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…
We're all CTO now
61–70 of 108 posts
Re: We're all CTO now
#62Re: 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…
>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
#64Earlier 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…
Re: We're all CTO now
#65Earlier 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…
Re: We're all CTO now
#66Earlier 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.
Re: We're all CTO now
#67Earlier 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.
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
#68Earlier 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?
Re: We're all CTO now
#69Earlier 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…
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