571–580 of 656 posts
Everyone starts off as a bad engineer. Just like any other profession, you to make lots of mistakes to learn. But now you're less likely to get wisdom from another human to build up the knowledge and experience you need. And more likely to delegate the hard stuff to Claude so you don't learn from your mistakes.
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I think this point gets lost on people. A frequent argument I see in favor of vibecoding is: “well there’s also bad engineers”. In other words, bad code is already being written, so who cares if the LLM is wrong sometimes? The issue is that with no reins, the LLM is a fire hose of bad code compared to the garden hose of bad code orgs had before. A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff.…
> A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff. A bad engineer with a good model and harness will produce something faster, but it will be worse. A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff.
Not fast enough to keep their job these days.
Time was always the limiting factor to code quality, good engineers satisfied the classic "good", "fast" but not "cheap" selection of those three classic options.
I very sincerely doubt it is possible for even an incredible engineer to keep up with the delivery schedules required to ship products now. Not to mention that frontier models do ship pretty consistently good code. By far the biggest source of issues I see is not "poorly coded" but "problem poorly specified". We still need good engineers, because they can understand how to do decompose problems well, but I don't know anyone who writes code by and anymore (other than for fun).
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Yes, but much more slowly. And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever
Speed doesn’t matter.
It’s difficult to have spent a long time learning something, only for that thing to suddenly become accessible to anyone; something that was once scarce and valuable is now abundant and cheap. There are still machinists doing things by hand, but for real production or prototyping, most will now use a 5-axis CNC machine. It still requires an operator of sorts, but much of the work that once required skilled manual mac…
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> A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff. A bad engineer with a good model and harness will produce something faster, but it will be worse. A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff.
> A good engineer, without LLM assistance, will still produce great stuff. Not fast enough to keep their job these days. Time was always the limiting factor to code quality, good engineers satisfied the classic "good", "fast" but not "cheap" selection of those three classic options. I very sincerely doubt it is possible for even an incredible engineer to keep up with the delivery schedules required to ship products n…
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The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship p…
> Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." For one, the industry never did professionalize to begin with, certainly not in the way accountants, lawyers etc did. We never had any real body that could certify proficiency, which is what contributed to companies having to resort to leetcode and other such sty…
Accountants and lawyers effectively controlled their customers. You can't use accounting or legal work for business purposes without those things coming from licensed practitioners. And they have no other use than to work with regulatory agencies (loosely speaking such as courts, IRS, etc).
If you lock down software development too hard, people will write their own. It's easier to hack something together that solves a specific problem than to write general purpose software that can be sold. And eventually the licensed programmers will break their own rules, for instance by using un-approved computers, languages, and development tools, in order to compete with software smuggled in from overseas.
> bad engineers were always a liability This part of the article hits home for me. With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization. The most egregious of these cases for me is often long tenured engineers who have lost interest in the craft, creating a dangerous combination of having enough merit to ship but not enough interest to make what they ship _good_. I am still a f…
I think this point gets lost on people. A frequent argument I see in favor of vibecoding is: “well there’s also bad engineers”. In other words, bad code is already being written, so who cares if the LLM is wrong sometimes? The issue is that with no reins, the LLM is a fire hose of bad code compared to the garden hose of bad code orgs had before. A good engineer, with a good model and harness will produce great stuff.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but much more slowly. And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever
Speed doesn’t matter.
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> they make a lot FEWER such mistakes than would people who could not pass the exams and maintain a license. I don’t know if that’s true. More schooling does not mean more trustworthy or careful doctors. And I suspect some negative trait selection. Milton Friedman wrote a PhD dissertation on the topic of medicine that I invite you to take a look at. > than if nothing were done. The alternative is not to invite people…
I appreciate your positivity. However it is difficult to reconcile your argument with the reality that executives at tech companies frequently behave in ways that satisfy the investors but clearly do not produce good results for the people using their technology. Indeed in numerous cases today the technology is openly hostile to its own users' interests. The regulations are there to protect the users (or customers or…
Hardware technology jobs have some of these credentials and are part of that system.
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> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-code…
My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv. Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself. Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift. We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.