451–460 of 870 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Businesses too. For two years it's been "throw everything into AI." But now that shit is getting real, are they really feeling so coy about letting AI run ahead of their engineering team's ability to manage it? How long will it be until we start seeing outages that just don't get resolved because the engineers have lost the plot?
How long until “the LLM did it it” is just as effective as “AWS is down, not my fault”?
I think not much. The real society bottleneck is that a growing number of peeps try to convince each other that life and society are a zero sum game.
They are so much more if we don't do that.
I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…
It's not just brain atrophy, I think. I think part of it is that we're actively making a tradeoff to focus on learning how to use the model rather than learning how to use our own brains and work with each other. This would be fine if not for one thing: the meta-skill of learning to use the LLM depreciates too. Today's LLM is gonna go away someday, the way you have to use it will change. You will be on a forever trea…
You're lucky to afford the luxury not to atrophy.
It's been almost 4 years since my last software job interview and I know the drills about preparing for one.
Long before LLMs my skills naturally atrophy in my day job.
I remember the good old days of J2ME of writing everything from scratch. Or writing some graph editor for universiry, or some speculative, huffman coding algorithm.
That kept me sharp.
But today I feel like I'm living in that netflix series about people being in Hell and the Devil tricking them they're in Heaven and tormenting them: how on planet Earth do I keep sharp with java, streams, virtual threads, rxjava, tuning the jvm, react, kafka, kafka streams, aws, k8s, helm, jenkins pipelines, CI-CD, ECR, istio issues, in-house service discovery, hierarchical multi-regions, metrics and monitoring, autoscaling, spot instances and multi-arch images, multi-az, reliable and scalable yet as cheap as possible, yet as cloud native as possible, hazelcast and distributed systems, low level postgresql performance tuning, apache iceberg, trino, various in-house frameworks and idioms over all of this? Oh, and let's not forget the business domain, coding standards, code reviews, mentorships and organazing technical events. Also, it's 2026 so nobody hires QA or scrum masters anymore so take on those hats as well.
So LLMs it is, the new reality.
> It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. Somewhere, there are GPUs/NPUs running hot. You send all the neces…
So yeah, that wasted a lot of GPU cycles for a very unimpressive result, but with a renewed superficial feeling of competence
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I think I should write more about but I have been feeling very similar. I've been recently exploring using claude code/codex recently as the "default", so I've decided to implement a side project. My gripe with AI tools in the past is that the kind of work I do is large and complex and with previous models it just wasn't efficient to either provide enough context or deal with context rot when working on a large appli…
I'm worried about that too. If the error is reproducible, the model can eventually figure it out from experience. But a ghost bug that I can't pattern? The model ends up in a "you're absolutely right" loop as it incorrectly guesses different solutions.
My first job had the Devs working front-line support years ago. Due to that, I learnt an important lessons in bug fixing.
Always be able to re-create the bug first.
There are no such thing as ghost bugs, you just need to ask the reporter the right questions.
Unless your code is multi-threaded, to which I say, good luck!
I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…
I ran into a new problem today: "reading atrophy". As in if the LLM doesn't know about it, some devs are basically giving up and not even going to RTFM. I literally had to explain to someone today how something works by...reading through the docs and linking them the docs with screenshots and highlighted paragraphs of text. Still got push back along the lines of "not sure if this will work". It's. Literally. In. The.…
I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…
I've gone years without coding and when I come back to it, it's like riding a bike! In each iteration of my coding career, I have become a better developer, even after a large gap. Now I can "code" during my gap. Were I ever to hand-code again, I'm sure my skills would be there. They don't atrophy, like your ability to ride a bike doesn't atrophy. Yes you may need to warm back up, but all the connections in your brai…
I used to know a person like that - high in the company structure who would claim he was a great engineer, but all the actual engineers would make jokes about him and his ancient skills during private conversations.
So what is he even coding there all the time? Does anybody have any info on what he is actually working on besides all the vibe-coding tweets? There seems to be zero output from they guy for the past 2 years (except tweets)
However more often than not, someone is just building a monolithic construction that will never be looked at again. For example, someone found that HuggingFace dataloader was slow for some type of file size in combination with some disk. What does this warrant? A 300000+ line non-reviewed repo to fix this issue. Not a 200-line PR to HuggingFace, no you need to generate 20% of the existing repo and then slap your thing on there.
For me this is puzzling, because what is this for? Who is this for? Usually people built these things for practice, but now its generated, so its not for practice because you made very little effort on it. The only thing I can see that its some type of competence signaling, but here again, if the engineer/manager looking knows that this is generated, it does not have the type of value that would come with such signaling. Either I am naive and people still look at these repos and go "whoa this is amazing", or it's some kind of induced egotrip/delusion where the LLM has convinced you that you are the best builder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just brain atrophy, I think. I think part of it is that we're actively making a tradeoff to focus on learning how to use the model rather than learning how to use our own brains and work with each other. This would be fine if not for one thing: the meta-skill of learning to use the LLM depreciates too. Today's LLM is gonna go away someday, the way you have to use it will change. You will be on a forever trea…
> It's not just brain atrophy, I think. I think part of it is that we're actively making a tradeoff to focus on learning how to use the model rather than learning how to use our own brains and work with each other. I agree with the sentiment but I would have framed it differently. The LLM is a tool, just like code completion or a code generator. Right now we focus mainly on how to use a tool, the coding agent, to ach…
An LLM is always going to be a black box that is neither predictable nor visible (the unpredictability is necessary for how the tool functions; the invisibility is not but seems too late to fix now). So teams start cargo culting ways to deal with specific LLMs' idiosyncrasies and your domain knowledge becomes about a specific product that someone else has control over. It's like learning a specific office suite or whatever.