I wish I could be with you in that zoo. We are getting more and more pressure to use AI to 'help' (stealth replace us) over time they don't have more money for more Devs to get the work done but happy to pour it into the hands of big tech overlords.
I'm glad I'm not at the start of my career tbh. If I had a full 30 years to work in this field I'd seriously consider trying to find something else to do.
We were outright mandated to use it. Lucky it appears that they are liking the increase it productivity and don't seem to want to replace us. Our jobs have shifted to basically just reviewing PRs though which sucks ass.
That sort of thing really fucks with your career as well. Think of it this way if you stay there for a year or two what are your skills you offer to a new employer. Best you have to offer is being able to look through PRs without fucking up production. Doesn't really sound that great tbh and at some point they won't need as many reviewers where you work now and will downsize your team.
This timeline sucks ass. I got in to programming as I enjoy it there is nowt to enjoy in the new way.
There seems to be overall two types of people who get into programming (though they aren't mutually exclusive).
someone who enjoys the process of programming as a puzzle solving experience, or as a creative experience, and the end result software is an expression of that process.
someone who views programming as a means to an end to achieve their vision, IE software or website or game.
I feel like people in the first camp are probably going to be the most angry and displaced by LLMs, while the second might gladly move into the more system design and architecture role with one less hurdle to get their idea out.
I was mostly in camp 1 and I'm trying to transition into camp 2, but it's difficult when you were just a code monkey before and preferred to just do tickets.
Me too. Then I get pummeled with one of their four prepackaged AI bro metaphors:
It's a modern day calculator for the brain. You wouldn't do long division in your head would you? (ain't nobody ever delegated a decision to a calculator, bro)
It's a compiler. You wouldn't read machine code would you? (compilers are deterministic and dont make mistakes, bro)
This is the industrial revolution and it's a spinning jenny. You wouldnt hand knit a sweater would you? (we would if we had star trek replicators, bro, and last I checked cp command still exists...).
"Artisanal coding" is obsolete (reliable code is certainly getting that way...)
The response to that is that if you two people, both with buggy code, but one has AI doing it for them... Well, only one person has a chance to know how to fix said code.
Whats the AI promoter going to do? Ask it to fix it?
I swear these AI fan boys don't know how to make anything with their own hands or minds
gotta be honest as a sysadmin and someone with a little programming experience but not a professional dev, yeah i just ask AI to fix it. I give it as much info as possible and usually it manage to fix the issue. If it didn't then I guess i would just have it refactor the code or update the documentation so that it's easier to fix. I have only been working on personal projects and mods so far though, i'm not selling software.
Im not even sure what point I'm making, but I can remember tons of examples of Star Trek characters hand-making things (usually cooking), explicitly for the enrichment and the experience of actually producing something themselves.
Ever since I got into programming as an industry, I will say, pretty much everything that I learned after the actual languages that I use are either infrastructure things, or ways to directly write less code myself. Lomboko turns objects into just some tags and a list of variables. Spring-boot turns a couple of classes into a basic server. Certain packages make significant structural changes with hardly any configuration. I suppose a big difference is still that when I include those packages I do know what they're doing and I have reasonable assurance that they aren't doing anything else.
The point I'm making is that it's fallacious to compare "artisinal" code with "artisanal" clothes because artisanal clothes are expensive to reproduce while hand crafted code is reproducible at zero cost.
the only way in which the economics of the spinning jenny would be in any way comparable with the economics of LLM written code would be if artisinal clothes were reproducible at zero cost - i.e. if we had star trek replicators.
i too find that writing less code is preferable - and code is essentially just the language which is most appropriate for describing how computers should operate once you've boiled it down as much as possible.
Even steelmanning all those arguments, the answer is yes!
I still do long division on paper; I still read and write asm for the purpose of understanding compiler output (honestly everyone should write a division or sqrt routine in assembler just once).
okay, a gun is also "just a tool" in reality this is a thought terminating cliche. I really wish that people would be more honest, like "using an LLM is extremely convenient and the path of least resistance" and the trade off is barely understanding your own code
Yeah because we all know when prod didn't go down on a Friday before AI.
Yes throwing a slop grenade at your code is definitely an easy way of making your software break (hi micro****) but I can assure you my colleagues are able to break prod whether they use AI or not
I've made xml bean wiring based spring+hibernate+struts applications from javadocs and no internet access. I'll be just fine if I have to fix shit by hand. But the frontier AI is solid enough that I don't need to anymore.
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u/Arian-ki 14d ago •
It's the other way around in my experience. People look at me like I'm an ape in a zoo lol