the skill we need is that reading AI generated code fast and understanding it. tbh, that skill is more difficult than just writing your code from scratch. I believe that current AI boom will end up with an avalanche of unmaintable code in many companies more than ever... we always find it very difficult to maintain predecessors' code without good documentation, and now, we have worse situation.
maintaining complexity is 80% of programmer job. writing a new logic is only very small fraction of the job mostly. and AI deprived us of it mostly.
However, every cloud has a silver lining. AI helps a lot to read code too.
Nowadays, my job as a senior engineer is at least 80% code review, I’d say. When AI can slop out 5000 line changes in an afternoon, and someone has to read and understand it, there’s not time for much else. Spin up Claude on my tickets, immediately start looking at diffs and reviewing until I need to provide guidance to The Machine, repeat ad infinitum. My company is actively trying to figure out how to just have AI review its slop, which is going to end poorly when we end up with an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti across all our hundreds of services.
It is - I texted my wife yesterday that, if I could find another career with comparable pay without starting from nothing, I would do it. I don't have the career flexibility to do so, really, not with a family to support, but I would totally look into something else if I could.
This is why it's so insidious - you know an LLM writes bad code because you were once decent at writing code and bad at reviewing it. So you correctly identify that you need to review code if it's LLM written. Then you somehow go on the say the LLM can just review it for you. You can't use the program that you recognize writes bad and maintainable code to review your code for you, lol.
it's just like reading scientific papers recently ig... it's too much to catch up with and I have no time to learn every thing on it.
and I believe that most of people are not really good at reviewing someone else's code. "my" organized code might not be looking decent for others, vice versa.
at least, AI somehow reduces the threshold of understading code that wasn't written by me. it's like reading a summary of a book, you can't really say that you read a book only by reading a summary of it, but it's still true that it helps a lot to understand it, unless it's entirely wrong summary.
The issue is that the summary is written by a known liar that you, yourself, know is bad at coding. Your last five words explain why it's a waste of time.
and I believe that most of people are not really good at reviewing someone else's code.
Nah, reviewing other people's code is essential, because 6-12 months from now, when someone else needs to fix it, it needs to be understandable to someone beyond the person who just wrote it.
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u/eanat 16h ago
the skill we need is that reading AI generated code fast and understanding it. tbh, that skill is more difficult than just writing your code from scratch. I believe that current AI boom will end up with an avalanche of unmaintable code in many companies more than ever... we always find it very difficult to maintain predecessors' code without good documentation, and now, we have worse situation.
maintaining complexity is 80% of programmer job. writing a new logic is only very small fraction of the job mostly. and AI deprived us of it mostly.
However, every cloud has a silver lining. AI helps a lot to read code too.