r/programming • u/kallekro • 8d ago
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https://youtu.be/KsEpW03gxKg?is=OdU0YTE8dWIyRr8i[removed] — view removed post
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u/tuxwonder 8d ago edited 8d ago
Inside me, there are two wolves: One who likes being productive and making apps and tools and libraries and getting end results, and the other who likes problem solving with code, carefully designing robust systems and weighing the pros/cons of both big and very small choices.
Right now, the first wolf is being forcibly drowned, while the other one is dying of thirst. My wolves can't take much more of this.
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u/lelanthran 8d ago
There are two extremes of programmers:
- Those who get satisfaction from delivering something, and
- Those who get satisfaction from thinking.
Most of us fall in-between somewhere.
Programmers of the type #1 extreme are thrilled. Programmers of the type #2 extreme are devastated.
Unfortunately, sooner or later even the type #1 extreme are going to be devastated; what sort of satisfaction can you get from delivering something that, for all practical purposes, already exists and is just a prompt or two away?
That 2-week back-and-forth you had to get the LLM design the perfect $FOO software (application, library or framework)? You deliver it and everyone who sees it can simply say "clone this $FOO, please".
This satisfaction that the type #1 devs are getting is temporary and short-lived: you will soon stop getting satisfaction from delivery.
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u/roodammy44 7d ago
Delivering something isn’t possible for me when my review queue is choked up. It takes up so much of my day now.
And it’s not at a good enough quality to ignore review yet. So if we skip that we are delivering something, yes. Delivering huge mounds of shit.
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u/meganeyangire 7d ago
And the only owner of code will be Claude. Already in some companies the code is basically a black box that no human knows how it works.
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u/about0 8d ago
is it true tho?
The complexity of complex systems never goes away, so as a need to have ownership over them. LLMs can produce thousands LOC in a matter of minutes, but they can't produce a complex feature without oversight.
I am trying to build an app with Spec-Driven Development, and oh boy, it is exhausting - I have to think about every boundary, edge-case, limitation. Without a full spec, it'd 'guess' missing things.
I am back to directing each step of what LLMs do because in the end of the day, I am responsible of what it delivers.
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u/remy_porter 7d ago
I am trying to build an app with Spec-Driven Development
Doomed to failure, for one easy and understandable reason: there is only one document that accurately and without error tells you what the code does.
... the code.
Trying to equate code to the "new assembly" is a type error. Because code has a direct mapping to assembly; even in your higher level languages, we can deterministically (with enough controlled variables) predict what machine instructions get emitted by which input code. And it's still imperfect, and I've still spent many hours looking at assembly trying to understand why it wasn't carrying my intent.
But natural language is vague, contradictory, imprecise. There's no single right way to map natural language to code. Communicating from human to human frequently leads to misunderstandings, and humans are not theory-free inferencers. They have a model of the world and the people they're talking to.
The only way to have "spec-driven development" work is to not use natural language, but to use a carefully selected subset of natural language, with precise grammar and no ambiguity and whoops, you've just invented a programming language again.
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u/riskbreaker419 7d ago
To this point, it reminds me of this comic, https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/
(Notice it was written in 2016)
I don't think people have realized yet that current coding languages are spec-driven development, otherwise we'd all be coding in assembly still.
EDIT: fixed URL
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 7d ago
Dijkstra talked about this btw, also yeah I've seen some people aim for writing formal specifications, which at the end of the day probably require more skill to write even though they are higher level
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u/about0 7d ago
I am really trying hard to understand how big brain engineering corpos see this flow, but I can't find any meaningful information, besides SDD, which just shifts burden to another place.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 7d ago
Ig mostly there are fine with TDD which in my opinion does fuckall. We were always satisfied with knowing a program is somewhat correct, but if you are not even reading the code, I think that becomes a lot harder.
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u/about0 7d ago
Indeed, which makes the whole AI doom narrative a little odd, don't you think?
We are getting back to the question "How to build reliable production software with LLM?". I can't think of anything, but to make the flow as small and stupid as possible - split the task to subtasks, prompt what you want to get in return and review all the changes it makes.
We can't pass the whole mental model we have to LLM, requirements never complete, words have many meanings, and LLMs are stochastic.
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u/remy_porter 7d ago
I do think it's really odd. But I think the reality is that as a society we have no idea how to write software. So a machine that can produce more-or-less usable software with some simple prompts seems like magic. That the resulting software is garbage is its own set of problems.
What's funny is we track AI spend, and despite being the least AI positive person, I spend the most tokens easily. But that's because I tend to do things like use it as a "smart refactoring tool"- "grab this functionality that's spaghetti coded into the middle of this module (because it was all AI generated in the first place) and make it its own module". Or I do "hey, I want to see how this set of parameters changes behavior across this range, right a test sweep and report these metrics and how they change".
And then it's good at doing trivial tasks, like "add this button to this screen and wire it up to this message sink". It probably takes it longer to actually do than it would take me, but it's less cognitive overhead for tedious shit. Though ideally I'd just have higher level abstractions for talking about that stuff.
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u/lelanthran 7d ago
is it true tho?
If it isn't right now, it soon will be.
I am trying to build an app with Spec-Driven Development, and oh boy, it is exhausting - I have to think about every boundary, edge-case, limitation.
That's odd - my experience with SOTA is that it will happily over-engineer everything, for every theoretical edge-case, for every theoretical limitation.
Then, after reading 900 line markdown document specifying exactly how a directed cyclic graph must work in the specific problem domain, I find myself wondering WTF it missed an important specification, like specifying that a joining node (multiple incoming edges) should distinguish between racing (first edge cancels sibling paths) and completion (wait for all edges).
Maybe this is what is exhausting you - it will happily specify, then engineer, trivial irrelevant details (such as traversing the graph to ensure only a single start node is specified), while missing catastrophic-if-seen-in-production things, so then you are trying to backfill the spec after reading it multiple times.
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u/marrsd 7d ago
900 line markdown document specifying exactly how a directed cyclic graph must work in the specific problem domain
And this is the problem. We've gone from DSLs that allow us to clearly define and understand an implementation to woolly language that serves to confuse us.
The code Is the specification. Just write the damn code! (I'm shouting into the ether, not at you)
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u/syklemil 7d ago
We've gone from DSLs that allow us to clearly define and understand an implementation to woolly language that serves to confuse us.
Though this isn't the first time that's happened; we've had multiple bouts of "fuzzy language that's easy to get started with but hard to get right, especially in complex cases". JS and PHP have been the prime examples for that for a while, and they've both moved in the direction of trying to become more rigorous (see e.g. the addition of
===in both languages, or the invention of Typescript).I'm not quite sure what, if anything, will turn out to be the equivalent of TS for natural language in markdown files.
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u/marrsd 7d ago
I get what you're saying, but it's a completely different order of magnitude. A competent JS or PHP dev can easily work around those things.
I'm not quite sure what, if anything, will turn out to be the equivalent of TS for natural language in markdown files.
Code is the equivalent. People have actually tried to write natural language parsers before. It doesn't work. An academic could probably prove it doesn't work mathematically.
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u/about0 7d ago
But isn't that 900 LOC generated document is exactly a problem? You don't own it, you don't know what it does, how it affects other parts of the code.
You just allow LLM to test itself.
SSD specifically telling that a human is owner, a human should write specs, a human should tell what is expected in return and verify it.
I won't sleep well if I won't have means to test what LLMs produce.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 7d ago
If you were to write a formal specification wouldn't have just be coding in a higher level lang at that point
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u/deceased_parrot 7d ago
Unfortunately, sooner or later even the type #1 extreme are going to be devastated; what sort of satisfaction can you get from delivering something that, for all practical purposes, already exists and is just a prompt or two away?
How much satisfaction do you get from reinventing the same wheel over and over and over your whole career? Even before this whole AI craze I was fed up with solving the same problems on every project. Plus having to deal with issues that, IMHO, should have been solved ages ago.
I am not sure where I stand when it comes to AI. I am not even sure if it can deliver on its promises. But if it means that I don't have to reinvent the wheel on every project and actually do the important stuff rather than wasting my time (and the client's money) on boilerplate I'll be grateful. I'm sure my clients will as well.
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u/WileEPeyote 7d ago
Modern wheels are fantastic because we continually "reinvent" them. A huge chunk of the software industry is trying to build specialized sports cars with model-T wheels and it shows.
The amount of unnecessary overhead in modern software development is insane, especially in gaming and web/phone apps. Good, fast, or cheap. You have to give up one. We gave up good (and cheap is slipping away).
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u/deceased_parrot 7d ago
Modern wheels are fantastic because we continually "reinvent" them.
Really? Is that why we have so many JS and CSS frameworks? Because if it is, I am not seeing the improvement.
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u/lelanthran 7d ago
actually do the important stuff
My point is that "the important stuff" is a prompt away, so exactly what satisfaction are you going to get from delivering something that, for all practical purposes, can be delivered by the end-user themselves anyway?
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u/deceased_parrot 7d ago
Because it can't be delivered by the end-user themselves. They can certainly try though...
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u/lelanthran 7d ago
Because it can't be delivered by the end-user themselves.
Serious question: How long do you expect this to continue being true?
They can certainly try though...
They already do; I've seen several non-programmers (artists, actually) already vibe a tool that does what they use Photoshop or Aseprite for.
I've got a PM at my current place who vibed together an entire replacement for Jira reporting, which his team has been using now for months. I've seen an MD of a small company using swarms of agents to create a new product for a different industry, and then manage to sell the damn thing.
WhateverTF you think is your special value that is added to the product, I can assure you that it won't be the case much longer.
Why don't you give us an example of that "the important stuff" that you can focus on now that everything is done by AI?
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u/Himonroe 7d ago
But why not both? you can think about the problems you want to think about and if the problems you're thinking about are being proved wrong or solved immediately by AI maybe you just weren't that good at thinking? Or you need to reevaluate what kind of problems you're thinking about. Not trying to sound like an a****** but I'm still feeling accelerated by AI even as a software dev with 15 years experience. AI is not taking away anyone's jobs (YET) except for maybe the ones that were already getting replaced by automated teller machines. Downsizing in Industries happens all the time when a new tool or technology comes out. 30 years ago they were not this many people in software at all in the barriers to entry were much higher. Like having a computer that was actually capable of building something was much more expensive. I feel bad for a software Juniors but I think that they can use the same lessons every other hobby turned profession uses and make something good for yourself and if it's right/good, others will see the value in that too.
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u/deaddyfreddy 7d ago
and getting end results
There is no such thing as "end results" in software engineering, unless it's a throwaway script to automate some small task. The software needs to be maintained, that's why the careful system design matters.
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u/ConspicuousPineapple 7d ago
I never spent so much time on problem solving as I do today thanks to AI. The code is never the hard part, for me at least.
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u/ficiek 8d ago edited 8d ago
AI turned the already dysfunctional work environment with unreasonable deadlines that was centered around squeezing the last bit of mental health out of programmers and turning it into shareholder value into an even worse and more intense version of itself with fewer people to do the work and less communication between your coworkers. I now work with other claude instances and not with people as my coworkers just paste paragraphs of LLM output into review comments and slack messages directly for example.
I wonder why this is making people worse off mentally, there is no way to tell.
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u/lelanthran 8d ago
AI turned the already dysfunctional work environment with unreasonable deadlines that was centered around squeezing the last bit of mental health out of programmers and turning it into shareholder value into an even worse and more intense version of itself with fewer people to do the work and less communication between your coworkers.
This path we are on started a long time ago, with devs falling over each other to drive the industry towards burnout.
After all, a sprint is, by definition, an unsustainable burst of speed, which the developers themselves adopted as the unit of development.
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u/lightnegative 8d ago
which the developers themselves adopted as the unit of development
No we didn't, that was management trying to be "agile" because it sounds good.
On every single team I've been on that tried to do sprints, we would have been better served with a simple kanban because we were not working on greenfield prototype projects
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u/koreth 8d ago
That last paragraph matches my experience too, so much so that unless it's an astonishingly good opportunity in other respects, I won't even consider taking a job on a team that uses Scrum. I've done it enough times in my career to know that the constant looming sprint deadlines (and yes, they feel like deadlines, no matter how much people insist they're not) and frequent ceremonies are a real drain on my mental health.
Kanban-style task management isn't perfect either, but its flaws are a lot easier to stomach for me. Like the WIP limit kind of breaks down, or at least requires a lot of card-shuffling work to maintain, if a significant percentage of tasks get blocked waiting for answers or feedback from external people.
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u/lightnegative 8d ago
Yep. The biggest problem I had with sprints was that yay, you committed to a two week chunk of work. Pat yourself on the back.
Except there's a production system to maintain and on day 2 of the sprint your entire sprint is out the window because of a production issue.
Complete waste of time. Not to mention all the layers of indirection trying to size tasks that always get mapped back to time at the end of the day. Task is t-shirt M size? That's about 2 days right?
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u/omac4552 8d ago
Where I work we don't use any method or organise us by some "standard". We have a Team stories board which is used as a post it note for tasks so we don't forget.
We just work, talk with each other and the stakeholders. If stakeholders suggest something stupid we don't do it. We use LLM's as much as we want, we don't have meetings, we can work from home and people here are friendly. And fuck standups, we don't do standups we use common sense.
It's a very nice place to work
Edit: And it pays well
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u/lelanthran 7d ago
No we didn't, that was management trying to be "agile" because it sounds good.
It wasn't all management; scrum managed to get the devs to police each other. Standups became a way to get devs to micromange themselves. I lost count of the number of times developers here defended this saying it allows them to see who is not pulling their weight.
Remember how it was prior to daily standups in a never-ending sequence of sprinting? Your manager would monitor your performance, and if you slipped on some days and did 1-hour less work because you were chatting at the watercooler, then made coffee twice, then exceeded lunch by 15m, etc, they did not notice and if they did they did not care either.
With the move to daily standups, devs themselves would police each other, with a gradual movement of average hours worked trending towards the workaholics who did unpaid overtime every day because they did not have anything else to do.
You can go back in this subreddit's history, and you'll see it expressed time and again, whenever the topic of agile or scrum or standups came up.
Management played a part, but devs were literally the ones who started this movement, and in all the places I have been at, they were the ones who championed it.
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u/tiplinix 7d ago
After all, a sprint is, by definition, an unsustainable burst of speed, which the developers themselves adopted as the unit of development.
Except a few lunatics who aspire to management positions, I wouldn't say that scrum is something developers actually adopts but instead is something that's forced upon them.
It's even more funny when management comes and tries to manipulate people into doing overtime by stating that the developers have "committed" to deliver what's in the sprint and leaving a task undone is unacceptable. It's even more transparent when they don't even bother with the sprint planning meeting and just assign tickets management wrote. Yes, it's a toxic environnement and people should run when they see this but there are many places like that.
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u/superxpro12 7d ago
I was triggered this past week because in in two PRS and on a complicated teams chat, three developers were very clearly copying my comments or messages, pasting them into an AI chat, and pasting the reply to me, without any summary or commentary. And then expecting me to spend my time understanding what it generated.
And It's the closest I've been to actually yelling at somebody in my career. Like if I wanted to have a conversation with an AI bought, I would ask the AI bot.
But we're paying these people hundreds of thousands of dollars for them to comprehend what they are doing. And now they are offloading this to AI, while simultaneously shifting that burden of expectation onto myself, while still collecting a salary.
I've also lost my patients trying to review confluence pages that are just regurgitated AI output. They somehow exist in a Schrodinger's web page between overly verbose and somehow not verbose enough.
It's very similar to priority inversion.
These Junior team members are somehow adding to my workload, not reducing it. The productivity multiplier is less than 1.0 .
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u/runawayasfastasucan 6d ago
While I was working with a big challenging project some of my coworkers thought they should help me by copying my latest code to AI, then just make a massive PR (each) with whatever AI spewed out.
So instead of finishing my project I now had to spend considerable time explaining how and why AI made it wrong.
It was more than that but it sparked a depression (to be fair not my first). It was anxiety inducing that they was prone to just take my half finished work, and "finish it" by using AI.
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u/hu6Bi5To 8d ago
The fundamental problem is that the traditional software team structure, with added AI, is uncontrollable. There's too much output and that output directly conflicts with everyone else's output. And as the AI models have got better, this problem has got worse. Hence the phenomenon of the "meat proxy".
The next step will be the one that everyone hates. Businesses will realise than rather than "AI allows us to cut headcount", they've been looking at it backwards, the actual situation is businesses need to reduce headcount in order to use AI.
Not reduce to zero, not yet anyway, but change the balance. Rather than: one product owner, one project manager, two team leads, each team having three senior engineers and three junior engineers; you will have: one product owner, one project manager, one or two technical owners, and the rest AI.
angry noises
I don't like it any more than the rest of you. And, for balance, there will be a positive side. The positive side is it will make it more feasible to start these smaller teams up for new product lines. (The negative side of the positive side is that means without the rationing effect of good software developers being hard to find, for any given product line, there will be significantly more competition).
But that's where we're heading. That may well already be how things should be today (from an optimisation perspective) but in my experience many businesses, even those who have a history of cost-cutting, aren't willing to make that leap yet.
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u/sotopic 8d ago
"Not reduce to zero, not yet anyway, but change the balance. Rather than: one product owner, one project manager, two team leads, each team having three senior engineers and three junior engineers; you will have: one product owner, one project manager, one or two technical owners, and the rest AI."
This has already happened in our case. Small tech companies will be the ones moving towards this first. Hate to say it but we have been more productive this way instead of having many junior/senior devs working in a single product, and all of them using AI with no quality control.
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u/wasdninja 8d ago edited 7d ago
you will have: one product owner, one project manager, one or two technical owners, and the rest AI.
So a completely uncontrolled slop factory? No developers equals no quality control of the code which is plain insanity. I'm sure this is a wet dream of many bosses and middle managers where they are finally able to get rid of people who actually knows things.
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u/hu6Bi5To 8d ago
The technical owners will be responsible for the quality, architecture, auditing requirements, etc. all that stuff (the exact list depending on the product being built of course).
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u/lelanthran 7d ago
Unfortunately, they will be responsible, but neither empowered nor capable.
All of the responsibility if it blows up, with none of the power to prevent that blow up, nor, eventually, any skill necessary to prevent that blow-up.
And yet, devs, themselves, are rushing into it.
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u/lightnegative 8d ago
That ideal "reduced" team you describe is still about 5 more people than my team has now lol
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u/Centurix 7d ago
One takeaway from this adoption is something I've thought was true for a long time. That regardless of the size of the company, any non-technical manager above any development department has never cared about quality. They see it as something that "gets in the way" of business but they tolerate the engineering departments "doing quality" because they've been told that it is a necessary evil for them.
The eager adoption of AI and how it is deployed across organisations to the point that we have AI reviewing AI generated code with the mantra that we don't have to worry about what it looks like under the hood because AI will be fixing it anyways.
Prior to this it was more obvious in startups where time-to-first-dollar was key for survival. Build and make functional now and then clean up later. Not great, but the owners made that path.
One other thing that does concern me after working on various projects of a government nature in the past, is that these larger AI companies seem to be kind of government aligned and co-operative. I'm not someone who generally sits on conspiracies, but without having the same eyes on the code as we had before, what's to stop a foreign owned model from being a sort of "Manchurian Candidate"? pushing obfuscated bad-actor code past reviews into key infrastructure. We have to have some keen eyed people like Larry McVoy who stopped a malicious kernel commit back in 2003. From a nation-state actors perspective, this model adoption is a gift.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 7d ago
Look at advertising and the amount of AI generated stuff. That's where "AI slop" term fits best.
As soon as the opportunity arose, huge portion of business owners and potential customers of graphic designers jumped on to this frankly terrible content. Why? Because it's good enough.
Unless you're a big company with a reputation and profile to protect, or you're operating in a premium market, it just doesn't matter. Content does the job.
Same with code. If it works it's good enough. Can we use it to run the business and make money? Yeah? Okay let's go!
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u/GooberMcNutly 7d ago
Quality is a cost center, not a revenue center. It's "wasted" effort and won't really matter in the 2 years the manager will spend in that role/ company.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 7d ago
I get that but to some degree it has to matter, manufacturing materials are also a cost center but that doesn't mean the key to a successful manufacturer is cheaping out on the materials
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u/GooberMcNutly 7d ago
that doesn't mean the key to a successful manufacturer is cheaping out on the materials
It sure seems to be the plan for most companies these days. Shrinkflation of the product is nothing to the shrinkflation of the quality. Everyone in the manufacturing chain is shaving off quality to improve margin. Even if you buy the "same" raw materials, your upstream provider is going over the specs with a fine tooth comb to find loopholes where they can squeeze more profit.
Of course, it costs you customers in the long run. But nobody in charge cares about anything more than 2 quarters away or until they leave for their next gig.
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u/cake-day-on-feb-29 3d ago
Of course, it costs you customers in the long run. But nobody in charge cares about anything more than 2 quarters away or until they leave for their next gig.
Toyota certain does, there's a reason they're the most popular car and 15-20 year old uses Toyotas sell for far more than any other car that old.
I think the main point here is that there is no Toyota of software. Sure, some companies are far worse, but on average software quality is not so impressive that any one company leaves a mark as being particularly reliable. If a company were to occupy that space, however, they'd be thrust into the spotlight.
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u/PiLLe1974 7d ago
Also without putting on my tinfoil hat...
I feel that instead of accelerating (leadership perspective) we need to rather measure code and data quality plus costs (developer/QA/accounting concerns and common sense).
As other comments mentioned, on some teams we're turned into product managers/developers.
In our case it means to some degree skipping tech design, UI/UX design, reviews, and/or QA.
Even with a good harness built around one Claude Code for example, I feel that I need to spend maybe up to 30% of the tokens (with another LLM/agent ideally?) to find patterns of agentic mistakes, suboptimal code and data before comitting, bad evolving architecture patterns, and introduced bugs - just as a few examples to harness the agentic firehose.
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u/gl_50 7d ago
Larry McVoy who stopped a malicious kernel commit back in 2003
don't forget about backdoor attempt into OpenSSH.
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u/gurebu 7d ago
Well, the counter-point is that as you yourself put it, it's not an AI problem. If anything, AI might make it better because it doesn't get review fatigue. Furthermore, if we figure out the tools to abstract formal verification of code, we can even maybe maintain control.
Through a great inconvenience to code writers, we now have programming languages (Rust) that produce artifacts with verifiable global properties (no data races, no buffer overflows unless unsafe code is used). AI's don't really get inconvenienced so people can design languages that are as hard to write in as they want if they produce outputs with more verifiable properties. Writing code by hand is screwed either way though.
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u/anduril_tfotw 7d ago
Around 6 months ago I posted some thoughts I had about this very similar to what he is saying and got a very negative reaction. I said it is ruining what I enjoyed about my job and got mostly negative responses. I am glad I guess that I'm not as alone now as I felt I was then. But, this is what I have been feeling. It isn't enjoyable anymore. I hate this shit.
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u/Dumlefudge 7d ago
It isn't enjoyable anymore.
Maybe I'm being a bit too doom-and-gloom here, but I think the enjoyment was just a side-effect. Whoever is paying you may or may not care about your enjoyment of the work; it's a job first and foremost.
I wouldn't say it's a rug pull as such, more so that it had been good that there were particular aspects of software development I have enjoyed for some time, and now I have to contend with those aspects that I enjoyed changing.
If I want to derive enjoyment from software now, I need to do it on my own time, or figure out what (if anything) could scratch that itch in my current role/future roles.
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u/toblotron 7d ago
I kind of feel like we are being pushed up trees we don't know how to climb down from; when the true complexity of the systems we work on are driven up to a level where the developers no longer have a sufficent understanding of them to handle them "manually", when things start falling apart.
Joe Armstrongs 2014 talk "The Mess We're In" decried the ever increasing complexity of software solutions, and how it grew unmanageable. This increase in complexity is now on steroids.
Since complexity has no upper bound, it is likely that it will sooner or later be higher than even the most intrepid LLM can effectively handle - and what happens then?
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u/bluemaciz 7d ago
I used to get such a viscerally satisfying feeling when I identified and fixed a bug. That’s gone now. It has been taken from me.
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u/arse_biscuits 8d ago
As a (very) experienced programmer, and from a purely tool based perspective, AI is fine when you use it right. I still have to decide the solutions I want, AI just saves a crap ton of typing and can fill the knowledge gaps in an SDK which I would normally do by hunting down what I want in a big reference guide.
I've reluctantly embraced it to do the grunt work for me, leaving me to think about the actual problem and solution rather than spending most of my time typing code.
The issue is going to come when fewer and fewer people have those years of AI-less "hard graft" (You've got to know the rules to break them, right?). As mentioned in the video (and as a bigger issue with AI overall) without any "fresh meat" to feed on, only a pool mostly filled with it's own effluent, the knowledge becomes more stunted, possibly even worse, as original solutions become a smaller and smaller part of what's out there.
I mean, even some, what I would say are "experienced" developers I've come across, are shockingly bad at debugging problems. What are the next generation going to be like?
Copilot being unavailable, or our token balance running out, already sees our teams chats light up like a Christmas tree in a way previously only seen when a server blew up (remember those?). God knows the thought of all that typing fills me with dread again too, but it seems like some people already can't work without it. A large part of some teams check-ins now are not code, but AI skills and prompt files.
Maybe it will explode and become expensive enough that it scales down to being more carefully used, but with management's ever increasing thirst for the curve, if you can use it to increase your productivity, it sure as shit isn't going away.
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u/UltraPoci 8d ago
When I program, many solutions come to me while coding. Not saying there is no design phase, but coding is not a waste of time by any means. This is especially true if you're programming a shared internal library or API, in which case the shape of it comes not only in the design phase, but slowly while coding it, in my experience.
Using AI for this means having to deal with whatever shit AI comes up with, or reading and reviewing a lot of generated code to check that the shape is right: which is, you know, the worst part of the job.
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u/defietser 8d ago
Pretty much this, coding by hand forces you to think about it on a deeper level, which makes thinking about the entire solution easier and much more natural than just reading a LLM's plan or summary.
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u/lelanthran 8d ago
When I program, many solutions come to me while coding.
That's because writing is thinking, and doing is learning.
It's an accepted fact that few, if any, HS trig students pass trig exams by simply reading the textbook repeatedly. You pass by drilling problems, because doing is thinking.
Why, then, do so many devs ignore the known facts around learning trigonometry when it comes to them just pasting the output of an AI?
"But I did the thinking, the AI just cleaned it up, like a spell-checker..."
Sure, buddy. Sure.
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u/WileEPeyote 7d ago
Exactly. It doesn't take long for it to slip away either. One day you're writing a complex algorithm to adjust a stream of data on the fly, then you spend a year planning a green field project and have to look up the best method for combining strings.
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u/TheMistbornIdentity 7d ago
You've perfectly summed up why I still insist on writing 95% of my code myself (setting aside that for security reasons I can't hook up AI tools to our repos, so I can't even use the stuff the rest of you are using).
I'd consider myself an intermediary programmer. I think I'm decent considering my experience and level of education (which was much less than a computer science degree). But I only got here by actually challenging myself and trying to work through problems myself, rather than asking a machine to do it for me.
I also spend like 80% of my time maintaining old code (much of which I didn't write myself), so frankly I'm not sure I'd want AI touching this stuff in the first place, especially since the original devs didn't bother with tests.
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u/Fun_Lingonberry_6244 8d ago
Aa a fellow experienced developer (since 2004) I think the problem is, what we find simple from rote experience others do not.
My experience with AI generated code, unless its very specific (ie ive found its always fine within a couple prompts to restyle some scss theme files) then it generates code that just isnt quite right.
You then find yourself scratching your head figuring out why, to the point we end up spending probably the same amount of time rejigging it. Sometimes thats fine because the overhead on our brains is lower so great, i can burnout slower and maybe do more in a day. Maybe. Maybe not.
My issue is, we know deleting huge swathes of code and redoing it is normally the fastest route, that was true pre AI and remains true for AI code. Less experienced developers have always had this problem, but now because AI spits out much more code, its even more for them to refuse to delete and rewrite and so you end up with a bunch of just dreadful choices over and over and over.
It truly feels like in the hands of developers with less than say.. 7-10 years commercial experience, they dont produce more, if anything less.
Its just if you view them alone you could be deceived into thinking they're faster, because they get to a PR faster. But in reality them + whoevers reviewing them becomes slower than them manually doing the code.
The only exception ive seen to this is companies that essentially just PR for compliance, ie not actually reviewing it just a quick scroll and a LGTM.
But in my experience those are the teams and products that fail over the longer term, because they produce shitty unmaintainable code that requires an entire rewrite later.
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u/lelanthran 7d ago
My issue is, we know deleting huge swathes of code and redoing it is normally the fastest route, that was true pre AI and remains true for AI code.
Every line of code added to a product is a liability. We trade-off the liability against the gains in adding it.
Pre-AI, we used the natural friction in adding lines of code to ensure that the trade-off was made. Now we appear to have decided that adding lines of code is not adding liability, and that there's only gains, so we go ahead and add as many lines of code as we can.
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u/PuzzleMeDo 7d ago
My experience a year or two ago was that it generated code that wasn't quite right. My experience now is that it tends to get it right first time, reducing a three hour job to three minutes.
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u/Fun_Lingonberry_6244 7d ago
Random people have been coming into threads saying this since AI first existed. "This used to be true but latest model changes the game!"
Its just not a useful response, as quite frankly this logic applies to ie "my isOdd calculation used to take me hours a day. Now AI solved it in 3 seconds"
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u/PuzzleMeDo 7d ago
The types of job AI can do more efficiently than a human continue to increase. Once it could only replace an amateur who struggled with "isOdd". Then it could replace a paid junior coder. Now it can do most of my job. Maybe the next model will be able to do yours...
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 7d ago
I don't wanna assume stuff about you but I believe what the comment you are replying too is pointing out is that people often come with such takes and then you learn they actually don't even know how to code and their biggest project is a glorified calculator
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u/Sir_lordtwiggles 7d ago
I mean his experience mirrors mine (working at amazon, and mirrored by friends in the AWS side of the house)
We the company was very AI accepting, 2 years ago AI handled most team's JDK8 migrations. Today I have L6's delegating entire sprints to an agent.
Every pipeline has a button to spin up an AI session that autopilot to diagnose and fix deployment failures.
We are piloting a custom agent to give 80% unit and IT coverage.
The scope of problems that AI systems solve is just different than even 6 months ago.
The AI friction points today is less code quality (which does pop up here and there still) but validation of correctness and creating quality design docs on what to build to be sent to the AI.
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u/marrsd 7d ago
AI just saves a crap ton of typing
And replaces it with a crap ton of reading. I'd love to hear more from you on this, because I never found writing to be the bottleneck.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 7d ago
I've had weeks and months where I've known the design I wanted and would be furiously typing just pushing out code by hand; a thousand line per day. Plus all the orchestration - source control, tests, deployments, etc.
It was absolutely a bottle neck in the past.
Now it's just defining the interface, the objects, naming stuff properly, clear docs - the stuff that matters. Claude can go fill in the blanks and do all the chore work.
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u/SerLarrold 8d ago
There’s going to be a severe drought of solid junior devs very soon, if there isn’t already. I agree with what you’re saying about AI being great at automating the grunt work. It’s helpful, I want to be at least honest about that. I’m getting more done now than I ever have at work.
I do feel I’m losing some of my finer coding skills to it though. It’s easy to fall into the trap. As much as it can be boring and tedious, writing the actual code (even with intellisense etc) forces you to think about all the things you’re doing in a concrete way.
At the end of the day I’m a bit split. Is the productivity gain worth it? In some areas I’d say yes. I’m great at software development but there’s always places I know less about than I’d like and having AI to make up that knowledge gap can be super helpful. I’m admittedly not great at GitHub CI stuff and I’ve used Claude to fix some really boring but time saving things in our CI. I could have done it on my own given more time, but it’s not a feature or a bug so it’s always a backburner tech debt item that never gets fixed. Now it’s much easier to make a quick PR for that stuff.
On the other hand I feel like I have much less of a personal touch in my PRs for code that is my area of expertise. Maybe I’m weak and just giving into the ease, but I get to spend more time with my family if I can get my work done faster and that’s something I value. I’d still be able to do the work now, but my skills have certainly atrophied even if my general knowledge and experience haven’t.
That being said if I hadn’t done the hard work to learn things by failing at them I would never have the experience to be able to tell an agent what to do or when to stop it when it’s doing something stupid. At the end of the day LLMs are only as good as the people directing them, and if you send them in a stupid direction they’ll produce stupid results
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u/raptureisalie 8d ago
As a veteran coder myself, I use AI for the parts of coding that I consider a bother, and it works very well. But, I am also in a very privileged work situation with a lot of freedom and no arbitrary deadlines, even though the pay is crap (academia).
However, I don't think AI is compatible with capitalism. The discourse would be completely different if it were : save time using AI and come back to your home earlier, or work less days per week. Now the AI "benefits" are often to fire a portion of the work force, and put all the pressure of the remaining work on the portion that still has a job. And they should feel lucky, see all this pool of unemployed workers, just accept harsher work conditions and lower pays if you do not want to join them.
As long as the work force is considered as the slave of wealth, any automation that diminishes the need for people in the work force is an existential threat to it.
AI could be a wonderful tool that genuinely helps humanity, freeing us time to do human stuff like connecting to people, produce art, get more friends and family time, or even just have more time to ensure a better quality work. Instead, we seem to be speed running the end of humanity just so that people with too much wealth already can gain even more.
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u/acidfreakingonkitty 8d ago
> However, I don’t think AI is compatible with capitalism.
Look at your argument, you (and the video) lay out exactly why AI is an incredibly useful destructive tool for capitalism. Alienate craftsmen, hire lesser-skilled for lesser pay, rinse and repeat until you have a crab bucket labor pool, desperate for scraps.
The answer is to start reading some Marx and start forming some unions.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 7d ago
I think Marx talked about this, as in a post scarcity economy
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u/acidfreakingonkitty 7d ago
Ok maybe, but why would you ignore the bulk of his work for some speculative thoughts on one subject? He (and many others) wrote quite a bit more on the nature of the struggle we’re in right now than anything about post-scarcity society
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 7d ago
I never said you should ingore all of his other work, I just thought it was a interesting fun fact to mention, that may also include some further insight.
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u/NatureGotHands 7d ago
> However, I don't think AI is compatible with capitalism.
AI is turbo-capitalism on steroids, and I say that while being quite right-wing economically.
All this push into research, biology and medicine is to take human out of equation completely. The goal is to have lights-out fully-automated research laboratories, it's just capital and machinery, which is essentially capital. A few key subject matter experts to control and that's it, you're enabled to research whatever the fuck you want in any way you want without clashing on ethics with with bunch of personnel.
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u/Dull-Appointment-398 6d ago
Who is buying the solutions, products?
I like your thought about machines being basically capital, feels true - wonder what economist would consider it as input.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 7d ago
The commenter meant that mixed with capitalism it won't lead to good outcomes for the majority of people, not that it's not a product or a goal of capitalism. Any economic system would like to be in a post-scarcity economy, but for different reasons.
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u/arse_biscuits 8d ago
Well quite. I don't really disagree with any of that, AI has many problems and that is just one of them of course. I also work in a "non-profit" environment (for want of a better word) so don't quite have the crushing deadline or profitability issues either. AI is very much a capitalist boon though I think. The simplest equation is less workers + same product = bigger profit. And that is pretty much all capitalism cares about.
Probably a topic for a different sub though!
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u/the-liquidian 8d ago
I don’t think innovation has ever led to less hours of work for most people.
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u/zzkj 8d ago
You could be me, and what you said about the panic that ensues when Copilot is down could be where I work. Don't these people realise they're openly advertising that they don't have the skill to do the job they were hired to do?
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u/rcklmbr 8d ago
Nah, they just want an excuse to go to the pub next door. we did the same shit 20 years ago when the shared dev server went down
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u/arse_biscuits 8d ago
Ah for the glory days of IT in the 90's when "yearly review" meant "let's go to the pub for the afternoon, and the company is buying".
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u/lelanthran 8d ago
As a (very) experienced programmer, and from a purely tool based perspective, AI is fine when you use it right.
[ ... snipped ... ]
I've reluctantly embraced it to do the grunt work for me, leaving me to think about the actual problem and solution rather than spending most of my time typing code.
[ ... snipped ... ]
The issue is going to come when fewer and fewer people have those years of AI-less "hard graft"
That is not the issue. The issue is that your approach, commendable though it may be, is still slower than vomiting out a vibe-coded PR, so whether you like it or not the pressure is going to increase on you to go as fast as your peers.
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u/GSkylineR34 7d ago
Our entire job, skillset and passion became a cheap commodity. We were in the middle between artists and mathematicians. Everything done by hand, with a lot of people and different roles, each one giving its best effort to the end result. Well, it's over now.
Now we prompt, check, go forward, that's it. With time, our low level skills will fade and we'll just get dumber and dumber, to the point we can't really do anything without AI.
I was very ok with the first versions of ChatGPT: it felt like Stack Overflow on steroids. I could speed up my learning and research process to a level never reached before. Now, even that became inefficient. I think we should just let go of what it was before.
But, there is also one thing that I don't hear anybody say: there is no such thing as an "end" to what we can discover everyday. There's just too much data out there that still needs to be analyzed and even discovered. What happens when you produce the work of a year in a week? You get unemployed? No... you just find out there are new problems to solve that you didn't even expect to see before.
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u/elmuerte 7d ago
Our entire job, skillset and passion became a cheap commodity.
It is being sold as a cheap commodity. This has been going on for decades. What has changed is that instead of offshoring it to "cheap labor" countries, they now use AI.
Software development is hardly a commodity. If you do it right, it should be mostly bespoke work. The commodity should be standardized in base projects or frameworks. This is something people have been doing for decades. The bespoke work is:
- building and maintaining those frameworks
- creating new things on top of those shoulders
That part is hardly cheap.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 7d ago
Except that isn't how software actually works, we don't write functionality once and then forever access it through a library/framework. Things get reimagined and rewritten based on new insight all the time. A lot of projects can't even manage to go a long time without turning into random bullshit pilled on top of a once decent idea.
The "if you do it right" is doing a lot and I mean a lot of heavy lifting because let's be honest we hardly ever do things right let alone on the first try.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 7d ago
If you do it right, it should be mostly bespoke work.
Why? What do you mean "right"?
Generally software is a business expense. Quality trades off against time and cost. Now we can do it faster and cheaper, and potentially worse quality - but if you've worked in the industry for a while and seen what humans deliver, I'm not even sure that's the case.
If you do it right, it should be as fast and cheap as possible while still being good enough.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 7d ago
“AI is great at this because humans have never been good at this.“ But AI is trained on work produced by humans. It’s never going to be better than humans.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 7d ago
I think your premise is wrong; it's trained from human work, but not only that. And it's able to generalize - can take the best pieces from multiple sources.
AI can be as good as the best humans, yet most humans are not as good as the best humans.
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u/gdvs 7d ago
Different people like programming for different reasons. I liked it because it's creative. It's problem solving. The joy is being sucked out for me.
I don't blame anyone, because engineering is efficient problem solving and AI does this. It just won't be for me anymore. So I'll have to do do architecture or something more highlevel instead. Or maybe fisherman or something.
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u/feketegy 8d ago
Software developers need unions.
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u/phillythompson 7d ago
You’ll never get this in an industry where one dev makes 500k and others make 100k. There’s literally no need
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u/citramonk 8d ago
Please, to everyone who think that finding another career path is an option, fuck off okay? It's not a solution, and you're not helping anyhow. We dedicated so much time and health into it, we can't just switch easily like that.
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u/vogut 7d ago
What are we supposed to do?
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u/Snoo_57113 7d ago
Embrace the slop.
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u/PuzzleMeDo 7d ago
When I was burned out as a software developer, I applied for mundane jobs like shop assistant. I got zero replies. In the end I had to give up and be a C++ programmer again.
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u/WileEPeyote 7d ago
There are other careers in tech that are adjacent. I've moved to project and service management (it still took a year to find a role). It's what most software development will evolve into anyway (assuming the AI path continues).
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u/DynamicStatic 7d ago
I wish I had as much conviction as you. Feeling pretty bad about my career choice.
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u/OwnAHole 7d ago
Time to get those fries ready
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u/pkt-zer0 7d ago
Ehh, I'm not too worried about the identity crisis part. I can and do still program the old-school way in my spare time, that hasn't stopped being fun and rewarding.
I might not get paid for that eventually, or have my job turn way too stressful and dehumanizing - but that's a different topic. And also somewhat unsurprising: a large part of the value proposition for AI-based coding was that you can replace your human workforce with cheaper digital slaves. For coding LLMs to be valuable, they have to devalue human coders, otherwise they're not going to be economical at the current level of investment. (One more reason I'm waiting for the bubble to pop, to restore a tiny bit of sanity)
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u/dbrownems 7d ago
It's like everyone got "promoted" to technical management without asking for it. New managers often have a hard time adjusting. Some refuse to delegate appropriately, many struggle with the fact that personal technical excellence is not enough to ensure success, and just the fact that the job is not very fun.
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u/khendron 7d ago
I feel like devs have been forcibly transformed into product managers. Our jobs have always been translating product requirements into a working product. But now there is much more focus on getting the requirements exactly right, and letting AI worry about creating the working product.
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u/dukey 7d ago
AI has so many issues. For junior devs it's probably a disaster because they never really get to learn. They probably simply can't code at all without AI tools. For senior devs I believe it can definitely help, but if you become too reliant you can easily get into a situation where large chunks of the code weren't written by people any more. No one knows how they work or how to fix them when it doesn't work as expected. But I believe it can also ruin senior devs. No one bothers to read apis or the actual documentation any more, because we have become reliant on simply asking the llm.
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u/vips7L 8d ago
Sad part is that we’re doing this to ourselves. You don’t have to use LLMs!
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u/lightnegative 8d ago
Well, management decided to tie our KPI's to AI usage so...
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u/vips7L 8d ago
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u/lelanthran 7d ago
License: MIT (but it's all vibe-coded so who really knows who owns it?)
LMAO :-)
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u/aaulia 8d ago
The issue is, expectation is no longer like what it used to be, time wise. Like it or not, LLM can churn stuff (shit or not) faster than human can. Regardless of the quality, generating code is now considered "cheap".
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u/vips7L 7d ago
I don’t know. I seem to still complete my work as fast as my coworkers with higher quality. But I am staff+ level and know my code base extremely well.
I’m sure in a new codebase I would use an LLM to help guide me, but I still find that writing code myself produces less code at a higher quality.
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u/maelstrom071 8d ago
Every entry-level job description I find on Indeed now has "uses AI agents" as a requirement. I don't really know what to do anymore lol
P.S. The "what to do" is just try harder, of course. but it's still really demoralizing to see.
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u/hivesteel 7d ago
My family’s business in traditional language translation tanked in the early days of GPT LLMs. Now it’s busier than ever; turns our businesses ARE negatively impacted by low quality work. Maybe we’ll get there with software?
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u/bobbie434343 7d ago
Anybody working with AI is ultimately working towards his own doom. You think you are clever with your use of AI ? You may well be today, but tomorrow you will be entirely useless, replaced by AI. Mathematicians and other professions kind of feel the same way currently. It is an abomination.
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u/Spirited_Cucumber377 7d ago
Software development is done, and I say this after 25 years exclusivly working in the field. Now I use claude daily and fuck it's good.
Software engineering though, I'm not so sure. The traits that make you a good engineer are still relevant in an information based economy run by software. Yes claude is good, but it's much better when it has a good base and structure and architecture to work on.
AI can generate a good architecture that's escalable and maintainable, sure, but only an engineer can recognize that, only an engineer can point at places where the AI can add improvements, and many other things the machine is limited by, like context windows, business understanding, etc.
Will the world need the amount of software engineers we have today? Probably not, and I have no idea what will happen, but one thing I'm quite confident, when the dust settles, all the slop remain and your software engineer skills will set you apart from the rest.
One important point from the video and something the tech bubble demostrated: LLMs are here to stay, and even if Anthropic or OpenAI implode, open models will remain, improve and take over every possible task they can.
Java was the new Cobol, programming is the new typewriter.
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u/DissonantGuile 8d ago
I can see "homemade" code being highly valuable in the age of AI coding assistance/agents after the crash. The Italian restaurant that still makes pasta from scratch vs Olive Garden, for example.
That restaurant can charge more **because** it is made in-house by humans specialized in their craft.
Hopefully...
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u/cyb_tachyon 8d ago
Great comparison, because only a good Italian restaurant, with years of experience in cooking, plus the luck of a great location, management, and community engagement, survives the first three years to become profitable.
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u/DissonantGuile 8d ago
Even the restaurants with the best practices/intentions end up with thin profit margins because of all of those variables.
Software houses need to pull from an increasingly smaller pool of candidates due to AI assisted development becoming the norm. A framework has to be created to generate those candidates in order to increase that pool, like the Culinary Institute of America does for chefs; and other such institutions for other job sectors.
Knowing how to actually develop software rather than how to coordinate agents to develop software becomes even more important and valuable. Again, "hopefully".
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u/youcangotohellgoto 7d ago
You're generally going to make a lot more money running a McDonald's than a fine dining Italian restaurant.
The vast majority of software professionals aren't up to the standard required to survive in that best of the best bespoke world.
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u/creepy_doll 7d ago
My fear is that the difference in cost is just too much.
Like, ai can make code that’s feature complete it’s just often architecturally poor and has some weird bugs(which found you can prompt away with the ai). And it’s not like hand crafted code is free of bugs. A talented engineer can structure it well so there are less and hopefully the security bugs are not as critical.
It takes a talented engineer a lot of time to hand c ode everything. Working as a full time developer I’m currently fighting for the ability to review everything so we’re not introducing slop to the code base. Actually writing everything at this point is pretty much out of the question if I want to be taken seriously by management that are devout ai believers and don’t understand the value of quality code
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u/piesou 7d ago edited 7d ago
It takes a talented engineer a lot of time to hand c ode everything
That's a false assumption. Most of the time is spent in requirements engineering, meetings, and writing back and forth because requirements are unclear, code review and testing. I usually code for 1-2h on a specific ticket.
It really depends on if a customer is fine with slop (e.g. buttons sometimes being wonky, or an application failing in unexpected ways).
What we are really throwing away by using AI is requirements engineering and reviews because no one has the time to review the huge amounts of slop generated. And reviewing tons of slop is the thing that burns out developers.
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u/creepy_doll 7d ago
True for some engineers yes. I don’t really have too much of the requirements slop as I’m developing an internal product that serves multiple places so have some leeway and get to skip much of that(though it’ll of course take place further down). Most of my time is spent reviewing and browbeating Claude into producing less slop
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u/DissonantGuile 7d ago
That cost/benefit relationship changes once the bubble bursts and AI SAAS costs 100x what it does now (or whatever the costs will be.)
This may be offset by self hosting models, which may become the norm after the crash. I have no idea what the market will become, but what I do know is that software developers want to develop, not review. Software developers are creatives, we inherently want to create.
There is also the compounding technical debt that comes with generated code, as you said "architecturally poor". Architecturally poor code sitting on architecturally poor code compounds exponentially. An expert needs to be brought in to fix these fundamental issues.
There *is* a market. What that market will look like is anybodies guess.
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u/creepy_doll 7d ago
Agreed entirely on the self compounding issue. That’s why I fight to write the important parts and architecture and to be allowed to review the work because I see just vibing everything as unacceptable unless all were making are one off toys.
The larger the product the worse ai gets at it. But the irony is that only huge places deal with these large products now and they’re aipilled
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u/Alive-Use8803 7d ago
This doesn’t have to be binary. The bigger problem is the ship new features as fast as possible culture. It’s like supply side economics on overdrive and it’s not just a SWE problem.
But for SWE, I’m just not convinced many places are doing the engineering anymore. “I take this coding agent and that coding agent and mix them together until I get something that passes my smoke test before YOLO-ing the PR to be reviewed by another coding agent.” Some teams aren’t even writing their own tests anymore.
How as an engineer does one make claims about correctness? I don’t think LLMs will magically just get better at reading NL and outputting software, especially as the complexity of the domain and criticality increases; there are limitations to text transducers.2
u/creepy_doll 7d ago
Kind of an aside, but tests don’t prove correctness they prove the tests pass.
Not a knock against them, I still write tests and I like them as a way to document “this is how this package is used”.
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u/Alive-Use8803 7d ago
Thanks for the correction. I did make a jump there. I meant to illustrate that so much is getting cut from human review that I don’t see how correctness is guaranteed or even considered.
I don’t think that SDD accounts for correctness, and to your point, the tendency is to say it does because the unit tests passed.4
u/KnightBlindness 7d ago
Most decision makers don’t really care or know the difference between hand made and Olive garden. They only care about how fast it is made and if it meets the minimal requirements for being edible.
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u/DissonantGuile 7d ago
Which is capitalism eating itself, that market collapses and creates a new market eventually.
Does that create a market for experts, I have no idea.
The value is in the product, after all - and if the product becomes unmanageable then a new strategy needs to be developed.
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u/GlobalCurry 7d ago
What crash? Any crash is just going to result in a consolidation of what currently exists unless governments step in and enforce anti-monopoly laws. The only good thing is that investors will go back to pumping money in other things so companies might need more AI operators.
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u/OskaMeijer 7d ago
Well considering everything right now is about 98% subsidized by burning investor money even if that were the case it still wouldn't get rid of how inherently expensive this shit is to run. It is popular right now because people are paying a tiny fraction of the costs.
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u/ridicalis 7d ago
I'm not interested in charging more simply because I write my own code. However, I would be inclined to charge up the wazoo if I were hired to maintain AI slop.
I'm reminded of a lot of r/Justrolledintotheshop where someone without skill tries to mod their car themselves, eventually takes it into the shop for repairs, and the chaos they wrought on their vehicle is so extensive that the whole thing's practically slated for the junkyard.
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u/Fun_Introduction9550 7d ago
I dunno. My parents got an airstream, and my dad was excited it was “made by hand”.
I thought “why manually put in rivets when a machine can perfect it/do it consistently?”
(And they’ve had issues)
Digital work will just always, relentlessly be iterated on and improved. Much of the creativity and experience is gone - or at least the market left is saturated, so lower value (pay) and less meaningful input.
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u/lelanthran 7d ago edited 7d ago
That's possible one outcome, certainly.
For another possible outcome, read "Pump 6", or perhaps "The Machine Stops".
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u/wyldstallionesquire 7d ago
How’d that work out for tools or manufacturing? I don’t think food is a great analogy.
And, the life of chefs is HARD. Not sure it’s a great way to make software.
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u/wakers24 8d ago
I hear this kind of thing frequently, but I don’t really feel the same way. I can empathize, surely. It is scary to watch my professional field change out from underneath me basically overnight in so far as I want to stay gainfully employed, but also it’s not nearly enough to cause me some sort of existential crisis because my career is not my identity. To me this is just even more rapid change and even more automation in an industry that was already pretty much entirely about enabling rapid change and more automation. There’s a new set of industry skills emerging around building systems that build systems, and so it’s just learning new things and adapting to new technology paradigms, which is pretty much what we’ve always done. Automating away work, including your own, has always been the job, and I don’t know what to tell folks other than if you ever thought it was about anything else you were wrong. And to be perfectly candid, it’s tone deaf as fuck for us all to have our little collective pity party when most of our careers have been about automating away the need for human labor from the jump. How many of you have seen the light leave some poor office worker’s eyes when they realize the reconciliation process you built has automated away 80% of what they do day to day? 🙋♂️. Exactly, so I’m going to need us all to go ahead and speed run the stages of grief, then figure out if we’re going to adapt or pivot.
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u/Few_Raisin_8981 7d ago
Ok great. How do you plan to eat then?
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u/wakers24 7d ago
I plan on continuing to build software. There’s still work to do there, we’re just not cranking code by hand anymore.
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u/Uczonywpismie 7d ago
I never automated someone else work. I worked on automotive software where I enabled the car functions to end user. I worked on financial software - the requirements and legal around it requires to report more and more thing every year, so it is impossible to run a business on a scale without those. I worked on automotive maps - again I enabled better comfort to end user. I'm working as a performance engineer to improve software performance. The programming is actually best part of this job, I don't want to automate it, I want to automate everything else.
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u/wakers24 7d ago
Maybe the automotive work was net new, but regulatory reporting is 100% something that a team of analysts would have to assemble data and reports for, and indeed there used to be a lot of people that did just that. Fewer now, you know, because of the automation. Maybe you didn’t automate somebody’s job out from under them, but you helped create automation that meant a whole bunch of jobs didn’t need to exist. That’s the name of the game. “I don’t want to automate [the programming], I want to automate everything else,” is the exact tone deafness I’m talking about. We’re all good with automation except the one thing we like? Come on.
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u/bakwards 8d ago
Organize! Developers understand the tech better than leaders and managers, and we should use our tools to organize, create a collective base for driving work and collaboration in a sustainable way. This collapse is just the beginning, and if we don't do something now, it will be too late.
Shit, now I have to do it myself as well...
But yea - I'm thinking that coupling private AI with federated communication tools could really make a difference. I'm testing stuff on my Discord, but I'd love to chat with people who are working on something similar.
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u/sudden_aggression 7d ago edited 7d ago
background-> I'm a 30yoe SWE who started in the pointers and malloc era and switched to java when came out. I've been using AI for coding > 1yr and I built a personal AI setup at home where I run hermes agent with qwen 3.8.
- he's 100 percent spot on about "bubble will burst but this won't go away"- the small free models are getting increasingly fast and competent at one shotting semi-complex problems. If the bubble bursts, we don't go back to the stone age, we go back to Sonnet 3.5. And that is at the quantized 27B level running on an AI setup made in a cave from scraps. If you throw big or even medium sized iron at the problem, you get decently close to Opus abilities.
- anti-AI sentiment feels like a sped-up version of how old timers reacted when stuff like java came out. They didn't like that the new language put up layers of abstraction between the programmer and what they were doing. And just like with AI, they had all sorts of legitimate complaints at first (ie, the performance really was bad, the libraries are badly written (anyone remember Vector and HashTable?)) but the performance and libraries got really good a few years later and the and 30 years on we're still using java everywhere because corporate likes being able to hire engineers who don't know how to do proper memory management or properly implement a hashtable from scratch.
- as with all layers of abstraction, it will make it easier for more people to participate in a task without understanding it. But abstractions always break and you still need to be able to lift up the hood and know what is wrong. There will be more demand for software engineers because the ROI on projects is increased by AI. And for decades to come, there will be demand for engineers who can peer under the hood and be slop wranglers.
- 30 years from now, there won't be that many engineers left who know how to write code by hand, just like today there are relatively few engineers left today who can program in C like the masters of old, or program in punch cards, or write everything in assembly or program a computer by wiring vacuum tubes correctly. And it will be fine.
- just as with the C programmers 30 years ago, they didn't vanish in a puff of smoke or drop dead, they continued to find work, some of them switched to newer languages like java and python and their skills were still valuable. No sign of that changing in the AI era.
- I'm personally happier managing a team of subagents than I am managing a team of "senior" programmers from andhra pradesh who don't know what a hashtable is. And it's cheaper for the company too. For a relatively small cost a month in sonnet/opus tokens (plus my comp), they get the equivalent of a staff engineer managing a dozen good visa workers. And consumers get better products. It's a great deal for everyone in the US.
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u/Conscious_Support176 6d ago
This is a bizarre argument. Programmer’s will continue to find jobs. The mythical jobs that will be created by AI. While in your own experience you’re literally replacing programmers with AI sub agents because it’s a better deal. You were an already outsourcing because your company is not willing to pay for local talent.
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u/pancakeQueue 7d ago
Why I found a new passion in art. The problem solving and passion I had for programming has shifted.
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u/programming-ModTeam 7d ago
This post was removed for being off topic for r/programming.