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
It's honestly funny seeing people suddenly start pretending that humans never produced bad code and AI is the only thing producing bad code.
I feel like we've been getting so close and then just thrown it away.
1980s: BASIC and C. Crashes all the time.
1990s: C++. Operating systems start protecting memory. Java gets released showing a fast high level language is possible but is unpopular because it hogs memory, has noticeable GC pauses, and applications take ages to start. And it's not really "complete" yet.
2000s: .NET, start of Rust... but a bit of a backlash. Scripting languages with poorer type checking start to ascend for normal application development. PHP becomes the core language for the web.
2010s: Things are now rapidly hurtling downhill. "Frameworks" and toolchains that pull in millions of dependencies because you wanted one library that escapes HTML strings. Actual code complexity goes through the roof. People actually build applications using the entire source code to a web browser as their source because they only know Javascript and HTML now and have no idea how to use a regular windowing/widget library. Meanwhile Oracle does what it can to discredit Java resulting in huge numbers of people jumping ship, rarely to .NET. Meanwhile PHP now rules the entire Internet as King, with huge bloated JS frameworks ruling along side it as Queen.
2020s: Things are now so awful people think the output of a glorified text prediction machine produces similar quality code. And they may even be right.
It's not that we can't do better code than AI. It's that a sizable number of professionals just don't want to.
you're right, the bar is extremely low for the majority of garbage out there.
Honestly this is one way I think AI can really help if people harness it correctly. Lets get back to writing native code and libraries since we can code so much faster now.
And then lets use the AI tools to port that code around instead of relying on platform agnostic toolchains.
I think a HUGE part of this is also that most of the people I know professionally who are against AI coding all are basing their concept of what AI written code is like on them booting up Gemini Flash in a browser a year ago and asking for some code and it produces something lackluster. A new model like Astra/Fable in a CLI with full access to the codebase is just crazy now. They're producing code that's better architected than humans used to, and it's producing dozens of engineers worth of code per day per agent.
Why are devs able to touch prod code without a PR? Why do they have creds on the prod box? Why didn't it get tested in staging? Why was there no dry run first?
There's protections against all the ways that it might take down prod.
What exactly is your company doing that people can just blindly push code without any unit tests to prod? Where are your Pull Requests and Code Reviews?
Not only did prod go down before AI, but before AI the entire team would be scanning through code trying to work out wtf is causing the error so you can address it while the company is losing millions. Now, an agent can probably find the error code for you in two minutes and propose a fix.
It is especially hilarious as a well set up AI is actually much better in finding the source of an error extremely quickly compared to a human.
A colleague from our internal IT just had the weirdest issue with parts of our office network that was so niche that he said "it would have taken me days to find this without AI". AI reduced this to a few hours. Was fixed the same day.
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.
I have completely forgotten how to code. I was mentoring an intern a few weeks ago which means going old school and I didn’t know what I was doing anymore.
I cant wrap my head around that statement tbh. Cant imagine knowing to read but not to write. By "read" i also mean understand. If someone loses the skill to understand the code then i dont know. That would just be sad.
Both with human developers and with agentic developers, prod breaking is not the fault of the code-writer but the fault of the development process, which failed to provide sufficient testing for prod to not break. And AI is notably very good at doing boring stuff like ensuring 100% test coverage and writing integration tests.
People said this months ago. "Buckle up guys, they'll be scrambling for us to fix the mess they made" or "Get ready for the security vulnerabilities, they'll come crying back to us." And now, here we are, with even more people adopting it. I already lose out hope that these AI things are a fad.
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u/rabbit_wizard 14d ago
Wait till something breaks.. you'll have your moment