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Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

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Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#71

Post by voidUpdate »

scotty79 wrote: post #69
voidUpdate wrote: post #25

What's interesting to me is how many people have found out with the LLM boom that they don't want to be developers/engineers, they want to be managers, delegating all the work to another entity and checking in occasionally to see how the coding is coming along

You seem to think you can only be an engineer if you are holding the shovel yourself. Building software consists of many parts. I love each individually. I was always a bit dissatisfied about how they interact and how they block each other. I love puzzle solving, I love debugging, but I kinda hated building software because it depended on those elements and I'm not fond of context switching. I can love building softw…

Maybe engineer was the wrong word. Developer/programmer, where I'd say that yes, you need to wield the tools yourself rather than telling someone/thing else to

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#72

Post by dadoum »

jrflo wrote: post #15
hootz wrote: post #3

But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code? Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?

I wonder if people thought something similar when moving from writing low level machine code by hand to high-level languages. No one looks at the actual machine instructions anymore! Will our ability to understand low level instructions atrophy?

The compiler has been written by a lot of very smart people, it is very well tested and sometimes has even been formally proven to output exactly what the language specifies, and I have a mental model of what the code it outputs does in relation to what I write.

Nobody can be sure of what the LLM will output for a certain prompt. If you don't review what it outputs, it will not necessarily match your expectations. You could argue that it is the same as when you assign an intern to the task, but I personally would check what the intern writes (and in my experience they are more reliable than current AIs, of course not as quick).

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#74

Post by jdc0589 »

aselimov3 wrote: post #8

I think the main issue with this approach is that your solution space eventually narrows. You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one. I’ve noticed this recently as all my side project work is being done by hand. If I do ask an LLM another question about something small it will offer solutions but doesn’t offer the solution I think…

> You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one.

totally depends on how you use the tools. Plenty of people fall in to that scenario, but plenty of others explicitly tell the LLM tools what and how to build something.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#75

Post by lenerdenator »

hootz wrote: post #3

But the question is, will this atrophy our ability to write and understand code? Is reviewing enough? Won't we inevitably get lazy and stop reading enough code? Reading always was a worse way to learn than doing. When we stop doing, we will have to triple our reading (if that's even enough), but will we do that or just trust the agents more and more?

I don't think it's necessarily a question of laziness. It's more about velocity.

Your CTO was just shown a demo where a fairly complex piece of software was spat out in MVP form within a few hours. Something that used to take months is now more-or-less completed in a two-week period, including deployment.

The CTO knows that competitors are seeing the exact same thing and are going to try it for themselves. Now your company has to use the LLM because that's going to enable the development speed seen in the demo if they want to stay in business.

There's the iron triangle of engineering: fast, cheap, good. You used to have to pick two. And in reality, you still have to pick two, but a lot of this technology is sold as allowing you to pick all three. It lets you pump out a MVP:

1. fast - it's done in a few days 2. cheaply - you don't have to pay engineers as much or at all 3. it's "good" - it looks good enough for the client to accept it instead of suing you and give you revenue.

The third part is where this breaks down. Like you say, people aren't reviewing this code. It's probably 85%-95% of the way to fulfilling all use cases, but that 5%-15% is the critical part where there's SLA violations and risks to business, property, or people. The thing is, clients have to find that within the first 90 days to have it impact the books for that quarter, and they probably won't. Also, you have lawyers who can drag it out further. If the company really gets screwed by quality problems, well, sell to a competitor or someone and return value to shareholders that way. There's always some way to get cash back.

So we've pushed out code faster, gotten revenue booked, and have a way to not lose money in the short-term, which is ultimately the only term that matters. The goal was never making good code; it was making money as fast as possible. Velocity. LLMs deliver on that.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#76

Post by lenerdenator »

snek_case wrote: post #55
droidjj wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it reads like every goddamn LinkedIn post these days.

I wish the tech field wasn't so full of clueless grifters. The most frustrating thing is that this kind of people, the kind who loudly and confidently assert bullshit claim based on insufficient knowledge, have a knack for positioning themselves in positions of power.

It's not just the tech field. It's everywhere these days.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#77

Post by doug_durham »

aselimov3 wrote: post #8

I think the main issue with this approach is that your solution space eventually narrows. You go from formulating unique solutions to flagging things that look wrong and then just picking an alternative LLM generated one. I’ve noticed this recently as all my side project work is being done by hand. If I do ask an LLM another question about something small it will offer solutions but doesn’t offer the solution I think…

That presumes that software has a wide solution space. In my experience writing software from the kernel all of the way to distributed systems is that the space is narrow. There are certainly a few long tail areas that require unique approaches, but you'll hit those a couple of times a decade.

I love software. It is my passion. I've practiced and studied it for decades. We should not delude ourselves on what it actually is. Writing software is more like plumbing a tract home, than computational fluid dynamics. I'm fine with that.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#78

Post by aselimov3 »

njovin wrote: post #62
phito wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I do ask an LLM another question about something small it will offer solutions but doesn’t offer the solution I think makes sense in the architectures I’ve written. This is my experience as well, and I've been using Claude Code a lot. Extremely impressive tools, but they're like fast food. They will solve your immediate problems quickly and cheaply, but you're going to have issues on the long term if that's all…

Have you tried drilling into the reasoning when this happens? This is why I usually leave it in "Plan Mode" and when it proposes a solution that seems unusual or unexpected, I point out why I think it is and ask it to justify it's position. Sometimes I get the "you're right!" response, but often it will also explain why it made the decision it did, and it's rational enough that I accept the new approach. It's still v…

> Sometimes I get the "you're right!" response, but often it will also explain why it made the decision it did, and it's rational enough that I accept the new approach.

I think this is kind of what I’m worried about. Referencing Karpathy, an LLM can basically convince any one of anything. Doing this enough times and your opinions just become the LLM opinion. Same with problem solving approaches. I see this for myself so I reserve time to formulate my own solutions. Maybe my solutions are worse but at least I’m training the muscle that may lead to me outperforming the LLM in specific spaces

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#79

Post by bilekas »

> After many years into coding I found out that writing the code was the toll I paid to get those decisions into reality.

I'm happy they are having fun, but these takes are getting worse and worse every day, this is the equivalent of saying, I don't like writing or typing but I love telling stories.

No developer would ever say "I love typing on my split keyboard in vim, it's why I became a developer."

Maybe it's not a bad thing though people are different and this is showing them what they really like, delegating certain things to focus on others. Maybe I should try work with an LLM to act as my architect.

Re: Going full AI engineer, not touching code anymore

#80

Post by tidewinner »

mariopt wrote: post #33

I’m forcing myself to write code. This idea of reviewing an architecture that you never coded is just a fantasy. At some point in time, me and a lot of people, thought that using Redux was a great idea until we had to manage verbosity and middlewares. Now we had to deal with the consequences of our decisions and we learned. I also think this article is just a rage bait

The people who I work with who have gone full LLM prompt engineer are the people who produced low quality, sloppy work. Generally they never liked to be challenged and never appeared to put much effort in.

The same people might have put some effort into responding to a code review before, but now they just prompt the LLM with 'is this a valid point?' and respond with whatever it hallucinates.

These are the people that are hard to work with.

First thought reading this was yes it's rage bait.

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