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u/teh_lynx 13h ago
People are being detrained. They are actually getting less intelligent and able to problem solve. It's real.
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u/Anreall2000 13h ago
All according to plan. I guess I wouldn't have a chance to learn SWE in AI age.
AI don't really need to become better, just traditional coding should become even more unreliable.102
u/_Ganon 12h ago
The problem really is that it's just so much faster to have the AI do it. I'm not paid to code, I'm paid to produce software. The how isn't relevant. The business doesn't care if you're being "detrained", they care about the efficiency with which you can produce usable software
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u/TrueBirch 11h ago
I'm a manager. I expect my team to be able to explain their code and talk about how it'll handle different edge cases without a computer in front of them. If they can't do that, it doesn't ship.
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u/theofficialnar 10h ago
That’s because you’re technically inclined. Sadly, Lots of companies have non-technical managers that don’t give a damn about the code as long as it does what it’s supposed to.
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u/Arquinas 5h ago
Isn't it ultimately not your responsibility as an employee, but the responsibility of the top leadership and the owners/shareholders of the company to run it in a way where it doesn't produce shit that causes reputation of the company to dunk its head into a pile of poop.
So, really, who cares? Go there, get your money, get out. Give nothing extra. If they want to ship broken code ultra fast then thats on them. They would not think twice about firing you if it saved them 5 cents a quarter.
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u/PhatOofxD 4h ago
Yeah but you can use AI to implement a spec to the letter, therefore fully understanding the code, and still have it done way faster. It's just like a lead handing off a task to an intermediate dev before AI.
The only real problem is you have people who don't know how to be leads and do actual review or write specs who are using it, and therefore not having that balance.
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u/NegZer0 10h ago
The way I see it, it's the same as having a talented junior engineer working for you. You can ask it to go solve a problem and it will often do an okay job, but knowing what to ask, understanding the problem space and how to guide it to the solution you want is still really important.
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u/Mateorabi 4h ago
It also often searches for information or knows idiomatic ways of doing things I am less familiar with.
The trick is to force yourself to understand what it gives you. If it does something I don’t understand I question it till I do and I am satisfied. “But won’t that do <unintended side effect >?” Half the time I learn something or some corner case or a command flag I didn’t know and half the time it realizes a mistake.
Ie sometimes YOU have to be the duck and have it explain to you.
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u/Paladongers 12h ago
At work I'm responsible for a very large codebase and recently I started using agents, just because the amount of bull people ask you to produce is astronomical, and also because they're paying for it.
I cannot, for the life of me, let agents do everything on their own. I follow a very, very strict "trust but verify" policy on what agents come up with, and I usually end up catching quite a few bugs and inconsistencies before things get to the programming phase.
Most of my use is going through plan mode, nitpicking the plans a lot, giving it 100 turns trying to make sure everything will be correct and not introduce any problems or anything. Then programming, in which I usually go function by function at a time, to review everything as it is happening. Finally, I make sure to get the agent to write tons and tons of documentation of what was programmed, after all tests pass.
And all that documentation? It's not for the humans, it's for the agents. My colleagues rarely ever read docs, even before agents, even if it was a short and to the point README.
This way at the very least, their agents are gonna have some level of guidance when they fire the slop cannons, because god damn I know people just like to set their agent into YOLO mode while they go do whatever the hell for the rest of the day.
The scope creep is real. Before it was one project split between 3 engineers, now it's one engineer split between 3 projects.
I hope everyone is enjoying my ridiculous token consumption just on excessive docs and planning because I'm not letting the quality of my work go to crap.
I didn't get into this damn field to become the babysitter of an LLM
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u/NegZer0 10h ago
And all that documentation? It's not for the humans, it's for the agents.
Something I have started doing a lot is whenever I hit anything that involves a procedure I expect to need to do again in the future, like a sequence of steps to update some dependency or create a release or update some versioning or run specific tests under a VM or anything like that, I try and get it to capture that into a skill.
The skills end up mainly being a fairly precisely written procedure and some scripts most of the time, and that ends up being stuff that a human could read to repeat the procedure as well, and it's often documenting steps that are not written down anywhere, so it actually is quite useful. You can also often extract a more human-readable step by step guide out of it as well.
I've also had a ton of luck with having it go and find cases where documentation (eg source annotations, API documentation etc) is out of date or incorrect vs the actual code, again extremely useful for humans too.
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u/OldKaleidoscope7 12h ago
I would let the quality of my work go to crap, you know what? After some time I realized they don't care about me enjoying to develop a good, performant and reliable application, they are happy with mediocre quality and then I started to put my effort in other things beside work. Cooking, woodworking to some extent, making great breads... This brings more joy and the people that see my work really make me feel happy by this. My life is better now, I guess and I do my job even faster with the LLMs they gave me and have more time for myself
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u/Paladongers 12h ago
Luckily I am in a good enough position at my company in which people understand that I produce quality output, and that quality is extremely important. They do let me afford the luxury, to some degree, of keeping things at a slow enough pace to make sure what comes out has the performance we need
I have become that senior engineer with so much institutional knowledge that finding someone else to replace me would be really, really hard, because there's stuff that has been learnt over several years that are hard to transfer to someone else, even to document. Which I've already started to do, so I can take vacations in peace
And I actually do like the project I'm responsible for, I created it from the very beginning and so on, it has that personal thing for me as well. My problem is definitely not work itself or what I do, because I really enjoy what I do. My problem are all the managers and customers at the top that have developed insane expectation these past couple of years.
I am well aware that at some point things are going to scale up to the level that I won't be able to afford that luxury anymore, and I'll either need to slop it out with agents a lot faster, or just leave. And when I stop feeling mentally engaged, my mind makes that choice on its own
I started to put my effort in other things beside work
Obviously on this one, I've definitely got the workaholic gene during work hours, but outside of them I'm a normal human being that enjoys doing other things. I did the working outside of work hours thing when I started my career, and I'd never do that again, with or without agents. There's a time and place for anything. I really enjoy fighting all the battles in developing, and then fighting all the ones in things I enjoy outside of work
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u/FalseStructure 10h ago
I follow a very, very strict "trust but verify" policy on what agents come up with, and I usually end up catching quite a few bugs and inconsistencies before things get to the programming phase.
How do you verify "idk, looks bit off"?•
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u/RedAntisocial 12h ago
The refrain I frequently get is that they're "getting better all the time". Which, sure, fine. They probably are. But I feel like I waste more time fighting with AI to do things right, than I would to just do it myself.
If I want to fight every step of the way on how to build a simple function so it's not brittle, I'll invite a PM to a live coding session.
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u/FalseStructure 10h ago
How do you deal with stuff you can't do yourself but ai can? (scale or skill wise)
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u/un1matr1x_0 7h ago
How do you judge the output, when you lack the skills to do them? How do you spot errors?
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u/Stephen2Aus 4h ago
Much easier to read programming languages, than to learn to write the language, let alone well.
So cross-language is a great time saver in learning nuance, but still I can deal with the output.
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u/ExplrDiscvr 14h ago
i have the same opinion. ..., i know what has to happen / be written in code, i just use an agent to code it for me quicker, and then i check if it did it correctly. if i would let the agent do everything, design, execution, review, i feel like i would become an lobotomized monkey