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The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

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Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#71

Post by basilgohar »

spaqin wrote: post #57
basilgohar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job market under our Great Leader has taken away a lot of this agency. Software engineers have gone from having the pick of the market for themselves to becoming (perceived as) next to disposable.

That's a very American-centric point of view; the job market worldwide for developers is getting tougher and tougher.

I'm willing to have my leader take some of the blame for this as well. I think the decisions of the leader of the what's still the largest economy of the world likely has an outsized impact on the rest of the world too. It's getting less and less, for sure, but still significant. I'm not trying to be American-centric, I'm trying to accept that what we do has an impact despite unequally applied isolationist mentality of some here.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#72

Post by azinman2 »

solomatov wrote: post #23
htrp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

context switching across the entirety of the feature surface for an app You could easily have agents to work on login page, messaging feature, database/data model update, recommender system, backend api, etc

But you have to keep it in your head, and remember all stuff at the same time. How is it possible to track, and do reviews one after another? Or are these pretty long running agents?

I’m not sure what you mean by keep it in your head? I know all of the parts the agents are working on. It’ll often be a mix between bigger tasks (some large refactor, new feature, etc) and small tasks (little bug fixes).

For prototyping I just merge. I don’t bother to review the code. For anything more important than I am reviewing the code and going back and forth. Basically there’s a queue of stuff demanding my attention, and I just serially go through them.

What’s also been really helpful to me is /simplify and similar code review skills (I have my own). That alone takes an agent a while to parse through everything it’s done and self reviews. It catches quite a lot itself this way.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#73

Post by azinman2 »

jondwillis wrote: post #34
htrp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

context switching across the entirety of the feature surface for an app You could easily have agents to work on login page, messaging feature, database/data model update, recommender system, backend api, etc

We have our doubts about this. Can you share your code or product? Anecdotally, my mistakes and lack of understanding exponentiate the more I try to parallelize.

Who is “we”?

As I said in the neighboring comment, for vibe coding side projects and prototypes for work I just merge and iterate. It works out more than it doesn’t. For anything bigger at work I cannot share as I’m at Apple.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#74

Post by bensyverson »

palmotea wrote: post #66
bensyverson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the PR workflow is just unsustainable in the agentic era. Rather than review every new feature or bug fix, we would depend on good test coverage, and hold developers accountable for what they ship. The result might be more faulty code getting merged, but if you already have outages and can't review every PR, is there currently a meaningful benefit to the PR workflow?

> I wonder if the PR workflow is just unsustainable in the agentic era. Rather than review every new feature or bug fix, we would depend on good test coverage, and hold developers accountable for what they ship. I think what you're describing is setting up the human as the fall guy for the machine.

So taking responsibility for the code you generate is being a "fall guy?"

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#75

Post by palmotea »

bensyverson wrote: post #74
palmotea wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if the PR workflow is just unsustainable in the agentic era. Rather than review every new feature or bug fix, we would depend on good test coverage, and hold developers accountable for what they ship. I think what you're describing is setting up the human as the fall guy for the machine.

So taking responsibility for the code you generate is being a "fall guy?"

> So taking responsibility for the code you generate is being a "fall guy?"

Yes, if your boss expects you to use AI agents to generate code faster than you can reasonably understand and review it. You're stuck between a rock and a hard place: you're "responsible," but if you take the time to actually be responsible you'll be reprimanded. The environment pushes you to slack on reviews in the short term to keep your head above water, but when a problem happens because of that you'll be blamed for it.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#76

Post by iroddis »

The “programming is an act of externalizing a mental model” vs “a code review is reverse engineering the model, then verifying its reasoning” really hit home. Even before AI code reviews required a lot of mental effort for me. AI has made an already difficult process much more prevalent.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#77

Post by solomatov »

azinman2 wrote: post #72
solomatov wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have to keep it in your head, and remember all stuff at the same time. How is it possible to track, and do reviews one after another? Or are these pretty long running agents?

I’m not sure what you mean by keep it in your head? I know all of the parts the agents are working on. It’ll often be a mix between bigger tasks (some large refactor, new feature, etc) and small tasks (little bug fixes). For prototyping I just merge. I don’t bother to review the code. For anything more important than I am reviewing the code and going back and forth. Basically there’s a queue of stuff demanding my att…

>I’m not sure what you mean by keep it in your head?

If the project I work on is large enough, it takes me some time to get everything I need to understand for review into the short term memory. If it's small enough, it's less of a problem for me.

Re: The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers

#78

Post by K0balt »

zthrowaway wrote: post #15

Can definitely attest to this. The frequency of outages at my company have increased drastically the past year, especially ever since incorporating agentic development. I’m seeing all of the dev best practices go out the window. We have a few vibe coders that are posting 15-30 PR’s per day. It’s way too much for us to review. We’re not a big shop. I think we’re going to have to hire more people just to review code ac…

Honestly by the time it gets to review it should be rock solid, so the only thing the reviewer has to think about is the big picture and never “does this actually do what it’s supposed to without abusing any of the interfaces”. Vibe coding makes solid validation, testing, and documentation trivial. The onus of proving your code is good needs to shift downward, not upward. And straight up vibing it is absolutely a terrible idea for anything other than a demo or a simple tool.
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