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We're all CTO now

jamie.ideasasylum.com

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Re: We're all CTO now

#71

Post by subw00f »

yoav wrote: post #14
matt3210 wrote: post #3

Author assumes we’re going to use AI more and more. I don’t agree. I regularly out perform the AI pushers on my team and I can talk about engineering in person too!

Maybe that’s because the AI pushers are compensating for already not being as good. What happens when other yous start using ai. I suspect they will obv outperform you just in sheer typing speed.

I don’t agree. There’s a “muscle” you train every time you think about problems and solve them, and I say muscle because it also atrophies.

Re: We're all CTO now

#72

Post by jffaufwwasd »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #15
artursapek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents are definitely more useful than Google and SO… have you tried pair programming with Claude 4 Opus and building something? It’s amazing.

Exactly. Having built a few non-trivial projects with Claude Code, you can act as a CTO. At least that is one semi feasible way of using it. I would say in a generation or two, you could operate in a way where you rarely have to dive into the code.

> Having built a few non-trivial projects with Claude Code

Can you clarify what "non-trivial" means here? To me "non-trivial" is writing FoundationDB or Kafka from scratch.

Re: We're all CTO now

#73

Post by throwingrocks »

izacus wrote: post #54
throwingrocks wrote: post #44

> There is a popular argument that a software developer’s job is not write software but to solve a user’s problem. Bullshit Wait, what? > I was never particularly interested in the code itself > Instead, I was always more interested in the product Confusing contradictions aside, I had trouble engaging with this article. The author seems to think every developer thinks like they do. Some people actually enjoy helping…

Well, AI absolutely appeals to the type of bulkshitter which hates coding and wants to get away from it.

> bulkshitter

With all due respect, this perspective baffles me. Some see it your way, others see so much opportunity.

Re: We're all CTO now

#75

Post by CuriouslyC »

ofjcihen wrote: post #67
CuriouslyC wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have had great success at guiding LLMs to produce my desired output. Your baseless snark is a sign of your incompetence.

Re: We're all CTO now

#76

Post by me_darianb »

throwingrocks wrote: post #44

> There is a popular argument that a software developer’s job is not write software but to solve a user’s problem. Bullshit Wait, what? > I was never particularly interested in the code itself > Instead, I was always more interested in the product Confusing contradictions aside, I had trouble engaging with this article. The author seems to think every developer thinks like they do. Some people actually enjoy helping…

This was my reaction exactly. I personally get my endorphins as a manager from seeing products get traction. The author clearly thinks differently from me and it seems like they don't believe devs like me exist.

Re: We're all CTO now

#77

Post by StopVibeCoding »

nico wrote: post #69
StopVibeCoding wrote: post #10

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…

> 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…

No. It is different, when working with a codebase written by humans there is always sanity. Even when looking at terrible codebases, there is some realm of reason, that once you understand can make navigating the code easy.

I believe you missed the part of my comment saying that I have been coding professionally for 20 years. I have seen horrible codebases, and I'm telling you I'd rather see the switch statement with 2000 cases (real story), many of which were 100s of lines long, with C macros used religiously (same codebase). At a bare minimum, once you get over the humps, with human written code, you will always find some realm of reason. A human thought to do this, they had some realm of logic. I couldn't find that with AI, I just found cargo cult programming + shoving things where they make no sense.

Re: We're all CTO now

#78

Post by StopVibeCoding »

je42 wrote: post #64
StopVibeCoding wrote: post #10

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…

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

copy paste from a different comment in this thread:

> I have tried being specific, I have even gone as far as to feed its prompt with a full requirement document for a feature (1000+ words), and it did not seem to make any significant difference.

Re: We're all CTO now

#79

Post by ajaksbsbzjz »

artursapek wrote: post #23
paulryanrogers wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have, and it does a mediocre to poor job, even at trivial tasks using popular stacks and languages. IME, one most either start with a green field, or babysit every step with/as an expert, or both. Perhaps I've just been unlucky or my projects have too much debt.

I’ve used it greenfield and with existing indebted codebases and it’s remarkably good at both. You have to give it a good amount of context but that goes for a human worker too. I think devs who get bad results from AI generally prefer to be the ones coding and not managing and maybe take their own context for granted.

Most of my time spent coding is understanding and growing my context. By the time I’ve done that, writing the code is an afterthought. It takes longer to communicate this via prompt than to write the code myself.

I’ve heavily benefited from AI when I’m inexperienced or willing to trust the AI. The devs I’ve seen happy with AI either fit that use case or are subpar devs who don’t really understand what they’re doing. I have multiple coworkers who are the latter - code works for their single happy path and they’re on to the next thing.

Re: We're all CTO now

#80

Post by ofjcihen »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #75
ofjcihen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have had great success at guiding LLMs to produce my desired output. Your baseless snark is a sign of your incompetence.

Or that your use case is well-documented across the internet and simple.

That would be more inline with how the technology works and less a sign of your inherent genius though.

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