381–387 of 387 posts
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Something I don’t see “SWE-is-Doomed” comments address is this - SWE, I think we can all agree, is one of the more complex white collar jobs. If it gets automated, then likely most other white collar jobs have been too. At that point, don’t we have bigger problems?
Indeed. The bottom 90% of white collar work as it exists today is probably gone over the next decade.
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> My automated unit, integration, and load tests confirm that. Do they? Did you write them? If not, how do you know they confirm the desired behavior? If your tests are AI generated (and not human reviewed) then even if you're doing spec-driven development and provide a comprehensive spec, how can you be sure the tests actually test the desired behavior? Now if you're either writing or reviewing the tests, then sure.…
I review AI generated test of AI just like I reviewed tests of developers on a team I was leading. There is no “morality” when it comes to my job. Outside of my feeling morally obligated to give my employer the benefit of all my accumulated skills for 40-45 hours a week in exchange for the money (and in a previous life RSUs) in my account. I feel accountable to my coworkers and customers to deal with them fairly and…
Cool. Then what you're doing seems totally reasonable to me, for what that's worth. My skepticism would be directed towards people who have AI write the code and the tests, and then don't do any further review. That, to me, is a sure path to "AI slop". But if you're specifying the desired behavior and reviewing the tests, then I don't see any problem with it.
> What other moral obligation should I have besides my employer, coworkers and customers?
No idea. That's up to you. Note that my comment above was intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Like I said, I'm talking about something that's purely a self-imposed thing. If you don't feel that same thing, that's totally fine.
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From what I remember, typical new C++ debugged code speed is about 20-25K lines per year, lines that are non-blank, non-comment and not completely verifiable by compiler. E.g., standalone bracket or comma or semicolon are not lines of code, function header is too not a line of code, but computation, conditions and loops are. This is from old IBM statistics, I learned about it circa 2007. If we assume that there are 5…
I mean this genuinely and in good faith in case you didn’t already know it: the term for “non-blank, non-comment…” in programming is usually “Significant Lines Of Code” or SLOC.
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The multi week debugging sessions weren't fun, but that doesn't mean they weren't valuable and important and a growth and learning opportunity that we now will no longer experience.
IMO the more salient point is that bugs requiring multiple weeks of human work aren't going away! Claude has actually not been trained on, say, a mystifying and still poorly-explained Java concurrency bug I experienced in 2012, which cost a customer $150,000. Now in 2026 we have language-side tooling that mitigates that bug and Claude can actually help a lot with the rewrite. But we certainly don't have language tool…
It sounds awesome, but once you look deeper, there's no meat on it. I'd love to be blown away, but even 12 days later there's just... nothing.
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I mean this genuinely and in good faith in case you didn’t already know it: the term for “non-blank, non-comment…” in programming is usually “Significant Lines Of Code” or SLOC.
Thanks, I didn't knew that. I thought that SLOC means "Source Lines Of Code."