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I quit. The clankers won

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Re: I quit. The clankers won

#391

Post by trollbridge »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #249
niek_pas wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really interesting to me, because it never occurred to me to feel this way. Why would I care whether my comments are ending up in some dataset somewhere that's being used to train some model? My comments are boring and mostly uninformed. Have at it. I'm curious: would you say the feeling of being watched online is making you afraid of some repercussion, or is it something else?

Dog in the Manger. I get a feeling from overall anti-AI sentiment online that a lot of people feel they're entitled to 100% of value created by anything even tangentially related to their person, whether that's some intentional contribution or a random brain fart that happened in the vicinity of someone else doing something useful - and then become resentful they're not "getting their share". There's hardly any other…

I don't like the idea that I'm restrained by intellectual property laws, but that other powerful entities are not. That is fundamentally unfair.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#392

Post by code_for_monkey »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #378
code_for_monkey wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Major, big big major, not just me either. How is it alarming beyond words? If I said "Im an emt and I just ask the AI everything" now that would be alarming beyond words.

It's alarming because AI produces crappy software, and I would rather not lose money because banks are turning out slop with AI.

well I have bad news for you about probably every bank by now

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#393

Post by keeda »

prewett wrote: post #296
circlefavshape wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's necessary for devs right now, no matter how good they are, and it's those devs' code the models are trained on

Even worse, the training set probably includes a lot of code that needed review but didn't get it...

If we know the outcome of that code, such as whether it caused bugs or data corruption or a crappy UX or tech debt -- which is potentially available in subsequent PR commit messages -- it's still valuable training data.

Probably even more valuable than code that just worked, because evidently we have enough of that and AI code still has issues.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#394

Post by nunez »

prplfsh wrote: post #280

I 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.

I've been using Claude for a side project I've been trying to write for some time. Seeing it generate features at a much faster clip than I can (that actually compiles) has definitely been addictive. However, the joy I used to get from seeing something that I wrote work is all but gone, and it sucks big time to lose that.

The back and forth is more annoying now as well. Instead of trying different approaches to code to produce an outcome, I'm prompting "this is broken; can you fix it?" or "this almost works! can you do $x instead" and doing stuff in another window while Claude churns. This isn't fun or stimulating at all for me. It's like carrying a dog to a ball instead of making them run for it.

Using it also reminds me that a big part of the experience I've spent years accumulating is (or feels) no longer useful. That everyone can "write" (produce) code now is a good thing, but SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY was spent on putting writing and understanding code on a pedestal (especially on this site), and seeing that get torn down while gaslighting us into thinking that this never happened has been affecting my psyche for sure.

There's also the dirty feeling I get from abdicating more and more of my skills to a big company that is probably salivating at the idea of developers not being able to write code without Claude Code anymore.

I have a handful of projects I'd like to work on, but I'd rather leave them on the shelf until I can hand-write them than use agents to finish them and, in doing so, create a codebase that I'm less likely to be able to maintain without agents.

I guess I can turn the question back at you: how aren't you not losing your mind at becoming a glorified spec writer?

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#395

Post by Izkata »

lioeters wrote: post #265
catlifeonmars wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m just getting extremely lucky, but I don’t use AI to code at work and I’m still keeping up with my peers who are all Clauded up. I do a lot of green field network appliance design and implementation and have not felt really felt the pressure in that space. I do use Claude code at home maybe a couple hours a week, mostly for code base exploration. Still haven’t figured out how to fully vibe code: the generate…

We're witnessing a divergence between Coders and Clauders, with the latter dominating the market at a lower cost of labor + subscription fee to the almighty AI providers. Coders may be called in, hopefully with better renumeration, to review and debug the massive amount of code being generated. Either that or they will also be replaced by specially trained/prompted language models doing the review.

> + subscription

With how much some people spend on tokens that they've shared on here, and concerns about raising prices, I've kind of been wondering if we're actually heading to a point where seniors who don't use AI are going to be cheaper than juniors who do.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#396

Post by SpaceNoodled »

lopsotronic wrote: post #389
Waterluvian wrote: post #44

Improving developer skills is not valuable to your company. They don't tell a customer how many person-hours of engineering talent improvement their contract is responsible for. They just want a solved problem. Some companies comprehend how short-sighted this is and invest in professional development in one way or another. They want better engineers so that their operations run better. It's an investment and arguably…

Pour yourself a drink, as I have a longish story that might be a useful metaphor. Back in the day, there were more or less two consumer flight sims: MS Flight Simulator and XPlane. MSFS was and has always been the much prettier one, much easier to work with; xplane is kludgy, very old-school *NIX, and chonky in terms of resource usage. I was doing some work integrating flight systems data (FDAU/FDR outputs) into a ch…

Ah, but it's no longer "inexplicably!"

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#397

Post by Supermancho »

threetonesun wrote: post #154
Supermancho wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

These two statements go hand in hand though. While I do believe companies could take the altruistic take of training people whether or not they stay, and some places do, they're certainly not going to make the effort for someone who has clear markers of being someone who will leave anyway.

That's not how these initiatives are executed, unless the shop is very small. In which case, there's no concrete training offered anyway. If it's large, they don't want to allocate a lot of budget rather than starting a new hiring round. I would say the lack of in-job developer training (or resourcing) is due to multiple factors that results in a consistency rather than specifically targeting individuals.

It's not like I don't speak with ex-coworkers or run into them at times - eg one guy I taught Java to (at a position where java wasn't required except for a tiny tool), is the team lead at blizzard now. If I was made a pariah, I would hear about it over the years.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#398

Post by colechristensen »

tpdly wrote: post #344
colechristensen wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also did a native implementation of git so I could use an S3 compatible data store, your rails guru can't do that. Objectively, my GitHub clone is still shitty, BUT it got several ways github is shitty out of my way and allowed me to add several features I wanted, no small one of which was GitHub not owning my data. I don't know the shit out of Rails and I don't want to, I know the shit out of other things and I wa…

Hey I understand you've gotten something out of it. You hired a robot to 3d-print a mug that fits your hand. There's a place for that. You understand that it might poison you a little bit? You understand that this doesn't make ceramics irrelevant? Hobby-project vibe coding is pretty cool (if I'm being honest, its fucking miraculous; this tech is wild) but isn't it clear that there's a problem with the linkedincels, t…

>isn't it clear that there's a problem with the linkedincels, the investors, the management that are all convinced this will remove say 50% of programming jobs

These people have always been doing this. Starting in the 90s it was outsourcing programming jobs, they were right then, they got more work for less money and you could have less expertise on staff farming out work somewhere else that was cheaper. You also got worse results sometimes. So it goes.

LLMs are making people more powerful and sucking a lot of income off to the people who provide them. Yup. It makes idiot shysters more powerful just the same as it makes experts more powerful.

People are acting like the software engineering industry is full of fine artistry building the finest bespoke tools instead of duct taping rocks to sticks. I'm sorry but there is a tremendous amount of crap out there by people who barely know what they're doing.

Yes new technology empowers idiots, but it also empowers smart people and if you use it well it'll lead to more quality. Yes you're going to have the same problems you had before of someone doing something cheaply competing with someone trying to be careful to build something well. There also will continue to be idiots spouting off about it.

Nothing changed but the tools got more powerful and people are whining complaining about this change this time ruining everything. Like they always have forever.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#399

Post by oblio »

turlockmike wrote: post #156
titzer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that the vast deskilling that's happening because of this means that most "software engineers" will become incapable of understanding, let alone fixing or even building new versions of the systems that they are utterly dependent on. There should be thousands or tens of thousands people worldwide that can build the operating systems, virtual machines, libraries, containers, and applications that AI is bui…

How many kernel devs does the world need? A dozen or two? It will be the same with software. AI will be writing and consuming most software. We will be utilizing experiences built on top of that, probably generated in real time for hyper personalization. Every app on your phone will be replaced by one app. (Except maybe games, at least for a short while longer). Everyone's treating writing code as this reverent thing…

Does it even make sense to build everything on top of machines that are 70% reliable? The sheer orchestration and validation overhead at scale risks being more expensive than just keeping most software engineers and having them manage a few AI agents.

Also, 200 years ago we didn't have bike mechanics. Car mechanics. Boat mechanics. Plumbers. Electricians. Not all new professions fade away.

Re: I quit. The clankers won

#400

Post by adrianN »

ndriscoll wrote: post #135
Supermancho wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for 35ish companies (contract and fulltime), largely on the west coast of the US. I have experienced the lip service, from the vast majority. I have experienced maybe 2 or 3 earnest attempts at growing engineer skills through subsidized admission/travel to talks, tools, or invited instructors.

What exactly do you have in mind? The large companies I've worked at had book subscriptions, internal training courses, and would pay for school. Personally I don't see the point of any of it. For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. You can go download e.g. graduate level CS courses on youtube. MIT OCW has been around for almost a quarter century now. IME no one's going to stop you from sp…

Putting people on projects they’re only partly qualified for, ideally with mentoring, and letting them learn even though it takes longer than having the mentor do it by themselves. Allowing people to fail and try again without risking their ratings or their career.

Book subscriptions and conference travel are quite cheap in comparison.

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