We're all CTO now
jamie.ideasasylum.com
We're all CTO now
1–10 of 108 posts
Re: We're all CTO now
#2Author iterated with AI to build Postgres. Why not learn to use build systems? That’ll pay off big time in the medium timeframe.
Re: We're all CTO now
#3Author 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!
Re: We're all CTO now
#4CTOs at most of my companies were more like tech evangelists
Re: We're all CTO now
#5Author 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!
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.
Re: We're all CTO now
#6>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.
Re: We're all CTO now
#7CTOs at most of my companies were more like tech evangelists
It depends a lot on the specific business and company stage. E.g. CTOs at boutiques basically meet clients and put on a performance to instill trust. CTOs on product startups with little funding are more like "I'll hire a teammate that can put up with the mess I wrote". CTOs after the product startups have large investments are more like "I'll pretend I know what I'm doing and let the principal engineers actually run the tech and fix my legacy mess so we don't go out of business". CTOs at corpos are just C-suite politicians. Etc.
I find CTO as a title meaningless. At most it means they've got the signature powers.
Re: We're all CTO now
#8Is not the first time that I read this kind of narrative, actually appears pretty often in my LinkedIn timeline. We are now managers of agents and now we are CTO of agents… this is plain delusional, you can play with the toys all day long, a mud cake won’t sell very well. This CTO doesn’t code much, I agree, if you are a contributor you know that so called agents are as useful as google and stack overflow on steroids, nothing more than that unless you have no idea of what you are doing.
Re: We're all CTO now
#9I'm so fucking tired of people who had no interest in software development telling me software development is dead.
The author repeatedly states they have little knowledge of the tech they're using. But they're CERTAIN in what the industry will be in future.
Hubris
Re: We're all CTO now
#10Author 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!
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 didn't bother looking at the code throughly, I was more vigilant the first day, and then less so. The code looks fine, so just click "accept".
At first I was amazed by how fast I was going, truly, but then I realized that I didn't know my own code. I didn't know what's happening when and why. I could churn lots of code quickly, but after the first prompt, the code was worth less than toilet paper.
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.
Code was just splattered throughout without any sense of where to put anything, global state was used religiously, and slowly it became impossible for me to understand my code. If there was a bug I didn't know where to look, I had to approach this as I would when joining a new company, except that in all my years, even looking through the worst human code I have ever seen, it was not as bad as the AI code.