means of verifying systemic integrity. There is a reason that Upton Sinclair became famous: wayward inc…
You could e.g. write specs and only review high level types plus have deterministic validation that no type escapes/"unsafe" hatches were used, or instruct another agent to create adversarial blackbox attempts to break functionality of the primary artifact (which is really just to say "perform QA"). As a simple use-case, I've found LLMs to be much better than me at macro programming, and I don't really need to care a…
Code quality will impact the effectiveness of ai. Less code to read and change in subsequent changes is still useful. There was a while where I became more of a paper architect and stopped coding for a while and I realized I wasn't able to do sufficient code reviews anymore because I lacked context. I went back into the code at some point and realized the mess my team was making and spent a long while cleaning it up. This improved the productivity of everyone involved. I expect AI to fall into a similar predicament. Without first hand knowledge of the implementation details we won't know about the problems we need to tell the AI to address. There are also many systems which are constrained in terms of memory and compute and more code likely puts you up against those limits.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#313"No AI" right above a robot voice playback button. Mixed messages fr Hot take, folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AI, and wouldn't be difference makers after it either. I agree with the author, keep writing. It helps hone your ability to communicate effectively which we all need for some time to come (at least until we become batteries).
> folks packing it in because of AI probably were not difference makers before AI Anecdotal but I’ve been seeing a lot of the opposite. Some of those leaning in strongly are being propped up by the tools. Holding onto them like a lifeboat when they would have fallen off earlier.
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Re: I quit. The clankers won
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because technologies, programming languages, best practices, won't stay frozen. If LLMs cannot catch up with it, I think it can be considered as a drop in capability. No?
Close, but no. What will happen is that "technologies, programming languages, best practices" will stay frozen because human innovation will drop, and the whole field will stagnate.
This is the biggest fear! I don’t see an easy fix.
Will the developer of a new programming language be able to reach out to model companies to give a huge amount of training data, ensuring that the models are good at that new language? I don’t think a small team can write enough code, the models already struggle in medium-popularity languages that have years of history. They hallucinate lua functionality sometimes, for example, even though I’m sure there is lots of lua code out there.
So if most people use coding agents, we’re stuck with the current most popular languages because no new language will get past the barrier of having enough code that models can write it well, meaning nobody adopts the new language, etc.
Same thing with libraries and frameworks - technical decisions are already being made based on “is this popular enough that the agents can use it well?” Rather than a newer library that meets our needs perfectly but isn’t in the training data
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#315I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.
Some of us work on critical systems
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#316I do find it hard to tolerate the feeling of being watched online. The second-most trending dataset on huggingface right now is a snapshot of HN updating at a 5 minute interval. It makes me not want to really comment at all, just like how I don’t really publish any software I write anymore. Turns out it sucks to produce original works when you know that, whereas previously a few people at best might see your work, no…
HN always offered the data to anyone, what changes now? How does it matter if it is LLM's that is consuming your data. What a strange attitude.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#317Anti-AI articles like this seem to be the new "Doing my part to resist big tech: Why I'm switching back from Chrome to Firefox" genre that popped up on HN for a decade or so. If it makes you feel better, great, but don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society.
Plus many of these articles seem maximized to attract attention on social media, which is its own machine. Posting your most provocative and strong opinions in reaction to the latest controversy-of-the-week is what fuels the internet and culture more than anything these days. The attention economy demands hot takes mixed with preaching about every new thing.
see: purity spiral politics
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the irony is that AI usage should make onboarding juniors easier. Before it was "hey $senior_programmer where's the $thing defined in this project?", which either required a dedicated person onboarding or someone's flow was interrupted - an expected cost of bringing up juniors. Now a properly configured AI Agent can answer that question in 60 seconds, unblocking the Junior to work on something. And no, it doesn't…
The problem is that juniors given access to AI don't seem to learn as much. AI just gives them fish over and over instead of learning how to fish.
Yea, giving people a blank Claude with no setup will get you that.
What you could do is encourage (or force with IT's assistance) them to use a prompt (or hook or whatever) that refuses to do work for them, but instead telling them where to change and what without actually doing the work.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company Every company I've ever worked at has genuinely believed in and invested in improving developer skills.
You must be lucky then.
Realizing now that I've been both lucky and selective - I've always picked the kind of employers where this culture is baked in.
Re: I quit. The clankers won
#320I honestly don't get it - how isn't everyone having a blast with AI? Every one of those side projects you never had time for you can build in a weekend. You can explore five ideas at once. You can do big refactors/cleanups you'd never be able to dream of in the past. As a software engineer it's been fantastic.
You do know that there's many different personalities that people can have right? A lot of people love writing code and don't care about those things at all.