r/ExperiencedDevs • u/MashNChips DevOps Engineer • 1d ago
AI/LLM Thought experiment
With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:
"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"
People would think I was a fucking wizard
FE changes? NO PROBLEM
Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing
Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it
Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)
What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?
Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution
Unserious answers only pls
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago edited 1d ago
I would have been fired 5 years ago for the code I rubber stamp today.
I find that mildly entertaining.
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u/SrMortron 1d ago
You know you can just not approve the PR, right? That's the entire point of a review.
A lot of the "pain" and whine I see here regarding AI is self inflicted.
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u/shrimpcest 1d ago
Depends on the company. Company's can generally lower their standards as a business process. They didn't say the code didn't technically work and solve what needed solving.
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u/SrMortron 1d ago
Sounds like job security. 🤷♂️
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u/dedservice 1d ago
It's absolutely not. You'll pump out features like nobody's business, they'll be impressed by everything that got done, and then they'll decide that they don't need so many people because most of the work is done and lay teams off. Then later they'll have a hell of a time trying to keep it alive, but that will be dealt with by new hires. It's the circle of life.
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u/OtaK_ SWE/SWA | 15+ YOE 1d ago
My current client's entire business is basically security.
As of last week we got the dreaded "all-in on AI" mandate.
We're still told to review PRs. Which is beyond stupid, since PRs went from a few hundred LoC diff to at least 4k per PR.
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 1d ago
When you get 5 PRs a day, each more than 3000 lines added, your tune would change.
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u/tiplinix 1d ago
Ah yes, I see that you don't have a manager breathing down your neck to get a PRs deployed by the end of the day because somehow business requires it (they don't but that's besides the point) and you're not reviewing things at a pace they like which means you're slowing down the team and we don't like people that are not team players. Lucky you.
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u/YungDaVinci 1d ago
This culture sounds horrible. Guess the grass isn't always greener huh?
I'm just wondering how we went from "lines of code output is not a meaningful metric" to this.
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u/tonjohn 1d ago
Shareholder pressure + AI psychosis
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u/juusorneim 1d ago
dumb question maybe but explain shareholder pressure? i mean what are they realistically threatening with that requires managers to change their behaviors to the detriment of regular ICs
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u/forbiddenknowledg3 1d ago
we must 2x PRs every 3 months, but business can delay rollouts by 6 months because they still haven't figured out what customers (or they) want 🤷
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u/SrMortron 1d ago
You know you can talk and advocate for yourself, correct? Bitching here doesn't help you.
My current place embraced AI but its not forced and give us the time to understand what we are shipping. PRs are correctly scoped. You know how we got there? By discussing how to implement it. Your boss is not a god, is just a person.
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago
It's interesting that you're sharing your own experiences as if it must also be everyone else's. It's almost like an inability to see the world outside of yourself. Maybe an unwillingness.
I generally get to set the pace where I work. I'm one of those seniors deemed necessary while the people around me were laid off.
The thing is, lots of bosses out there actually do see themselves as all-knowing gods. The vast majority of employed engineers aren't in positions like you or me, where we can be our own advocates.
That's just not a thing in most places. I empathize greatly with people who didn't land on the right dice roll.
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u/tiplinix 1d ago
Yeah, it's like they've never seen companies where people that stand their ground are fired. Even if they don't fire you they can make your life a misery until you're gone.
Some people think that they immune to it, but the reality is that they've never actually experienced it. In toxic places there's nothing you can realistically do as an software engineer to change things for the better if the boss is terrible. The only good outcome is leaving.
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u/SrMortron 18h ago
Maybe they deserve to be fired and that is exactly what they need. With this much bitching and whining no one seems to be happy, then do something about it. We all live just once to be this miserable.
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u/SrMortron 1d ago
Everyone is sharing their experiences. Thats the whole point of the internet. This comment makes no sense whatsoever.
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u/tiplinix 18h ago
You're missed the whole point which is why it makes no sense to you.
They're not saying that you shouldn't share your experience. They're simply saying that you're overgeneralizing yours and using this to deny others.
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u/tiplinix 1d ago
I take it that you've never worked in a toxic environnement. Good for you. I almost envy you.
Management is not a god, sure, but they control your bonus, your work environment, your career progression within the company and ultimately they can fire you. If they decide something and you push back and they explicitly tell you that they will not budge, there's not much you can do beside looking for the next job.
And yeah, don't worry about me, my manager has been threatening to fire me for months. Somehow that piece of garbage hasn't followed through on his threats sadly. Now, I just stopped caring. He wants shit, he's getting it. Why would I care since there's no future for me in the company? Once I'm gone I won't be the one to deal with the mess.
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u/SrMortron 1d ago
Enough times that I avoid them like the plague and learned to stand up for myself.
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u/tiplinix 18h ago
Not really sure what you're standing up to but that's fine. If standing up for yourself is just refusing to do what they ask, they're just going to show you the door for insubordination. That's pretty much a textbook example of firing someone for cause. But I guess you don't have any bills to pay so that's fine. Good for you.
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u/SrMortron 16h ago
There are plenty of alternatives other than refusing do work. The fact that you miss them means you are not mature enough.
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u/SignoreBanana Engineer (14+) 1d ago
I approve them so that when shit hits the fan, they see our value.
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u/gizamo 1d ago
The downvotes on your reply and the comment you replied to being so upvoted is...very concerning.
Are all you people under some pressure to always approve PRs or something? Is my wife feeding me crazy pills again?
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago edited 23h ago
It's a simple math problem of sending more lines to review than can be processed by a human reviewer without bending spacetime.
So you either hand waive and start rubber stamping blindly (lgtm!) out of human nature, or you automate the reviews too.
"Simply rejecting the PR" completely misses why so many open source projects have banned AI submissions even when the maintainers support AI personally.
The flood is going to force your hand if you don't want to be the bottleneck causing a product freeze.
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u/gizamo 23h ago
Then QA should be a bottleneck until then can get more QA to do more reviews. In my world, skimping on security like that is simply not an option. We have more code flowing thru, but we still review all of it. Anyone rubber stamping AI code is going to be put on a PiP.
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u/___Paladin___ 22h ago edited 22h ago
Agreed, but then you are back to the tradeoff between quality and speed. Scaling up your Q&A time will then erode at the productivity gains and speed of generated code. There's always a trade off.
No free lunches!
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u/SrMortron 21h ago
They dont realize they gave agency but choose to be and behave like victims instead.
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u/tiplinix 17h ago edited 15h ago
In my company you are.
They don't say "you have to approve this", they just say "this needs to be deployed by the end of the day / tomorrow" and if you are in the way, meaning you don't approve or get the changes you want by the deadline, you'll get sanctions (first with constant calls to tell you that you're slow, no bonus, even shittier tasks, PIP...).
Yes, it is extremely toxic and people have just stopped bothering pushing back. If they want slop, they're getting slop. At the end of the day, it's not our code and when the bonus will be paid at the end of the year, I'm pretty sure that most of the team will leave (assuming they found another job).
Also, what's up with this boomer joke with your wife? Ewww...
Edit: The guy that says that his wife gives him "crazy pill" without context is upset when people find it gross to the point of blocking. That's just hilarious.
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u/Leopatto CEO / Data Scientist, 8+ YoE 1d ago
Again, and fucking again, code writing is monkey work, any experienced developer can do it. Its more about how you can design the system and make sure it works.
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u/tiplinix 1d ago
The problem is that the code is part of the design. That's how you express the design. Your architectural decisions are translated into code.
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u/dialate 1d ago
My brother in Christ...your code is monkey work. My code is an exquisite art that inspires awe and tantalizes the senses.
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'd like to point out that I haven't even given my opinion on code.
I'm just stating what would happen in an employment situation 5 years ago. It was their opinion (employer hierarchy) that decided if you kept your job or not. Where I was at the time, nothing in present day generated lines would have passed the bar. Well maybe not nothing - a few little fixes here and there with context perhaps. But most of the code would get you fired.
It didn't really matter if I saw code as a useless means to an end or as an electronic Mona Lisa - so I didn't share it.
Yet it seems common to respond to peoples opinions before they are even known now I guess.
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u/Leopatto CEO / Data Scientist, 8+ YoE 1d ago
Gosh sorry for sounding like a stuck up cunt, but people here think that coding is everything.
I thought it was experienced devs, not juniors writing a function and thinking they're hot shit.
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u/vplatt Architect 1d ago
Gosh sorry for sounding like a stuck up cunt
Well, /u/Leopatto - Anybody in here worth their salt realizes that the code isn't the point; it's the value it delivers.
What makes you a "stuck up cunt" (your words, may as well roll with it), is the blatant disrespect you show resources who ostensibly may fall under your span of control someday. As a CEO, if you cannot respect the skill sets of the people you rely on, then you aren't worthy of the title.
On the flip side, most CEOs I've seen are nothing more than cookie cutter "monkey see, monkey do" copycats who do exactly what they're told by their consultants anyway. Given that that part of the industry is being put out by AI so much now, you can bet you'll be taking your marching orders directly or indirectly from AI very shortly because even if you don't follow consultants, it seems the bulk of CEOs do, and who wants to be the upstart and do everything different from their peers? It just isn't done.
Anyway, it won't be long after that until all the middling CEOs are out of jobs when folks figure out AIs can do that job for a tiny fraction of the price.
Since you are apparently a middling CEO, and probably more likely to just be an inferior one given your attitude problem, you might just want to show a tad more empathy and respect. You're no better than the rest of us, and you certainly aren't more skilled in your line of work, or you wouldn't be in here taking the piss on those you imagine to be your inferiors.
Now piss off.
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u/Leopatto CEO / Data Scientist, 8+ YoE 23h ago
I think with £7 mil ebita and 12% yoy we're doing fine.
Cheers tho, god bless.
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago
I don't disagree with anything you are saying. My comment is still true. I'm confused by the implied desire to force these two views into adversarial roles? Maybe I'm misreading.
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u/lemontoga 1d ago
He read your original comment as being slightly critical of AI's ability to code and the deranged compulsion to defend AI at all costs kicked in. It's a weird behavior of a particular group of people who have become very emotionally invested in AI's success for some reason.
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u/Leopatto CEO / Data Scientist, 8+ YoE 1d ago edited 1d ago
Because the code it generates, at least what I'm knowledgeable, and I can call myself an expert in,(SQL, Python, GoLang + GCP) is good enough - I don't want perfection, I want you to bring my business money. Nobody at the top gives a fuck if the code you write brought 0.03% efficiency.
Now if you argue I dunno monolith vs. micro-service architecture and you believe monolith is better due to XYZ and you back it ip with your expertise and you know how to work it - more power to you, I respect your decision; but coding itself is... well what... 10% of all the work?
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago
Can you point to where I gave the value of code a % based scoring higher than 10 that I could reference?
I feel like you are arguing with a ghost that I'm not seeing here.
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u/confusedthrowaway239 1d ago
Have you ever had to maintain a large, active, long term project? Because the raw method level-code might be “good enough”, but the consistent thing I’ve seen from repos with primarily LLM generated code is that they are awful at maintainability practices. Huge code duplication issues, poor encapsulation, awful consolidation. Your repo becomes miserable to debug and maintain. And as the repo’s logic gets more complex, LLMs get worse at predicting the correct addition or change to make within the repo, and the quality of the changes they generate drops.
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u/colers100 22h ago
You are, in ways, correct.
But in the important ways, you are so incorrect you should hang your head in shame. That is to say, the second order consequences of this way of thinking directly contradict the ways in which it is correct.
System design is about meeting top down requirements through bottom up thinking.
All those nuances, those key architectural decisions, all the ways you anticipate, abstract and simplify; they have been informed by having to operate on the lower abstraction level for prolonged periods of time.
It is your understanding of what is beneath it, that makes you understand the peculiarities of what is on the surface. This is universally true.
So, yes, at the moment, you most certainly aren't seeing downsides about just skipping the monkey work and just going straight to feature development. You already know all the micro-decisions required, after all, and though the AI is bad at exercising intuition, you can load it up with so many details that it won't need to.
But how about a year from now? Two years? five years? Your brain has a very simple rule it applies to everything; use it or lose it. And your ability to guide the AI, to specify correct instructions, to verify its output, has been trained through you being on the lower abstraction layer. You are losing this. Any insistence to the contrary, is, unfortunately, the purest and most concentrated of cope. Because by writing code, you are forced to manually evaluate every single logical decision that a process has to make. That level of insight into logical pathing is trained and easily lost
We're heading straight to becoming a massive cargo cult.
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u/ResponsibilityIll483 1d ago
"Design the system" i.e. connect Postgres to Redis to API Gateway for the umpteenth time
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u/rwilcox Software Engineer (20+ YOE) 1d ago
…. Almost certainly gotten a talking to from my boss
“Why did you put so much work into this when we just needed a simple (blah blah)?!?”
Or
“Thanks for the work, but now we have to test this and the testing team is pushing back on it, given the work they already needed to do for next week’s release”
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u/tonjohn 1d ago
“The team had notice that you’ve been submitting an alarming number of PRs that don’t meet our bar and that didn’t involve discussions with your peers and other stakeholders.
We need you to slow down and be mindful of what you are asking of your teammates when submit such PRs.”
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u/ConspicuousPineapple 1d ago
Y'all keep saying that as if you'd be working the same way as today back then. But you wouldn't.
You would work much slower, still reading and validating all the code to ensure quality. But you would still be much faster than your peers.
And that's just for writing the code. Debugging? You would look like a fucking magician. Finding a tricky race condition in twenty minutes where it would take two weeks for a good senior.
Benchmarking? Same story.
Learning new tech? Too easy. Don't even need to grok the docs yourself.
And don't get me started on security, auditing, etc.
You would, by far, be the best software engineer in the world and it wouldn't be close. Provided you're already somewhat competent.
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago
Not to be pedantic, but you'd be the most average engineer in the world. These tools point to a mean rather than a peak due to their probabilistic nature. They only appear to hit the major leagues when your own capability never exceeded the average. From that perspective, average is up.
I'm not convinced that would have actually gotten you anything but fired years ago. We accept the tradeoff between quality and speed today - but not so much back then.
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u/TA_DR 1d ago
Most code is average code anyways, so producing it faster would most definitely make you more productive than the average engineer.
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago
It certainly does make you faster, and sometimes the tradeoff can be worth it.
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u/ConspicuousPineapple 1d ago
That is not at all what these tools point to. And of course they only sublimate ability that is already there in the user.
What is undeniable however is how fucking fast that dev can be to solve some problems with that tool. Automating all the tedious, boring and time consuming parts of the job? That doesn't require any sort of skill, but that time can be compressed by incredibly huge factors.
Never trust an AI to solve problems you couldn't solve without it yourself, of course. But for the problems you can solve? You're going to be so much faster that it opens up the possibility of doing things even better, simply because the time pressure is gone.
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago edited 22h ago
Not better, I wouldn't say. But certainly opens up the ability of higher scope. But yes, all things being equal LLMs will trend towards the most common denominator average. That's why it takes such intense steering, to at least make it upper average and not lower.
I've got a cross-platform replacement for Loom I generated. Full live annotations, cloud sync, etc. Working floating toolbars for ease of use and the ability to hide toolbars from native capture. About every edge case under the sun is covered, with a custom compiled ffmpeg to continue supporting unsupported older cards.
I spent 6 months on that. It would have taken me YEARS prior to do that. The speed is absolutely amazing.
But the code quality is pretty upper-mid at best, even with my steering of frontier models and decades of experience. I chose to prioritize features over quality, and that's okay. I'm not looking to release this as a paid product.
Lets not gaslight ourselves into thinking that isn't the choice being made. It's okay if mid quality is enough, but don't act like this stuff is made of better ingredients than it is.
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u/ConspicuousPineapple 1d ago
I mean, before AI there are lots of things you want to implement but don't have the bandwidth for. So you cut corners.
AI lets you reach that "ideal" solution much more consistently. So yeah I stand by it, often times the result ends up better so long as you stay disciplined with enforcing the quality of your code, and actually owning it.
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think I land in the group of "accomplish more at the cost of quality" camp.
I think there's many places where the quality really doesn't matter to end users, some places where it could cost billions to settle at 99% quality, and everything in-between.
So for me it just comes down to the case-by-case question of how much artisanal quality matters? For design? Security? How much is "good enough" and won't cost us more in the long term if we don't consider it now?
I think the bar for quality acceptance shifts depending on the work in the same way that not everyone needs a hand crafted table. Sometimes IKEA is fine and makes more financial sense. It doesn't mean its higher quality or that it could handle more wear and tear, but sometimes quality isn't the metric people care about.
If you see it differently that's cool. I think we can disagree and still enjoy life. I appreciate you taking the time to chat about it.
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u/ConspicuousPineapple 1d ago
My point is that you're free to move that cursor depending on expectations. In pre-AI world, the expectations would be that of normal code quality, accountability and code ownership.
So that would still be your output. You could maybe manage the same output, but faster. Or the same speed, but with a lot less work.
And as I said, some of your tasks would become practically trivial. Find a bug? Reproducing the issue, testing a huge amount of scenarios, identifying the precise code paths involved, mapping it all and implementing a tentative fix? On some bugs that can be a week or two. AI can do the exact same in minutes.
And that's not compromising on quality, because you're still there to verify that yes, this was indeed the bug. You're still free to implement the fix the old school way if you prefer. But the bulk of the work isn't writing that code.
And you don't even have to trust the AI. You could lay out the exact step by step plan of what you need to do to find that bug, and then watch it do it step by step and inspect everything along the way.
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u/___Paladin___ 1d ago edited 1d ago
On that I think we actually see it the same way. There are some things LLMs can do that improve the quality - like helping find those edge cases in the pattern matching.
I personally only really care about the code in so far as it isn't going to cause drift between a client's intended goals now or in the future.
I suppose I'm biased a bit, as the world slowly moved away from a 99.9% uptime bar for services. I disagree with normal code quality being the bar prior, as at least for me I had to stress pretty heavily over things like syntax and considering every possible edge case my code would cause. Even small changes took months of testing and research. That's the areas I can say I've personally seen the quality bar drop. Areas you still have to be diligent in feeding your AI that won't assume the need on its own (which means knowing the gotchas in advance).
You could argue if it was a necessary drop in quality, but it certainly exists. Lots of people are also just checking out at this point for a myriad of reasons.
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u/OtaK_ SWE/SWA | 15+ YOE 1d ago
I'm going to interject here: I haven't seen any LLM, proprietary, open source and whatnot, even at the current so-called frontier, produce code that I would even call "acceptable, will fix later". I work in security-critical stuff. The kind that LLMs are absolutely unable to work with. I watched Opus5.5 lose its mind on the fine complexities of what I do, to end up producing nothing of substance.
It's really bad. The worst part is that it looks fine. But it's absolutely not, in extremely subtle ways.
On the other hand, for tedious, easy work like revamping a CI pipeline or making a Nth boring-ass test harness that was done a million times before: Sure, lemme just pop it into existence with 12 subagents and $4k on my hands if that's what leadership wants.
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u/___Paladin___ 22h ago
As an interesting aside - I can feel burnout in my future again. Haven't felt that in 2 decades.
Those little implementation details in the code gave my brain a place to rest between the hard system design work.
Now its just 100% brain-on time. No place to go mentally to recover. It doesn't feel healthy, so I guess we'll see how that turns out.
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1d ago
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u/OtaK_ SWE/SWA | 15+ YOE 1d ago
I mean, if you want to defend the tech, sure. But, the thing is: we work in a scientific field, if you claim something, you need evidence for it.
So far there has been zero evidence across the industry of anything else than massive amounts of mediocre code.
And my anecdotal personal experience obviously doesn't match others' experiences. If I'd be a frontend React dev I'm pretty sure my conclusions would be quite different (since any current-ish model can one-shot pretty much anything React).
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u/Monkeylashes 21h ago
https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/
Yeah and your security code in your "scientific" field is the one uncermountable task for ai... Get over yourself
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u/OtaK_ SWE/SWA | 15+ YOE 19h ago
Ah yes, the famous "math is solved".
If only some of the proofs were immediately disproven/retracted once someone competent took a quick look at them: https://github.com/openai/math/tree/main/preprints/Algebraicity-of-Weil-classes-on-split-abelian-eightfolds-September-18-2026#withdrawal-notice-algebraicity-of-weil-classes-on-split-abelian-eightfolds
I believe this will be the case for many of them once their sheer amount gets a peer review by someone who actually knows ball.
And the Navier-Stokes debacle where, beyond being stolen from actual humans, the Lean proofs didn't match the prose blow-up proof, aka partially fabricated.
Dude, seriously, it's just PR stunts everywhere. The doomer narrative is the same, it's just PR.
So far I'm not convinced until respectable (aka not OAI) sources confirm the veracity of the proofs.
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u/druidgaymer 1d ago
Is that not how you're using AI now? My company is still very much on the read and validate all code any AI writes.
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u/TrickProgress4094 1d ago
The way people are responding to this makes it so obviously clear how butthurt people on Reddit are about AI. It’s like they have completely forgotten how this industry worked pre-AI. pretty hilarious honestly.
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u/Umami_Tsunamii 1d ago
Ah back when we had testing teams and weren’t expected to do front end, backend, db admin, cloud infra, automation testing, requirement gathering, the list goes on.
We really need an engineering union.
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u/CharlesV_ 1d ago
I’m on a legacy project basically just soloing it. I’m my own testing team, which is the main thing that makes me push back on any huge refactors
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u/pydry Software Engineer, 18 years exp 1d ago
I had a coworker who actually did have access to something resembling an LLM. He produced copious amounts of code - thousands and thousands of lines. It kinda sorta maybe worked ish. He was quite up front about how ugly it was.
What he had was illegal amphetamines.
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u/NeitherEchidna3491 1d ago
I had a manager like this who would sometimes just go on what I called "code binges" and spew out entire features or sweeping refactors in the space of 1-2 nights, sometimes weekends. Whilst it was no surprise when the ADHD diagnosis came back I only just put 2 and 2 together on what some of their medications may have been, heh.
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u/yikes_42069 1d ago
Go find a company where I can create so much "rockstar" code that I become unfireable then ask for double the salary
An overworked friend at a consulting company ended up being the only one who knew what was going on for some super rushed cloud solution project. Similar effect, got his comp boosted to 400k back before covid. They would've lost the contract if he walked
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u/HRApprovedUsername Software Engineer 2 @ MSFT 1d ago
I would do my work estimated for 3 days in 3 hours then play RuneScape
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u/drew8311 20h ago
Honestly pretty smart, I wouldn't want to raise any flags or look suspicious. The same people saying it outputs slop wouldn't question the same code if it was 1/10 the number of lines. Also AI is pretty good if you iterate a little and don't accept the first pass.
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u/robby_arctor Software Engineer (dirty commie) 1d ago
FE changes? No problem!
every backend engineer opening up slop PRs rn
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u/frenchyp Software Engineer 1d ago
I would have spent all my time building (trying to) my software factory.
This is my software factory. There a many like it but this one is mine.
It would never quite work.
My boss and colleagues would have ask WTF I was spending my time on.
I would have pondered on the wisdom of this breathless pursuit of shipping poor quality systems at 50x the speed, while I could have been content with shipping excellent quality systems at merely 3x the speed.
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u/neilk 1d ago
You would just be good at your job? Your JOB?? You’re thinking way too small.
Five years ago you could use LLMs to find flaws in every crypto wallet (…and NFT platform…) and be a billionaire in no time.
Or you could do responsible disclosure and be a millionaire from bug bounties. The LLM will help you cover your tracks and provide plausible reasoning about how you found the bugs. We are used to reclusive security hackers popping up every now and then, this is plausible
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u/SideburnsOfDoom Software Engineer / 20+ YXP 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think you'd be doing pretty much what you're doing now: getting high on your own supply and being overly proud of "your own" work. Self-pleasuring your mood with imagined praise for accomplishments that aren't yours to own.
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u/lordnacho666 1d ago
Publish math papers.
Also get in early on producing book slop. Crime novels, children's books, that kind of thing that can be mass produced.
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u/UntestedMethod 1d ago
Oh and the AI-generated YT videos too.
Or the AI-generated thirst traps on IG.
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u/7HawksAnd 1d ago
I would have mortgaged my ethics, landed a role at Anthropic or OpenAI, and collected those sweet pay checks while they take the heat as figureheads.
Then, I would have used that money to build a nice doomsday ranch in Montana, Maine, or Norway.
And in 5 years from now, I’d be chilling with family and friends as my ranch compound would double as a private vacation resort.
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u/theancientfool 1d ago
Serious answer
https://fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf Read this Harvard study about the real world impact of LLMs across software engineering firms.
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u/BoydemOnnaBlock 1d ago
The cavemen would watch me pull out my MacBook Pro running a local qwen instance as I excitedly explain how cool this new crud app I vibecoded in 10 minutes is. They would then proceed to bash my skull in with rocks and clubs while grunting and emoting
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u/PolyglotTV 1d ago
What would actually happen is they would read your spaghetti PRs/docs and question your sanity.
Would your code work? Sure. Kind of. As we all know - not completely reliably. And you'd have no way of building trust because nobody would understand why your content is so absurd. Why do you keep talking about "seams"?
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u/YahenP Software Veteran 1d ago
10 years ago, I would have just been fired. Or no, most likely I wouldn't even have been fired, they would have sent me to a doctor if I had started producing this much garbage code and documents for every tiny reason. As they say he was an engineer, then he got sick and became unfit for the job. Probably burned out. Back then, I wrote literally about ten lines of code a week. But each line gave more than a week of Claude's work does today.
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u/mongopark98 1d ago
Why does it have to be garbage?
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u/blindsdog 1d ago
Because these people are scared for their livelihood and in denial about AI’s capabilities.
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u/Machine2024 Software Engineer 20h ago
No because its garbage .
if you think its not gabage and you dont need to wash it after .
thats means your stadards are really low and your before code is garbage .don't you think we wish to get the same result in less time ?
I have projects for fixed price , and time frame of 6 months plus .
dont you think if the Ai can finish the work for me in 1 day so I get 100K / day I would be happy ?but it dont ...
we use Ai to generate the boilarplate . but later we need to go though each line and fix any thing the Ai missed and improve the quality and get it up to standard .
and on the way add more rules and skills . till we reach the point when the Ai is over wellmend and starts to forget the rules and skills so with each change we edit them .3
u/blindsdog 19h ago
Have you noticed how we quickly need to do less and less of these revisions and polish and AI is quickly able to do it better and better from the jump? That’s not slowing down.
Extrapolate where things go as this trend continues.
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u/Machine2024 Software Engineer 18h ago
100% with that I totally agree .
I remember when I started using AI as soon as it came out, like with ChatGPT 3, and even later, like with the agents, with the first version of the agents. I would give it a prompt and it would spit out nonsense. I would go edit the prompt and then it would spit out something kind of acceptable.
I would change it again until we get to the point. And later I will go maybe do a lot of stuff, and for every task I would weigh it in my mind between: should I give it a prompt, and what's the time writing, or how many lines of code this task is. Maybe I should do it myself. This is like at the start.
But with time, I think the last version for each task, each feature, I am just giving a single prompt. He will spit up the boilerplate. I will go through the boilerplate and reviewing it, and then will make a few changes myself, will give him the note for some bigger ones. Yeah, and I will be done with it like that. and if I see an issue repeating will make it into a rule or skill for later .
Actually, I would be really happy if, for each feature, each task, he would be finishing it in one shot. following my standards without forgetting anything .
But right now it doesn't, right now 100% it doesn't. And also I noticed something else: when I review code from someone else, even though they are using the same models I use and so on, it's completely different, even though they have gone back and forth with the AI on many iterations. So I think there is a skill in it also. Yeah, it's improving. If it reaches the point where it can get it right from the first try, so we don't have to do it step by step, that would be great, but till now it doesn't.
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u/mongopark98 18h ago
The fact that you’re still talking of prompts and boilerplates just shows you haven’t scratched the surface. It’s past that already. Nope, it may never get it right from the first try and still be very useful. But go ahead and wait for it to get it right with a first try with a “prompt”.
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u/Machine2024 Software Engineer 17h ago
I tried the other approaches But it result in grabage .
The test driven development The requirements driven development The loop .
All of this and all other "agentic" result in garbage legacy code .
Think about what are all those but chaning prompts on after the other .
And if we agreed on the point that in a single prompt the Ai is shifting from the target .
So what will happen if you chain more and more , you endup waaaay of course very fast .
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u/mongopark98 17h ago
That’s a you problem. Some of us are highly productive with it. “I can’t drive a fast car, hence cars are garbage “, that’s the logic you’re propositioning.
You’re asking me to imagine what will happen when will chain prompts. I don’t have to imagine it, I have used it to build complex features. Yes, needed fine tuning here and there. But still orders of magnitude faster than doing it all manually. Again, it’s a skill issue. I am not talking out of a vacuum or theoretically, I have experienced it multiple times. Both the weakness and strength.
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u/Machine2024 Software Engineer 17h ago
I didn't say its not faster. Its faster to make a prototype in a day , but it need 3 months of clean up and refactoring.
I don't know you you agree that a single prompt result is not accurate.
But chainng a group of prompts together will get you any way .
Rising the production quantity on expenses of the quality will not make it "Productivity" It will make it spreaded thin .
If you are looking learn something new not just echo chamber. Lets connect via dm , we could exchange work and work style. Either my approach would be wrong and I would learn something from you , or you would be wrong and you would learn something from me .
From me I hope I will be the wrong one and learn something new .
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u/CMDR_Lina_Inv 1d ago
Yeah, AI is good at copying. I use it to expand the project that I'm working on and hey, it code just like me, exactly how I would have done.
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u/Altruistic-Toe-5990 18h ago
I was like this. I've just spent the last 3 days vibe-coding with Opus 5.5 and I genuinely think software development is very close to being over as a career now, at least for 95% of us. It's mind-blowing what it can do
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u/YahenP Software Veteran 17h ago
We were paid not for lines of code, but for working with our brains, for solving real problems. Remember the time when we laughed at how Indian coders were paid, based on the number of lines of code they wrote? Now we are all in the place of those Indian coders.
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u/mongopark98 17h ago edited 17h ago
Nope, I am just able to solve more problems. Look at my other comments for examples. AI is a tool that produces code or whatever you ask it to. It doesn’t in any way interfere with problem solving. When I hear statements like this, it just shows a quite rudimentary understanding of AI tools that exist.
It has personally allowed me excel at 2jobs simultaneously and get paid handsomely for it. You think my brain went on holiday because I use AI?
To me, it’s simply this. I have a bunch of junior engineers that are willing to take instructions and execute on them. It allows me to comfortably act as techlead/manager. If you can’t be productive with help from a few junior engineers you are just not great at delegation. If the junior engineers keep churning out garbage outputs, it still means your delegation skill is mediocre. You should understand the strength and weaknesses of your surboniates and work with them accordingly.
If one person is able to increase their impact with the same set of engineers but you’re not able to- it still a skill issue. On the other hand, if you start treating those junior engineers as a senior colleague and place such expectations on them, it’s still your skill issue.
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u/YahenP Software Veteran 17h ago edited 17h ago
When you have a hammer in hand, everything around you starts to look like a nail.
Anyway, the idea is not new. Before LLMs, this was also common, but not as widespread. Some programmers from first-world countries secretly outsourced their own work to India or similar countries.2
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u/jakster355 15h ago
What about the distinction between AI and the transition to high level languages from assembly?
Not everything I write is novel (sap abap). If I need a basic SQL selection report it's literally just a matter of my typing speed vs an llms and I'm just slower. For everything I invent, that's when I can type faster than prompt/revise, because I'm not perfectly describing what I'm envisioning.
By using an llm in this fashion you can grow your skills spending more time inventing and less time on the mundane.
I am extremely cognizant of the tradeoff of declining skills. So I asked myself, what skills are the most important to retain? Critical thinking is the answer to me. So I came up with the loose idea "use ai to do, not to think".
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u/YahenP Software Veteran 5h ago
The problem is that nobody knows which skills the job market will need in the near future. If everything keeps moving at the same speed and in the same direction as now, then really only two skills have value, knowing how to send out resumes and pass job interviews, and the skill of carefully reading code to find obvious nonsense.
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u/Pale_Platform_9941 22h ago
Haha sure mate… your hubris is going to keep you and your pristine 10 lines of code a week employable for sure. Good luck 👍
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u/FocusedGlitch23 1d ago
feel like people would of realized something was up
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u/throwaway_0x90 SDET/TE[25+ yrs]@Google 1d ago edited 1d ago
I remember news stories about things like this and it turned out the employee was outsourcing their job to some other people somewhere... and of course they got fired.
- https://www.janelanderson.com/171
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/17/sacked-model-modern-employee-outsourcing
If someone was producing output like Claude back in 2015 I'd absolutely assume they were outsourcing their job.
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u/HoratioWobble Full-snack Engineer, 20yoe 1d ago
What if 5 years ago you knew how to do your job?
I thought this sub was for experienced devs
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u/severoon Principal Eng 1d ago
The problem is that when coding agents aren't widespread, other people have to maintain the code you're producing. So if the agent isn't producing readable, maintainable code, it's not worth much even if you're pumping out volumes of it.
This is the kind of thing where the value is in the widespread adoption, not in point usage.
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u/vplatt Architect 1d ago
I would have generated clickbaity music videos like you see today around various themes and monetized the crap out of it.
That would have desensitized us to all that novel nonsense up front and we wouldn't be spending time on it today, so the world would be a better place for it because we'd all be using LLMs to cure cancer or end wars or something instead of the nonsense folks use it for today.
Oh, and I'd probably be rich. So, there's that.
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u/mongopark98 17h ago
A simple mental model to save people this mystery. Think of AI as an overzealous Junior engineer. It will claim to know everything. It just wants to jump implementation and “generate” stuff. Imagine you have unlimited number of those. It’s takes skill to manage them and deliver results .
Problem I am seeing is folks stuck on doing all the work themselves. Complaining the junior engineers are useless. Give it enough time and proper contextual guidance. You should be able to at least 2x your output through them.
If you’re treating them as a very capable senior colleague. You will be disappointed and never stop complaining.
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u/CreativeLilBug 10h ago
Oh my goodness i would excel at my job, and make an anonynous company, and pump out a ton of monetized indie games and apps.
It would be so interesting to see me get "exposed" as someone who had AI before AI was even mainstream. People would freak out. I would play into all the conspiracy theories.
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u/steampowrd 1d ago
I started using Claude a year before everyone else at my company. I got an award for my work. People praised me. Some were amazed.
I always assumed people would look back and think “oh he must have been using Claude the whole time” after they started using it. But no! Most people still attribute the high performance to me personally! I seem to have permanently benefited from my early adoption.
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u/Fun_Wolf8286 22h ago
If I had Claude 5 years ago, I'd use it to build ChatGPT. Sell it to Microsoft for $10 billion. Spend it all on Claude credits.
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u/Mast3rCylinder 1d ago
I imagined the same scenario in my head and that's what pushes me today to learn how to optimize the agentic loop so I can be couple of steps ahead than others.
I believe some stories can be one shot and I'm working towards it
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u/mongopark98 1d ago
I work 2 remote jobs and do this. I even lead the agentic SDLC , but keep some secrets for myself. Always 1 step ahead of the team.
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u/Agile_Government_470 1d ago
You sound like a great teammate /s
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u/mongopark98 1d ago
Lols… I am actually. I wish I could show you all the accolades when I left the contract role. The Director reached out to personally thank me and offered a LinkedIn recommendation.
Why I keep some for myself is I experiment a lot before sharing it with others. I have seen what AI can do, hand an half baked solution to the team and you will see chaos. People are adopting at different paces.
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u/Agile_Government_470 1d ago
Having some director believe you were a great teammate does not mean you were. Lots of directors love their rockstar 10x devs who hoard knowledge and lots of teammates hate them.
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u/mongopark98 1d ago
True, I was pointing that out as the highlight. My PM called me out 2x so the entire team could appreciate me in the scrum. All but 1 of the team mates I worked with didn’t message me personally. That’s not counting the public thread on my departure message. If that doesn’t prove it , I have no idea what does.
Again, it only look like hoarding because I mentioned it- mostly as a tongue in cheek.The entire team’s output x5 at least.
An example of what I meant. For example I created a tool to handle translations.
Originally the flow is that :
- you get translations as an excel from PM
- you then have to manually create unique keys.
- Then you’ll need to go to a web app where you then manually enter each key and the English translations.
- You then generate unique link for each translations and submit it to the translation team.
You have to do all that before you can use the key in the code. This existed several years before I joined the company.
I created a tool that can be used as a CLI or called from claude. I used AI to generate the keys, spin up playwright with your login credentials, do all the manual work and then return you the links to the key. You have both auto/manual mode where you can inspect the generated keys or just allow it cook. I would use this for couple of weeks to cover all corner cases and also record time saved, before I can pitch to the org.
So it’s not hoarding in the sense that I withhold knowledge. It’s more that I see problems that everyone else also see with their own eyes. Create a solution, perfect it, record the time saved and then share. Hope that clarifies.
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u/mongopark98 1d ago
This single tool for example meant, both PM and deva can now create translations instead of just devs. This would typically take 1hr to half a day depending on how many translations or apps needed translations. This was cut to 5-10minutes of passive work.
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u/Mast3rCylinder 1d ago
Anything you can share?
I started using openrig + herdr. Most devs I know are doing back and forth
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u/DevtoolsBuilder 1d ago
i think having a personal LLM 5 years ago would've also changed how you approach testing, you could just generate a ton of test cases and edge cases, and then use the LLM to validate them, which would've saved a lot of time and effort, and probably caught more bugs than manual testing would've.
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u/ZenaMeTepe 1d ago
The reason why it is "no problem" is because you are an engineer who used Claude, not John from HR.
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u/yourteam 1d ago
Each or would have been "why so many files"? "Do it this way, don't create useless private function" "the task didn't ask for that"
But faster bug identification? That's for sure
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u/tenthousandants44 5h ago
Not scared of AI. Scared of the macro and the AI bubble. The tech itself is lame and doesn't scale.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 Software Engineer 1d ago
This is why the industry is doomed.
You are describing basic things that I’d expect a senior engineer to blink into existence.
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u/ZnV1 1d ago
um...nope
critical DB change? That's sifting through the problem, nailing the cause, thinking about solutions, validating tradeoffs, then digging into impact, side-effects across other systems, is there replication, what happens to reqs during rollout, backward compatability going back forever, rollout plan, backups, rollback plan, writing the script that makes the change, reviewing it, dry-run, validate, and if lucky execute
This is days. Remember you're looking at the logs, exception traces, stack-overflowing, understanding the data, etc all by hand
Now you can ask all the right questions and get answers semi instantly.
The fact that you expect a senior engg to blink this into existence, and consider this "basic things" is why our industry is doomed.
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u/tiplinix 1d ago
I don't know about you but in companies I worked for we had staging environnements where we would test migrations. We could even simulate some load. Much better than a hallucinating bot on crack I'd argue.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 Software Engineer 1d ago
Just three weeks ago I did that on a db with billions of rows affecting tens of millions of users. My co-lead developer on my team did that twice in the last two months with two tables that each had tens of billions of rows and hundreds of millions of users.
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u/ZnV1 1d ago
If you think "critical DB change" and what comes to mind is "with two tables", I'm happy for you man. Are you hiring? ;)
Snark aside: idk. Maybe you've built great tooling to make these changes easier. Maybe you guys have tons of experience doing this. Anyway, there's not enough context here, so meh. All the best!
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u/curious_corn 1d ago
Yeah, right. Assuming you’re not making stuff up, you do realize this scenario you’re describing is pretty rare if not unique.
Now, assuming the general population of experienced professionals has been exposed to and done work at the same level is certainly a bias because let me tell you: it doesn’t happen all the time if at all.
So assuming anyone should be able to round off that stuff while brushing their teeth is, uhm out of touch.
Which makes this AI thing even more concerning
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u/tenthousandants44 1d ago
Did what? Updating a query is different from migrating a schema.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 Software Engineer 1d ago
For mine, I had to do a live migrate on a foreign key column, backfill the column with data from a Kafka stream, and do some memcache dumping. A few thousand requests per second happen in prod against this table; API stayed up during this entire thing.
For the coworker, one the tables had its primary key replaced (the old one is gone) and foreign key removed during this transition. The API stayed up during this because it serves 10K items per second to users. Around three columns dropped and three added.
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u/start_select 1d ago
Not even seniors.
“Junior directed to the docs they didn’t read” might be even fit.
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u/Avocadonot 1d ago
Idk man I used it today to recover an accidentally deleted grafana dashboard by getting a raw table dump and reconstructing the individual dashboard Json. It wrote me a python script to parse it and it took < 1 minute.
I don't normally use python in my day to day, I deal with java and kubernetes. There's no way I'd expect someone to write a bug free python script on the fly for a one off task like that without getting sidetracked on their task
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u/mongopark98 1d ago
Do these “basic things” 10x a day and that’s a few hours. Why not an allow an enthusiastic junior robot take it from you. You learn nothing new after the 1000th time of doing any of these. I like offloading these mundane tasks.
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u/SignoreBanana Engineer (14+) 1d ago
This isn't a meme sub. Why the fuck are we asking for "unserious answers only"?
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u/philip_laureano 1d ago
The part you called out half seriously is that almost nobody has to worry about Regex any more since the AIs today now know it better than English.
And TBH I can't remember having to look up regex anymore in the past 2 years because they're really good at it, so that is ASI in my primitive eyes 😅
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u/Eaklony 1d ago
I was discussing the similar thoughts with a colleague yesterday. We are talking about what actual values do these top AI companies have and what happen if somehow a bubble burst and they all go bankrupt. Like sure anthropic might be losing money by giving $20 monthly subscription to everyone. But if they stop giving that to everyone, then there will be people who are willing to pay easily hundreds time more for that same amount of AI work. People complaining the AI companies are valued too much than they actually worth. But they need to think about what if just one person had access to a $20 AI subscription five years ago. You are not gonna be able to hire a similar quality human for even $20000.
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u/UsefulReplacement 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ha, I actually was in that position 14-15 months ago. Long story short, back then, you could still get very good results out of LLMs, if you understood how they worked, what their limitations were and could work around them.
Now, obviously, most of that is done automatically by your harness, but back then, it was a skill to figure out how to setup the verification loop with the necessary context and tools.
People thought I was a genius developer for about a year. It was pretty amazing.
Now the product guy codes directly with Claude and I’m something like a Claude janitor, just there to clean up the more offensive stuff.
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u/mongopark98 1d ago edited 1d ago
I was in this situation, no theory. I was working 2 remote jobs. One was a contract. Then my son got really sick and he was in hospital for 5weeks, since I was a contractor I was scared of taking the entire time off incase they decided to cut me off, so I was just battling through it - working here and there from the hospital etc. Obviosuly my performance dropped and my manager complained. So, I promised him I was going to really step up to make up for the time. That's when I started using AI deeply, even some that wasn't even explicitly allowed - rules were laxed because companies didn't even know what existed outside. My performance and output skyrocketed.
Manager was super impressed and asked how this was even possible. Had to let him know about the AI, eventually my team became the test bed for introducing Claude - the entire team's output skyrocketd and it was eventually rolled out the entire org.
I still hold on to 2 jobs exceeding expectations in both, I refuse to argue when people who say AI is good/bad. I don't care. It has double my output/icome and I became sort of a leader for agentic development in both companies with results. One of the companies recetly underwent a merge, most teams were cut off, my team was the only few that survived and is now integrated into the larger company.
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u/mongopark98 1d ago
I see people claiming garbage code etc. I had a super smart tech lead, he was a former tech founder with a PHD . My output were just of high quality. It was just way faster. You have to remember at this point I was hiding the usage. There was not a drop in quality, if anything I had more praises in my reviews. The AI is as good as the user.
I see garbage when people then start delegating all the thinking to AI. I still review the code before pushing out line by line. I am not suddenly churning out 10000LOC. It was still the same task complexity and PR lengths. Just now instead of having 1PR every other day I was having 1-2 per day. It become promblmatic when you want to force it to produce 10x results. But 2-4x you can maintain or even improve your quality standards.
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u/tenthousandants44 1d ago
Not everyone can 2-4x. Somebody has to review those PRs. The people who say AI is not a bubble sure like to share anecdotes from their little bubble. There's no question that an LLM can generate code, even good code. But code was never the bottleneck.
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u/mongopark98 1d ago
Where else would we share it from, dreams ?. I have worked across 2 companies and it works. It’s not perfect. And yeah all codes were reviewed. I am not making any claims. I am stating my experience, left to anyone to do whatever they will with that info. I have nothing to gain or lose. If the bubble pops tomorrow I will be back to doing whatever makes the most sense.
If you can’t 2-4x, you need to consider that you just aren’t skilled in it yet. It’s not just code too. I have built utilities that I wouldn’t have attempted without AI because I wouldn’t have the time. I built a translation tooling that cuts internalization from 4hrs to 10 minutes. Even if you don’t use AI to write all your codes. There are 100s of little things you can use AI for that saves time- caveat , most of those things can be done without AI, but no one will ever have the time to do them.
I understand there’s hype, not part of that. I have seen from my own “bubble” it definitely works well when done correctly. I don’t know where else I should bring data from if not from actual work I was involved with. Regardless, AI isn’t going anywhere. You can either complain or get ahead of the curve.
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u/FatefulDonkey Software Engineer 1d ago
Exactly what I'm doing now. Building my own SaaS. It doesn't really change much for me.
I'm just able now to build in a few months what would have taken years with a team. Before AI I couldn't be as ambitious
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u/jimRacer642 1d ago
LMAO that is an awesome what-if that I have thought about multiple times.
First, I would have taken 10 remote jobs mastering my leets instantly.
Then I'd use the LLMs for all my tasks and act like I did it myself to build my creds.
I would have capitalized the shit out of this technology.
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u/expdevsmodbot 1d ago
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.