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AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

sylvainkalache.com

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Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#61

Post by konschubert »

bob1029 wrote: post #6

A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users. I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people. I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patien…

It's the uncanny valley of AI. It's still not quite good enough yet that you can trust it blindly on a big codebase, so you still have to read and understand everything - which is often harder than just writing it up yourself.

EDIT: don’t get me wrong. I still think AI is incredibly useful for a lot of tasks! But when implementing an architecturally hairy thing, I find it less stressful and equally quick to jump down to the editor level and use AI just for code completion.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#62

Post by hypfer »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #58
hypfer wrote: post #29

Meta: The blinking cursor of the "logo" of the blog being sticky in the top left corner makes it impossible for me to read the text. It constantly fires interrupts at me. Depending on what your goals as the author are, you may or may not want that. Being able to scroll it out of view might be enough to achieve the aesthetics goal, and the goal of people actually listening to you.

Not just you. Must be nice being fully neurotypical and „not seeing“ all of this kind of stuff.

I mean seeing this stuff pays the bills and does so quite well, so..

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#63

Post by jjav »

shakna wrote: post #21
throw839948499 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the solution is so simple, why claude did not found it? At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me). After three decades of outsourcing to lowest bidder, I do not buy that humans are somehow better! > patient, old school troubleshooting I usually see similar arguments around systems with major red flags (no docs, poor CI, decade ago no CVS...). And engineers with private stash of…

Claude regular spits out six helper functions instead of... A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things. Overabstracting, deduplicating things that don't need to be. Building metaclasses because it saw a single orchestrator in the whole codebase. If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice.

> A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things.

Anecdote I like to tell.. I was working on a financial planning software, intentionally purely vibe coded as an experiment.

I eventually discovered AI had implemented seven duplicate copies of tax calculation functions. All of them different. All of them wrong. All of them giving different answers for same input.

Not even the most junior of newbie junior engineers would do something this crazy. But AI was happy to do it. It will solve the immediate problem, efficiently. Even if the most efficient solution is something ridiculous like this.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#64

Post by MichaelRo »

mawadev wrote: post #25
Root_Denied wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing this happen in the security space right now. Someone on my team I was helping train and bring along is all of sudden regressing in their understanding of the issues we're working on, and instead focusing on AI tool outputs to do their job for them.

I can share a weird story: Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform. I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about. At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or…

>> he continues to vibe code through me

So quit pair programming. I never did, never will do that, nor worked at a place that remotely encouraged that. Each to their own, that's how it should be.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#65

Post by danielheath »

wccrawford wrote: post #53
mawadev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can share a weird story: Usually, I take my time to understand each keyword of the code I'm looking at, especially if it is new to me, like terraform. I work in a team/with one architect, who only did the DevOps/Infra stuff for the past years and I had the expectation he knows what he is doing and talking about. At around 2 weeks, I noticed how his knowledge has severe gaps and how he takes things at face value or…

I don't think it's generalizable. The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. It's more compelling, and we probably see more of them because of it, but it's the same general thing. The kind of person who insists on understanding things and working through the problem has always been rarer. It's not "humble", it's "inquisitive" and "persistent".

I'm seeing people who _used to be_ like that losing that understanding without realizing it's happening - they have a superficial idea of what the code is doing, enough to feel like they understand it, but the change is apparent when watching them handle something unexpected.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#66

Post by Sharlin »

throw839948499 wrote: post #45
Sharlin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So after 30 years of outsourcing to the bottom 10%, you think Claude is better than the bottom 90% even though it’s so stupid that it doesn’t even know it should ask for advice or more information when it’s stuck?

It just follows instructions you give it. Some asian devs will go for weeks without asking for help, all while giving amazing fake status reports. Loosing face etc...

Do you think those devs are in the top 10% of all devs like you said Claude is? Or is the bar suddenly much lower after all?

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#67

Post by Foobar8568 »

shakna wrote: post #21
throw839948499 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the solution is so simple, why claude did not found it? At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me). After three decades of outsourcing to lowest bidder, I do not buy that humans are somehow better! > patient, old school troubleshooting I usually see similar arguments around systems with major red flags (no docs, poor CI, decade ago no CVS...). And engineers with private stash of…

Claude regular spits out six helper functions instead of... A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things. Overabstracting, deduplicating things that don't need to be. Building metaclasses because it saw a single orchestrator in the whole codebase. If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice.

Oh and how is it any different than most software engineers?

How many times I heard ORM are bad only to recreate the same shit?

How many times I heard ORM had bad performance and see 1+n stuff everywhere?

How many times I have seen tight coupling in the name of DRY?

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#68

Post by tannertech »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #34

I am exceedingly tired of poor metaphors that are popping up since AI has taken over writing. No, operating software is not like operating a plane. Not at all in fact. The people operating the software and resolving incidents are the same people who created the software in the first place, and continue to work on it day to day. Pilots have not and don't.

The former CTO of a large MSP software company once told me on a call the reason their product had so many features removed with price increases was "you can't maintain a plane while it's in the air"

The immediate response was "We don't, your updates bring the on prem RMM down for hours at a time, the plane is grounded for maintenence regularly"

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#69

Post by qsera »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #11

Isn't there anywhere to "go" from here? In the last decades, introducing new high level abstractions on top of existing paradigms naturally had everyone move up the ladder and work at the next higher level, why should this be different these days? Do we think AI will reach the top of the abstraction ceiling, so there's no where to go from here?

>introducing new high level abstractions...

Coding via LLM is not similar to using an abstraction. Imagine a car. The controls like steering wheel, the pedals, the gear levers. Those are abstractions.

But using LLMs are like driving using a remote control that has probabilistic behavior. You just loss what it feels to be in a car and you fail to improve as a driver because of the erratic remote control.

Re: AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

#70

Post by ffsm8 »

bob1029 wrote: post #6

A natural evolution of engineers losing touch with the customers and users. I'm noticing some of the concern play out regarding AI weakening the capabilities of software people. I gave the team an exact solution on a silver platter and they still failed to identify how to go about it after 3 days slamming it into Claude. The resolution is literally 1 line of code that could be arrived at in about 30 minutes of patien…

Sincerely , I think you're blaming the AI incorrectly there. You just got incompetents on your payroll.
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