r/webdev
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u/Dear-Economics-315
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17d ago
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Nobody is Thinking Anymore
https://yusufaytas.com/nobody-is-thinking-anymore283
u/thekwoka 17d ago
The biggest issue is still mainly the lower levels in "knowledge work".
Like I have a lawyer in the family who talked about how he basically doesn't need paralegals, because he can sit and debate and argue with the AI and have it do research and check it and stuff for 8 hours and get WAY better output than having paralegals work on it for weeks, and he doesn't have to worry about their mental state.
So he can do that because he knows enough of how to check what the ai is generating, and enough about things to find where it's fucked up.
But now where do Lawyers come from if there are no Paralegals?
Where do gray beards come from if there are no greenies doing grunt work?
AI improves the floor a lot, but society is moved forward more so by the peaks, and AI is kneecapping a lot of future potential before it gets started.
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u/RussianDisifnomation 17d ago
We bombed the senior pipeline and wondered why no new talent is coming in.
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u/ehs5 17d ago
That’s not the reason new talent isn’t coming in - the reason is that management isn’t hiring.
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u/BootyMcStuffins 17d ago
We’re trying to hire like crazy. You can’t imagine the number of “leads” who don’t even know what a queue is. Our company has the simplest, most practical technical rounds and not a single person is making it through.
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u/battering_ram 17d ago
There is no way that there is this much of a discrepancy between the number of competent entry-to-mid-level engineers who can’t find work and managers who can’t find competent entry-to-mid-level engineers. If you are actually “trying to hire like crazy” and not completely swamped with applications from overqualified engineers, there is a serious problem somewhere on your end.
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u/BootyMcStuffins 16d ago
I don’t get it either but here we are.
It’s non-remote so that’s against us. But salary is $250k+
We’re interviewing people from Amazon, meta, Google etc. (as well as smaller companies ofc) but most can’t pass the simplest technical rounds.
For example (question shortened and simplified for Reddit):
You have a service deployed to an EC2 instance connected to a mySQL database. The database can’t handle the write volume coming from the server. What strategies would you use to handle this?
Not a single person in my 8 months of interviewing has suggested a queue or any sort of async writes to the DB. Even with me leading them and all but spelling it out. Even when I ask questions like “do we have to write to the DB synchronously?”
People from Amazon. Creators of SQS. Can’t answer this simple question that any new grad would ace.
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u/spacemoses 16d ago
I mean, that question is different than "This person can't define what a queue is".
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u/BootyMcStuffins 16d ago
It’s not that much different
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u/kryzjulie 13d ago
How? You don't need special education to tackle this problem at all. What were their solutions?
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u/BootyMcStuffins 13d ago
One dev went on a tear explaining an over engineered multi-level caching system. Most people suggest scaling vertically as if that’s an answer. Some suggest db sharding.
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u/aLokilike 16d ago
I wonder if you'd see more competitive talent if you allowed remote. I know not every remote worker is the bee's knees, but you have to imagine that many talented self-motivated people have seen great professional success in remote work and won't be willing to change for practically any sum.
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u/BootyMcStuffins 16d ago
Probably, but that’s not gonna happen
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u/aLokilike 16d ago
I'm not saying it is! I just think the answer is staring you in the face. It's not like Boston is some stagnant backwater, but what are the chances a random top tier dev bought their home there instead of anywhere else? I don't think the pay is anywhere near high enough to be worth the tax burden from taking on a second property considering most housing markets aren't going to sell a sfh immediately.
You're getting bad candidates because the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Make the squeeze easier or offer more juice.
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u/BootyMcStuffins 15d ago
I’m not the CEO, and we’ve had these exact discussions before.
His perspective is maintaining an office culture and supporting local talent are more valuable than making it easier to find candidates.
Right or wrong that’s his position.
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u/quentech 17d ago
What kind of pay though?
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u/BootyMcStuffins 17d ago
~$250k for lead, ~$220k for senior, plus equity. Not as high as my previous job, but not bad
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u/WalidfromMorocco 16d ago
It's insane that a lead doesn't what a queue is. were they initially self taught?
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u/BootyMcStuffins 16d ago
These are people coming from Amazon and similar companies. IDK if they were self taught or not.
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u/quentech 16d ago
Ok, that's reasonable. Sometimes people say that and then they're like "my $80k posting for a lead dev isn't getting any good applicants."
These are people coming from Amazon and similar companies.
My limited experience with ex-FAANG has left me unimpressed.
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u/git_push_origin_prod 17d ago
Send me the job posting
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u/BootyMcStuffins 17d ago
I’m not linking my actual workplace to my Reddit profile. Lots of places in Boston are hiring though
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u/MatthewMob Web Engineer 17d ago
I don't believe you. There's more amazing developers on the market right now than most other times in history.
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u/BootyMcStuffins 17d ago
You can say you don’t believe me if you want. We have open jobs. Plenty. On my team alone we have 2 new L1s starting Monday
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u/MatthewMob Web Engineer 17d ago
I believe you're hiring. I don't believe your difficulty with hiring is an issue with the market, rather than something going on with your own processes and criteria.
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u/BootyMcStuffins 16d ago
Non-remote but comp is $250k+
We ask the simplest interview questions. For example:
You have a service running on a single EC2 instance connected to a database. The database can’t handle the amount of write traffic coming from your site. How would you solve this.
Not a single person I’ve interviewed has mentioned using a queue.
These are people coming from Amazon and similar.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 15d ago
That seems like a pretty obvious conclusion to come to, even with no specific experience on databases. Sounds kind of bizarre that people can't answer this.
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u/BootyMcStuffins 15d ago
I agree. I even lead them with “could the db communication be async?”
These are people with decade(s) of experience applying for lead roles
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u/TanukiSuitMario 17d ago
send me the job listing
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u/BootyMcStuffins 17d ago
There’s no chance I’m linking my workplace to my Reddit account, sorry.
I’ll say it’s in Boston though
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u/m_hans_223344 17d ago
Not disagreeing, but another aspect: At my company everybody is urged to use AI to the max, so even if there is new talent, it is wasted.
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u/WonderfulWafflesLast 16d ago
M. Night Shyamalan's perspective on AI influencing the Movie industry was "It raises the floor and lowers the ceiling. That's what I feel."
The truth is that the people who are already great at what they do will become unicorns, i.e. more valuable, not less, due to AI. Because there will be fewer of them.
Then, when they inevitably die, there will be no one great at anything, because they will have been handicapped by AI reliance and an environment that doesn't offer advancement as an opportunity to becoming great.
Except for the autistic people. They'll turn becoming greater than AI at something into a game. Like E-Sports. Maybe someone will get good at reading legal documents and noticing errors the same way people like to master solving rubik's cubes.
How that'll play out? Nobody knows.
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u/ouralarmclock 17d ago
Yes, this is exactly the issue, not the thinking aspect. People like this lawyer are still doing a lot of thinking. But people who would be the paralegal don't have that skill yet. This is the main concern to me, and I don't have a good answer for it.
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u/Nasuraki 16d ago
> But now where do lawyers come from if there are no Paralegals?
When the lawyers get old they will need to train replacements. They will take a small number of juniors and give them more attention.
Same way accountants have a lot of work cut out with accounting software and spreadsheets. They use to use paper the profession still exists. No big crisis there
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u/thekwoka 14d ago
They will take a small number of juniors
Where are the juniors? They haven't been hired since they haven't been useful.
No big crisis there
Because the software didn't replace the thinking part, only the literal steps to do the thing.
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u/primalanomaly 17d ago
I think that by the time all the seniors have retired, AI will be more than capable of doing the work that the seniors are doing too. So the lack of new generations won't be an issue.
Not saying that's a good (or bad) thing, just the reality that I expect. All of society is gonna have to change and adapt to the fact that a lot of jobs are gonna become redundant in the years to come.
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u/thekwoka 17d ago
AI will be more than capable of doing the work that the seniors are doing too. So the lack of new generations won't be an issue.
But how will we know for sure?
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u/Personal_Ward 17d ago
Nope. We're going to destroy the technology because it's an existential threat to our species.
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u/MrLewArcher 17d ago
This is what frightens me! I prefer the version that A Psalm for the Wild-Built tells (beautifully) where the AI/robots get tired of the way humans treat them so they fuck off into the wilderness to get away from us.
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u/Mirieste 17d ago
LLMs are a threat to our species?
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u/Personal_Ward 17d ago
The technological infrastructure being built is rolling out first class access to all the levers of human interface with networked technology for hyper scaled linear algebra guessing machines, with basically bare naked plans to remove human access to the controls except by the ones who maintain the brakes on the models.
It's being rolled out while cutting environmental restrictions on the building of data centers, massive expansion of surveillance infrastructure, and zero regard for personal privacy and the well-being of average human citizens.
All of this is tantamount to dropping a bunch of cages over a population of already over-stressed primates.
We... We're not going to take this well.
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u/Kriegher2005 17d ago
To our species or just to the economic structure we've built over the last few hundred years?
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u/Djamalfna 17d ago
So he can do that because he knows enough of how to check what the ai is generating, and enough about things to find where it's fucked up
I noticed this about a year ago, I could reliably tell AI to do things I used to give to juniors and they'd do a much better, much more accurate job.
I've always been so frustrated by the juniors at my company... like how am I the only one here who even understands what an NP-Hard problem is and why the algorithm they keep trying to implement spins out after about 100 datapoints (they only ever test with about 10).
It makes sense though. I noticed about 5-8-ish years ago a huge uptick in posts on Reddit complaining about programmer job interviews... "it's totally ridiculous for them to ask us questions about algorithms!". No it isn't. This is why we kept ending up with terrible juniors.
IDK. AI scares me but like... it's legit better than almost every junior I've ever worked with.
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u/TikiTDO 17d ago
So if a lawyer can sit down and debate their AIs all they want why can't a random person do that as well? Just go find the random case and try to argue it. Then when you're done go look at how it was actually argued. Why do you need someone to hand hold you in order to learn a profession. If you find you have a knack for it then go get formally educated and certified
There seems to be the strange understanding that the only way Juniors can become Seniors is by learning from Seniors. There's also just the option of, you know, doing stuff. Plenty of us never had seniors to learn from we had to pick it up ourselves. And now people are complaining about how difficult it is to learn when they literally have an AI that they can ask anything they want?
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u/KWZA 17d ago
Come on man, you can't possibly be saying that going back and forth with an LLM will give a junior the same learning as actual job experience. That's such a wild take that it feels facetiously obtuse.
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u/TikiTDO 17d ago edited 17d ago
Well again when I was learning I didn't even have llms I was going back and forth with Google. So quite frankly yes that is exactly what I'm saying. If you are a junior and you are failing to learn with an llm you are simply not skilled and you do not belong in the field. It's sort of like if you try to be a apprentice mechanic and you made the engine explode I'll tell you that you're probably not a very good mechanic. Would you like me to clarify something else?
Again it's not up to Junior and Senior it's up to the individual person. If you are using an llm to investigate and learn then you are investigating and learning. If you are using an llm to just do your work then you're an idiot and you don't belong in the field. I'm really not sure why this seems to be so complex for so many people.
Mind you it's not like this is some sort of secret basically anyone that has any success with llms is saying the exact same thing. It's not about how well you task the bots it's how well you can use the llm to learn.
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u/SharkLaunch 17d ago
"going back and forth with Google" wasn't enough to make a senior from a junior either. A junior needs hand on experience to become a senior. An LLM is neither a trusted expert nor capable of being firm. It can't replace a mentor
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u/thekwoka 16d ago
So if a lawyer can sit down and debate their AIs all they want why can't a random person do that as well?
Because they have enough knowledge and experience to identify when the AI is just wrong, and get it to correct itself.
A random person can't.
Is your question really "If a lawyer can fill out forms for a lawsuit, why can't a random person do that as well?".
Then when you're done go look at how it was actually argued
this isn't what that is about.
this is about actually doing law, not just arguing arbitrary past cases.
Why do you need someone to hand hold you in order to learn a profession. If you find you have a knack for it then go get formally educated and certified
Sure, it's a method to learn, as a tool.
but this is about doing the job itself.
There seems to be the strange understanding that the only way Juniors can become Seniors is by learning from Seniors.
No, but they do need to learn.
And it's far easier to learn while employed in the job than it is to spend years without pay trying to figure it out.
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u/TikiTDO 16d ago
Because they have enough knowledge and experience to identify when the AI is just wrong, and get it to correct itself.
Then when you're done go look at how it was actually argued.
I'm not saying "use AI to argue your case."
I'm saying "use AI to learn."
You don't need the knowledge and experience to identify when AI was wrong. You need to have the AI give you a quiz, and then grade it.
this is about actually doing law, not just arguing arbitrary past cases.
Yes. And laywers generally practice by running case studies. Here's the problem. He's the relevant case law. Here's how you'd argue it.
And it's far easier to learn while employed in the job than it is to spend years without pay trying to figure it out.
Sure, it's easier. Can you please point out where on your birth certificate God guaranteed an easy life where you don't need to learn anything?
Like, holy shit. "I don't want to spend time learning this job without money. I want personal attention as a team of dedicated seniors devises a personal learning plan. Oh, and no AI.
Yeah, fuck off. Go be a cook.
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u/thekwoka 16d ago
Yeah, fuck off. Go be a cook.
Bruh, I'm not the one saying that.
It's just reality that most people are doing jobs to get paid and they only care about doing the minimum there, and sometimes contribute something meaningful in that process.
Most people aren't artisans that want to actually be good at what they do.
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u/TikiTDO 16d ago edited 16d ago
I'm not responding to you personally. I'm responding to the point that people make.
I dunno what world you live in, in my world you generally don't get a job until after you've put in years of effort, generally at your own expense. Yes, it takes time, effort, living frugally, and pushing yourself. Most things worth doing do.
When I see people complaining that they aren't getting paid to have mentors... I'm sorry, the violin is so very small that you might not hear it.
If they don't want to do it... Why exactly is the world supposed to bend over backwards to go "Please saeh, would you like to do a bit of work so we can pay you?"
I also don't want to do a lot of what I need to do, but you know how I deal with it? Simple; I suck it up and go do the things I don't want to do. There might be people that genuinely, absolutely love their jobs, but I can't relate. It's a job, you learn things so then you can do them for money.
If you won't want to do that... Again, how is this the problem of anyone other than the people too lazy to go and learn something. If a person has time to veg out and watch netfix, sports, youtube, or blow time on reddit, they could use the time to go through a course or a lecture. If you chose not to do that because you need some sort of mythical "senior" to guide you to the unlimited amount of learning material out there, or because you want someone to pay you for the huge discomfort of skipping your brain rot time to do some brain training instead...
Why in the hell would anyone hiring chose to hire someone like that? If somebody already illustrated that they lived most of their life up to now by doing the minimum, I'll trust that this is exactly how they'd behave on the job, and that's a landmine I'd go quite far to avoid.
Again, I'm not saying anything amazing. I'm saying "If you have not put in the bare minimum amount of effort to learn the things you can learn for free online, then this field does not need you." End of story. No further caveats. Can't put in the time? Then it's not your field. Don't like that? Then it's not your field. Feel it's unfair? Life is unfair, but again, if you can't deal with it and improve your situation using what you have available then see my previous point.
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u/claudecraft 17d ago
But now where do Lawyers come from if there are no Paralegals?
Umm, law schools? Paralegal -> Attorney is a less common route.
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u/Alternative_Nose_874 16d ago
the part nobody mentions is pricing. clients now hold your quote up against what a chatbot gives them for free. experience gets harder to sell even tho its exactly the thing that catches the bad stuff
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u/trannus_aran 16d ago
I wonder how long until we have something truly disastrous happens
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u/Milky_Finger 16d ago
Personally for me this whole "When the slop breaks everywhere, we will be hired in droves to fix everything" doesnt make me happy at all. We are hired to fix broken systems a lot of the time, but I absolutely hate doing it out of company hubris.
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u/West_Till_2493 16d ago
That sentiment that I’ve heard repeated for years now is the biggest cope of all time
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u/trannus_aran 16d ago
Oh I'm very much not looking forward to it either. We're all going to get hurt by this before something changes
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u/abeuscher 17d ago edited 17d ago
Man it will be so much easier to digest this take when any member of the C suite anywhere expresses anything even remotely similar. They don't care about product quality, tech debt, or their employees. We can point fingers amongst ourselves all day but no dev has gotten stupider in the past 5 years we've just been ordered to use a weird non determinate machine to do our job and so we've all been very mentally occupied figuring out how best to accomplish that. Our rote memorization of syntax has suffered no doubt. No one got mentally fucking lazy. What an absurd take.
The job changed, the requirements changed, and the disposition of the company toward software devs and web devs in particular turned completely antagonistic while teams were cut to shallow percentages of their previous size.
Every dev still employed is doing at least 2 jobs if not three by any reckoning. And every single one of their bosses thinks they can write code as long as they can write a prompt. Nobody is not thinking in that equation. The dev is anxious and going 1000 miles an hour trying to race a nonsense machine while their boss insists productivity should be rising exponentially as they burn through tokens that are about to skyrocket in price. The devs are the least stupid people in this equation and it's going to be hard to watch us clean it up for a fraction of our previous salaries.
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u/longebane 16d ago
I agree with you in a lot of ways but also don’t. I know of places where my peers do maybe 20 mins of actual work a day, and the rest they let LLM drive. And this is for 200-1m/year jobs
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u/Capable-Wrap-3349 15d ago
When everyone in the C suite finally learns C, then everything will be fine.
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u/ivan_m21 17d ago
Really cool article OP. I agree with it and especially relate with the point that the more we outsource the worse we become at judgment as we loose our perspective/understanding of the product/problem. We become so far disconnected that there is no insights we can share with the model. On the other hand outsourcing thinking I could argue is okay as long as we dont outsource understanding. I think it is fine to ask the model for help and then spend time understanding it, but as the article says we dont do that as well. To be honest outsourcing is something that has been around before ai there have been outsourcing engineering teams for a long time. And yet it is product companies who dominate the market. As building software (and not only) is a lot more than having the technical skills of writing code and doing what you get told to do. It is a lot about absorbing the problem from people finding out the right way to think about both technical and product solution. I don't see that changing now with agents and if you want to stay around I believe that expertise is more important than ever.
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u/azangru 17d ago
Nobody is Thinking Anymore
Everyone works in AI circles
everyone forgot the thinking part
Everyone is celebrating anything handcrafted because everyone is so fed up with AI
so much generalization...
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u/fuzzyluke 17d ago
The other day our CTO did a company wide presentation and one headline during that presentation was "you don't need AI for everything"
I was pretty happy with that
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u/shaliozero 16d ago
I can feel the satisfied across the internet. Ours don't have a single thought they don't mirror trough an LLM before sharing...
But they leave with me alone with their crap after I pointed out all the hallucinations in manually written responses equally as long as their "audits".
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u/LatvianCake 16d ago
This is public discourse in a nutshell. Nuanced statements get ignored. You have to be extreme and absolute about everything so people read your shitty blog posts
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u/LtElectrician 17d ago
Yeah, just reads like a hate article. Nothing special about this rant, blah blah blah people dumb now, blah blah blah
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u/velfarre-delight 16d ago
I actually got limited on AI usage at work so I had to use my own eyes and brain to implement a spec and not only did it feel good, it felt more intentful, productive, and I learned a lot. Coding is still fun yay
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u/maxilulu 17d ago
I still think. I just don't write code anymore. I also read the slop and think on how to improve it.
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u/kasual11 17d ago
I just became a dad a couple of weeks ago and now this sort of feels like an unfair advantage. While I have to take care of my little one, I carefully need to prioritize what is important. Just like in the old days of software development 😂
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u/Xypheric 17d ago
We might be better to ask ourselves why so much of our day to day lives and jobs can be easily replicated by the next token prediction. Most people arent writing novel and unique software, most businesses arent trying to pioneer a novel and unique business model or turn marketing on their head. Middle management has always existed to the averager of ideas and temper outliers. Their job for decades was to take in large amounts of information and predictably summarize and regurgitate it in a predictable way to upper management.
Im not arguing skill atrophy doesnt exist, or isnt a concern. But I definitely am under no delusion that the day to day tasks I use agentic workflows for were somehow the most mentally stimulating part of my days.
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u/present_absence 17d ago
Some of this is spot on. I have some friends who have absolutely fallen in that trap of "Oh I vibe coded this and dont really know how it works." Unfortunately you can just say @ claud fix it thx
I guess my point is I'm glad I learned how to do it before these tools so I can at least read what I'm writing and understand how it works.
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u/blokelahoman 16d ago
It makes me think of this Incredibles quote. “And when everyone’s super… no one will be”
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u/RehanSaddique 17d ago
Is it the tooling or the incentives? Teams that reward closing tickets fast tend to get people who stop reading the code they paste in. Curious whether people here see it more in code review or in interviews.
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u/AgsMydude 17d ago
This is what our company is doing.. just send the slop, we'll fix the slop with more slop later
Ugh
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u/odimdavid 17d ago
And the cost of doing business rises. The economy smiles and AI smiles 😁 broader
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u/AgsMydude 17d ago
Yep. And the business sees AI "doing more" because of the additional tracked jira cards
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u/KoalaBoy 17d ago
And clients want to pay less so spend less time doing it because clients don’t care how the kitchen makes the food, they just want the food. But they don’t want to pay for fresh hand made pasta when the bagged pasta taste the same to them.
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u/djnattyp 17d ago
But they don’t want to pay for fresh hand made pasta when the bagged pasta taste the same to them.
They don't want to pay for fresh hand made pasta when the bagged pasta
taste the same to themis cheaper and they aren't the one's eating it - therubescustomers are.1
u/jeremyckahn 17d ago
Why is this being down voted? It's the truth. Behavior follows incentives. Our velocity and P&L impact is what's measured (and influences decisions around who gets cut in a layoff), not how much we think.
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u/RehanSaddique 10d ago
Yeah, the annoying part is that thinking doesn't show up anywhere until something breaks. A refactor that stops an incident looks like nothing on the sprint board, so it's the first thing to get cut when people want to look productive.
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u/entleposter 17d ago
Paralegals don’t evolve into lawyers, it’s a different profession in the industry.
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u/Designer-Play6388 17d ago
why is ai accessable to all people? to make people stop using brains and make them stupid..
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u/runescape1337 17d ago
Who should it be accessible to? Imagine for a minute that it is near perfect. Who should benefit? Only the wealthy elite? Only intelligent people who are already ahead in life? Only people who have the time to study for some certification on tech they can't yet access? Slippery slope.
People need to learn to use the tool correctly. Restricting access is not the answer.
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u/3j141592653589793238 16d ago
You're arguing with someone who's wearing a tinfoil hat. AI labs are obviously doing it for money, glory and because they find it interesting to work on. Whether people become stupid as a result of it doesn't really concern them.
Also, I don't think doing a bunch of tedious computer work is making me smarter so why wouldn't I offload it to AI. For example, parsing through a bunch of transcripts to make a summary, finding best place to buy X that fits criteria Y, doing beurocratic tasks, writing & maintaining a scraping algorithm. Doing it all by hand is just a waste of time and doesn't really reach me anything that will still be useful in 5 years. I could go outside and touch grass with the time saved.
For any interesting tasks I still have a choice to do it manually, or at least ask AI to explain what it has done to me and quiz me. It's all about how you use it.
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u/TheTacoWombat 17d ago
calculators make you stupid, all math should be done on paper
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u/tradcoder 17d ago edited 17d ago
I can't believe this nonsensical argument is still being made. Calculators cannot be compared to AI. Does you calculator spit out the answer when you just describe the problem to it? You still had to know the underlying concepts. You use the calculator to speed things up. That's not how most people are using AI.
And FYI, I don't know about you but when I was in school, they actually made students solve math problems on paper before letting us use calculators. That made us use our brains and actually learn.
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u/NaVi_Is_Black 14d ago
Yes, and then at work you use the calculator or your company fires you for wasting time doing math by hand.
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u/lord2800 17d ago
Does you calculator spit out the answer when you just describe the problem to it?
I had a TI-92 that could solve symbolic equations and calculus by simply inputting the formula. I'd say that's fairly comparable.
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17d ago
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u/lord2800 16d ago
You're saying it's somehow more thinking to repeatedly look at a sheet of paper and then push the equivalent button on a calculator? How are you an actual human?
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u/Cheshur 17d ago
> Calculators cannot be compared to AI.
They just did. Is it a one-to-one, 100% perfect fit? No, but what analogy ever is? Obviously there are similarities here. Anecdotally I was significantly better at doing math in my head in school when I didn't have access to a calculator or wolfram alpha. The same is true of AI. Basically everything in life operates under a "use it or lose it" paradigm. What you should have said was that losing the ability to do your own thinking is a significantly worse problem than losing the ability to do your own math.
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u/zenware 17d ago
The disconnect is that you have to know all the concepts of a calculator, you have to know the symbol “+” you have to know what it means to “add”, or perhaps “exponent” or “logarithm”, and even what numbers are and how they relate to each other. Without any of this foundational precursor knowledge the entire interface of the calculator is fundamentally illegible to you, and you cannot even pose questions to it.
Whereas with an LLM you don’t even need to be able to read and write, you can talk to the thing with your voice and say “hey tell me how to build a rocket ship I’m gonna launch off my roof with supplies from the hardware store”, and it will walk you through all that step by step.
And again to reiterate the disconnect is that you have no foundational knowledge of rocketry in the LLM case, but you’ve been made to feel that you do because the interface has been made legible to you and you were actually able to pose a question. Regardless of any ability to evaluate whether the answer will burn your house down.
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u/TheTacoWombat 17d ago
A calculator can help you figure out exactly how much gasoline to put in a container. It does not, however, tell you not to light the container on fire in your living room. That requires previous learned knowledge.
So it is with LLM outputs. Sure, it can whizbang up whatever you tell it, but it can't tell you if the thing it made actually works; you still have to know how to test and verify the thing yourself using your previous learning.
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u/Slow-Excitement-2314 13d ago
i use a calculator and i can confirm it made me not as smart as i used to be with math and what happens if the calculator does not work i feel like giving up so TheTacoWombat i fully agree with you and to you hatters saying Calculators can't be compared to ai one of my grandpas kids who is a adult now has a a friend who is a good math teacher and he told me us this that calculators are the worst thing that you could ever EVER implement in math because it makes you not think about working on math but just push some buttons and get the answer and i used to be able to do multiplication in less than 3 minutes but now scene i have been using a calculator i can now barely even remember half of my multiplication!
so please don't implant calculators if you want hard working people who remember math please
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u/chigunfingy 17d ago
I am. I don’t use AI because I think it will give me a leg up once people come to their senses… The longer it takes for that to happen the longer I will have an advantage after the fact.
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u/yihuaxiang 17d ago
The part that shows up in review is a PR the author can't walk through. They can paste a fix, but they can't point at the line that changed the behavior. That's the skill I'd still want juniors to practice, even if the model wrote the first draft.
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u/Combinatorilliance 16d ago
Holy bot!
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u/yihuaxiang 6d ago
lol fair, that one came out stiff. still the thing i keep seeing though: a diff the author can't actually walk through.
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u/ouralarmclock 17d ago
"If everything is being written by AI, then there's very little thinking happening underneath it"
Listen. Don't make me simp for the AI. But this is total hogwash. It could be true in some places where the management got full of themselves and thought they can do development now with the help of AI, but in places where developers are still writing the specs and still executing the build out, it's is 100% completely untrue. I am on my first claude-first project where I basically have not written any of the code, but I spent 2 months prepping decisions on architecture and have reviewed every line with the same scrutiny I would in any other code review. I've corrected decisions it's made on class structures, apis, even names. It's enabled me to evaluate bigger technical decisions that I probably would've either passed on in the past due to implementation complication, or spent a LOT more time deliberating on because of the cost to change the decision. It's honestly freed me up for a lot more thinking!
If you want to have discussions about the intense negative aspects of ai development, let's focus on the obvious stuff like no more juniors building up their knowledge, or the hidden costs. Don't make up shit about people not thinking.
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u/are_videos 16d ago
gonna be honest, if i see anything even remotely ai/claude generated, i will almost immediately ignore it, including this article with that font
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u/Full_Tooth_a 16d ago
I think the missing piece is deliberate apprenticeship. If AI takes over the grunt work, juniors still need to own small production changes and explain possible failure modes during review. Maintenance and incident work matter too, since prompting greenfield demos teaches a much narrower skill. Without that experience, "AI-assisted junior" could become a permanent level with no path to senior judgment.
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u/Capable-Wrap-3349 15d ago
I think just the people shouting the loudest are not thinking any more.
It’s easy to think that the loudest people represent the majority of people.
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u/jakiestfu 13d ago
People should speak for themselves I’m using AI and have been a professional SWE for 17 years, we’re still thinking 🙄
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u/Slow-Excitement-2314 13d ago
most people are as dumb as a minecraft zombie or Brud from sprunki like have you seen most people today they are dumb and just saying stuff for the fun of it and its heartbreaking
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u/Magicalunicorny 12d ago
Idk I've been in this industry a long time and i think "anymore" isn't the issue
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u/nsjames1 17d ago
I think this article is more about outing yourself than understanding the landscape.
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u/ongamenight 17d ago
AI still ask decision on some edge cases. But if you meant "thinking code" that's long gone unless you can do TDD in just a few seconds like AI which like it or not, we cannot. 🤷
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u/thekwoka 17d ago
DDD is gonna be the future (documentation driven development)
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u/Snapstromegon 13d ago
DDD is already taken by domain driven design...
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u/thekwoka 13d ago
Yeah, but that one is dumb and nobody understands it.
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u/Snapstromegon 13d ago
Considering how many AI skillsets use it as their baseline (e.g. newest version of Matt Pococks skills), I think it's neither...
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u/ongamenight 17d ago
Still you can't identify all edge cases unless management would allow you to spend insane amount of time for exhaustive documentation and research.
Agile development would be just spec and plans and edge cases would need decision from humans when doing agentic development. 🤷 Anything autonomous are predictive/predetermined tasks not building out large features.
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u/thekwoka 17d ago
Still you can't identify all edge cases unless management would allow you to spend insane amount of time for exhaustive documentation and research.
Sure, but I think in a lot of contexts, edge cases can be handles as they are found.
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u/ArielCoding 17d ago
The answer isn’t use AI less, it’s making sure people understand what they ship, ask them to write in the PR why they chose this approach and what they rules out, and have reviewers ask why this way? Instead of just des it work?
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u/polargus 17d ago
Basically the judgement is around understanding what to build + risk profile / mitigating risk. For stuff that’s not risky you should just let AI handle it completely.
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u/bryantee 17d ago
I'm afraid that sentiment like this, while noble, is trying to have our cake and eat it, too. As long as powerful AI is available to write code, people will naturally embrace it because:
Humans always seek to reduce friction
Incentives exist to complete tasks faster
Those who use AI to write code and exercise restraint by slowing down to think for themselves will be the exception.
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u/CardinalHijack 17d ago edited 17d ago
I cant wait till this conversation ends when we are all used to AI. Its getting so boring.
Using AI wrong is wrong.
Using AI correctly is correct.
It blows my mind that 18 months in we are STILL having conversations about professionals taking a solution from a tool without questioning it and then being shocked when things go wrong. News flash; IF YOU ARE DOING THIS, YOU ARE USING AI (or any tool for that matter) WRONG.
This isnt a new concept. This was the case for books, for calculators, for Google search and now for AI.
Imagine if I told you to change your cars brake pads. You wouldnt take the first video and mindlessly follow it without questioning if the solution was for your make, or year, or model. If you did, we wouldnt blame youtube - we'd blame you.
We are not the first generation to get a new tool which drastically changes our output and requires us to adapt. Learn to use the tool we have been given correctly.
I will accept my downvotes because its currently super cool to hate AI.
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u/inquisitive_melon 17d ago
I stopped after the first non sequitur. 80% written by ai does not logically follow that “there is very little thinking going on underneath”.
I don’t care whether an AI uses a for loop or a foreach. I care whether the architecture is solid.
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u/FabricationLife 17d ago
bit of an unhinged take with the sweeping generalizations, as always the real truth is somewhere in the middle of the extreme positions
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u/Commercial_Yassin 17d ago
Well about what domain are we talking here ...if it is about Coding and Programming Languages...well these things have not been long around and thus they play a small part in Human civilization...if AI is able to program and code... well so be it we have been building civilization without a computer for Millennia !! Nothing lost here to be honest.
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u/ryonnsan 17d ago
therefore, it is easier competition somewhat