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Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

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Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#51

Post by DeathArrow »

voidUpdate wrote: post #25

What's interesting to me is how many people have found out with the LLM boom that they don't want to be developers/engineers, they want to be managers, delegating all the work to another entity and checking in occasionally to see how the coding is coming along

I do not manage LLMs, I manage people.

I always considered myself a builder, a creator. The end result is interesting and it's important for me the end result to be just as I envisioned it.

Typing code isn't exciting. Thinking, planning, finding solutions and driving the LLM to implement the finished product is.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#52

Post by cguess »

jrflo wrote: post #15
hootz wrote: post #3

But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code? Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?

I wonder if people thought something similar when moving from writing low level machine code by hand to high-level languages. No one looks at the actual machine instructions anymore! Will our ability to understand low level instructions atrophy?

It did atrophy, but more importantly understanding what's going on below the code you are writing, even if your project isn't assembly, also atrophied. When you're coding an Electron app with Javascript you're so far removed from any concept of the efficiency a modern CPU can achieve you stop caring about optimization. Speed and memory management don't matter and then you get... well, the modern web.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#54

Post by linksnapzz »

jrflo wrote: post #15
hootz wrote: post #3

But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code? Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?

I wonder if people thought something similar when moving from writing low level machine code by hand to high-level languages. No one looks at the actual machine instructions anymore! Will our ability to understand low level instructions atrophy?

The move to HLLs created new classes of problems that assembly programmers didn't face; so while the # of problems that necessitated understanding hw didn't shrink, it did relative to the list of things that could now go wrong.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#55

Post by snek_case »

droidjj wrote: post #12
4rachelp wrote: post #4

Feels AI-written as well and a recycling of 1000 versions of this point.

Yes, it reads like every goddamn LinkedIn post these days.

I wish the tech field wasn't so full of clueless grifters. The most frustrating thing is that this kind of people, the kind who loudly and confidently assert bullshit claim based on insufficient knowledge, have a knack for positioning themselves in positions of power.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#56

Post by [deleted] »

supermatt wrote: post #14

People bragging that they "dont touch code" and only "argue" with agents are reinventing the slowest possible IDE. Obviously the agents are great at producing large chunks of code, but they often make minor and sometimes trivial mistakes which need amending. Typing something like "in src/auth/session/token_manager.ts the refreshTokenExpiry variable should be refresh_token_expiry. update every reference and make sure…

[deleted]

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#57

Post by Havoc »

Same here. It’s working well, though only using it for personal projects.

The one project that did give me pause was an S3 Server. Not entirely sure I trust that…

Toying with the idea of sticking a proxy in between that runs the vibe coded S3 in parallel to a classic server and see if the results track

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#58

Post by CharlieDigital »

spwa4 wrote: post #46
CharlieDigital wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slowly your brain just gets trained to mid thinking like an LLM Regression to the mean. I am doing a lot of the code reviews on my team and I can see that LLMs have a hard time with OOP (or are perhaps specifically guided to avoid) and writes a lot of `private static` utility functions. A lot of duplicated small utilities that can end up becoming a maintenance nightmare should the behavior need to be normalized/fix…

This sounds very much like a problem of the context, that should be solvable by having a file with instructions on how to do generic utilities somewhere in the code (e.g. AGENTS.md)

We have; but it's also not easily practical because there is some judgement involved and it's not really feasible to point out all of the edge cases (bloating the context).

What is not clear to me is whether this is inherent desirable behavior on the part of the agent or not. Why? Because for the agent, the code is more isolated and its immediate changes have a lower blast radius by internalizing some behavior (`private static`) versus touching a shared method or hierarchy.

I can see why the underlying models may be steered this way, but it creates a different kind of problem when things really should be shared.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#59

Post by lysace »

My professional career:

Year 0-12: Coding lots, learning lots.

Year 12-22: A product I built really took off. Now primarily building new stuff by talking to other engineers. Lots of product management/politics. Atrophying coding skills.

Year 22-28: I'm tired of building by talking. Re-learning coding.

Year 28-: "Here's this thing called Claude Code". I interface with it by... talking.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#60

Post by qaq »

supermatt wrote: post #14

People bragging that they "dont touch code" and only "argue" with agents are reinventing the slowest possible IDE. Obviously the agents are great at producing large chunks of code, but they often make minor and sometimes trivial mistakes which need amending. Typing something like "in src/auth/session/token_manager.ts the refreshTokenExpiry variable should be refresh_token_expiry. update every reference and make sure…

Codex and CC are actually getting better at reviewing code and flagging issues. False positive rate dropped fairly significantly. Also obviously might be very personal preferency but creating clear specs and iterating on specs really helps to crystalize the approach I want to take to solving a given problem.
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