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We're all CTO now

jamie.ideasasylum.com

61–70 of 108 posts

Re: We're all CTO now

#61

I'm a DevOps engineer. I'm training someone new to the field. Often I'll ask the AI to do something and it goes sideways. Sometimes it really saves me time, but many times not. I'll break down and actually type out commands or even Google what to do instead of using the AI because it's still faster. It's true that my trainee uses the AI more because there's fewer commands in his muscle memory. But, it's still not gre…

Are you talking about CLI commands? I’ve been at programming for over a decade and don’t have the type of memory that allows me to remember all the obscure non-intuitive commands - AI has been a lifesaver, I could care a-less about nerd points.

Re: We're all CTO now

#63

>And with those new skills, your old skills will start to atrophy. Skills don't work like muscles, please stop with this thinking model of the world. No one is going to fire you because you don't have the same speed of recall of language constructs and have to look more things up. Speed of coding is not the damn bottleneck. Plus have a little faith in your brain that you could get back to that point if you wanted to.

This is absolutely not true. Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days. Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job, regardless of if it applies to their day to day workloads. If people stop manually coding their ability to do so WILL atrophy. Take away the coding agents and you'll s…

If you properly learn the skills, then refreshing your skills takes way less time than learning them the first time. This means you didn't really lose the skill.

>Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job

People that do this need their behavior changed. Testing people on quickly find-able implementations is an absolute circus. Obviously an exception if the job actually involves writing CS algorithms, but most of them do not.

Re: We're all CTO now

#64
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the more interesting question is whether you without AI can outperform you using AI, not whether you can outperform someone else who is using AI. I think AI has already gotten to a point to where it can help skilled devs be more productive.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded. I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun. For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I d…

Have you tried to add more guidelines ? Similar to documentation you would provide to new members of the team

Re: We're all CTO now

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly this affected you deeply enough to create a new HN crusade account. Genuinely curious questions: Did you share this experience with management and your peers? What was their response? What steps could realistically reverse the momentum of vibe coding?

> Did you share this experience with management and your peers? What was their response? Among my peers, there seemed to be a correlation between programming experience and agreement with my personal experience. I showed a particular colleague a part of the code and he genuinely asked me which one of the new hires wrote this. As for management, well, let's just say that it's going to be an uphill battle :) > What ste…

I wish you luck, but at this point I think it is going the same path as banning cell phones in workplace/car/we.That is, even with penalties, people will do it.

Re: We're all CTO now

#66
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely not true. Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days. Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job, regardless of if it applies to their day to day workloads. If people stop manually coding their ability to do so WILL atrophy. Take away the coding agents and you'll s…

> but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job, regardless of if it applies to their day to day workloads As others have mentioned this is the problem. Not being able to pull up a binary tree the most efficient way on the spot should not be the criteria to identify a good developer.

But then the question becomes what are good criteria to do that ( and what is the easy way to do it for HR )?

Re: We're all CTO now

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded. I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun. For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I d…

AI writes code according to the instructions given. You can instruct it to architect and organize the code any way you want. You got the fruit of your inarticulation.

It always feels like the height of HN when some pseudo-genius attempts a snobbish reply but instead just confidently confirms their lack of literacy on the subject.

LLMs write code according to thousands of hidden system prompts, weights, training data, and a multitude of other factors.

Additionally, they’re devoid of understanding.

I truly hope you do better in the future.

Re: We're all CTO now

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded. I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun. For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I d…

Clearly this affected you deeply enough to create a new HN crusade account. Genuinely curious questions: Did you share this experience with management and your peers? What was their response? What steps could realistically reverse the momentum of vibe coding?

I love the implicit and totally baseless questioning of motives in this reply.

Re: We're all CTO now

#69
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the more interesting question is whether you without AI can outperform you using AI, not whether you can outperform someone else who is using AI. I think AI has already gotten to a point to where it can help skilled devs be more productive.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded. I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun. For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I d…

> I became unable to understand what I was doing, and as I read through the code very little of it made any sense to me, sure the individual lines were readable, functions made some semblance of sense, but there was no logic

Yes, this happens, and it’s similar to when you first start working on a codebase you didn’t write

However, if instead of giving up, you keep going, eventually you do start understanding what the code does

You should also refactor the code regularly, and when you do, you get a better picture of where things are and how they interact with each other

Re: We're all CTO now

#70
I'm doing something similar to the OP but I'm not a CTO but a "manager". Maybe the title is "we're all managers now". The CTO role is bigger than that.
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