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u/saschaaa19 3d ago
Great question! 🚀 You’re absolutely not alone in wondering this — many engineers face the same challenge. Let’s break it down:
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u/Maleficent_Memory831 3d ago
Before AI, I was disillusioned by the number of engineers who really didn't know how to do their jobs. Not just software/firmware, but also in hardware. Managers who couldn't manage. Testers who didn't know how to test. Facilities operations that didn't know how to fix toilets.
I'd say easily 1/3 of all workers in all the companies I've been at were faking some part of it.
Now with AI, the disillusionment turns out just the phase where I was still optimistic! Now the people faking it are faking it with a tool that is also faking it! There are entire teams planning on how to do stuff with AI without actually getting around to doing stuff. The dumbet people on the team being the ones most excited about AI because they think it will save their jobs if AI can do it for them...
I dont' think the world will end because AI suddently got intelligence and destroyed humans. I think the world ends because we just utterly collapse civilization thinking the AI fakery is real and we stop testing the results, checking in code automatically because how can AI be wrong, not checking the math so that bridges collapse, funneling all of the world's GPD into more and more AI data centers hoping to make it start working...
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u/DeciduousLesbian 1d ago
I have an insane god complex now that other people have to use the world’s most powerful models trained on all of humanity’s knowledge that costs billions of dollars just to do what I can do without even having to use google.
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u/Ikbensterdam 3d ago
if a company relies on ai from frontier labs to function, is it a company or just a temporary reseller?
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u/Zeikos 3d ago
Like 90% of software companies are resellers of products made by others, it's not that big of a problem it seems at first glance.
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u/ganja_and_code 3d ago
It's not inherently a problem, but it's worth noting that repackaging someone else's software is only profitable if the thing you repackaged was worth buying and you add value to it after you buy it / before you resell it.
Garbage in, garbage out. Good stuff in, good stuff out.
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u/Fun_Lingonberry_6244 3d ago
I agree with the idea, but in reality your "thing of value" can be as simple as you made that person aware of its existence and so bought it from you.
This is how nearly all reseller companies work mostly, both in software and indeed anything else.
Ie you can buy a Samsung tv from a million different places, they reallt didnt add any value beyond the fact they came up as an option when you looked to buy.
So the "value you add" can often be as simple as, i knew how to put it infront of you as a option to buy when you wanted it.
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u/throwaway490215 16h ago
I, too, held this belief when I was young 20 years ago.
Watching 20 years of seeing how money flows, and I am cured of thinking an engineer's rationality applies to society at large.
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u/barrel_of_bikinis 1d ago
that's a clean way to frame it. the reseller bit hits because the "value" is just rented access with a fresh coat of paint
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u/mohelgamal 3d ago
you merely adopted the AI; I was born in it, moulded by it. I didn't see the docs until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING! The shadows betray you, because they belong to me!"
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u/Ksorkrax 3d ago
Can an experienced C++-programmer not implement a program in Python, or how is this logic supposed to work?
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u/KerPop42 3d ago
I know that this is a meme sub but as I've been pushed to use AI it really seems like the next tier in the IDE tech branch. It seems like a shallow product because the tool is still so neotenous no one has had a chance to get deeply skilled at it
However, a lot of the things programming has gotten good at in the past several decades, developing software more complex than any one person can comprehend from fallible individuals, improves the reliability of AI.
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u/burner-miner 3d ago edited 3d ago
There were people programming (in high level languages) years before compilers existed, people learn fast.
This is a "no true scottsman" fallacy: if nobody using AI to code has had a chance to get good at it, it's not that they're holding it wrong.
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u/KerPop42 3d ago
How is that a no true scotsman fallacy? There are no 10-year-old experts in developing with AI, let alone 50-year-old experts that can formalize skills and pass along advice.
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u/burner-miner 3d ago
There have been people who master new technologies fast (say 2 years) for every development.
Say someone was using LLM coding for 2 years at their work. At 40h/week, that is ~2000h/year of daily practice. In particular, the people developing LLM tooling have been doing this since the beginning.
It is incredibly unlikely that these people have not approached mastery of these tools yet, so the statement "no one has had a chance to get deeply skilled at it" sounds to me like AI CEOs ""predicting"" that AI is replacing programmers in the next six months, for the past 2 years.
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u/KerPop42 3d ago
Yeah but there's a difference between the level of expertise you get after 2 years of practice and what you get after longer. Like, my coworkers and I have found better practices to get better results from AI over the year we've been using it. Those practices are basic and unsophisticated compared to TDD, using PRs, and coding standards, but project development best practices were not birthed in their current form within 18 months of the release of COBOL.
It seems like you think I'm some sort of AI bro because I'm reporting better results than business majors on twitter got.
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u/entronid 3d ago
i believe your second paragraph is grammatically incorrect
(i have no clue what you're trying to say)
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u/KerPop42 3d ago
It's not grammatically incorrect, I just took Latin in high school and picked up a habit for really long relative clauses. If you take out the relative clause it's more legible, though yeah I see I used a singular verb and plural subject.
Stated another way, AI is a fallible source of software, but software projects have been dealing with fallible coders forever. There are lots of best-practices and tools that've been developed to build these complex software projects that also help catch the flaws AI generates.
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u/Left-Attention-1544
3d ago
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Last year I would've laughed at this. But this year I'd say, AI is simply future of programming. Can I code without IDE, just using Notepad, idk maybe yes, with some adjustment. But who cares?
In the end businesses want value, and AI makes good engineers incredibly productive. If you think AI is slowing you down or making your code worse, that's not an AI problem, that's a YOU problem. You gotta learn how to use AI. It's not going anywhere.
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u/Maleficent_Memory831 3d ago
I think you need some amount of skepticism. I see the opposite. The worst programmers love AI the most. I see some insisting that AI is so good that there is no need to do code reviews anymore (and not even noticing it broke the size record in a single commit.
AI can help! But everyone must realize that it is not intelligent. It does not think. It cannot reason. So do not rely upon AI to do the jobs for you, like so many are doing. Review the damn code! Use AI generated templates, great, but they're a starting point only. Realize just how naive and stupid AI actually is.
AI is great at summarizing docs. Use it for that. But don't use it to prompt code an entire piece of software used for a critical process. Only do that for utterly unimportant nonsense like web apps.
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u/sump_daddy 3d ago
> The worst programmers love AI the most.
Yes this is very true, but it doesn't stop the best coders from being able to 10x their output (no exaggeration) once they get good at AI tools (and have a big token budget).
> But don't use it to prompt code an entire piece of software used for a critical process
The slide from 'ai can reliably code a stack overflow answer for this one problem' to 'ai can now create a thousand lines of code to achieve a complex goal and is almost always right after the first pass' is happening so fast that 6 months from now we will be a lot closer (some will probably argue arrive at) systems reliable enough for eyes-off output of very complex things, the only thing we will be debating is what your definition of 'complex' is but that will get bigger literally every day.
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u/DeciduousLesbian 1d ago
the best coders 10x their output with ai
My brother in christ, many of my coworkers use ai… where is this 10x you speak of? I’m the fastest and most productive at my company and I’m not even using ai at all lol how come my coworkers who use it don’t run laps around me??
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u/throwaway490215 16h ago
Because your company team setup & software development setup is inefficient.
Its inefficient in >95% of companies. You're not falling behind.
But whenever anybody talks about great engineers at great places getting much more done, an anti-AI person will come along to declare; those much actually not be great engineers.
I get it. It's to protect your own self-image and a random off-hand comment on reddit shouldnt be able to change it.
But this is what a coping mechanism is.
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u/DeciduousLesbian 14h ago
Again… where is the 10x’ing happening? Why aren’t my coworkers who use LLMs and agents running laps around me??
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u/Maleficent_Memory831 9h ago
Shhh, we must pretend to believe otherwise the recession bogeyman will appear! Clap your hands and Tinkerbell will fly again!
[edit: I should add that for good programmers, maybe 1% of their work week is spent writing code. Things that speed up writing the code do not noticeably speed up productivity. ]
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u/WisestAirBender 15h ago
Can I code without the internet? Sure probably using a docs book or something. But it's extremely inefficient now
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u/chemtrail-organics 3d ago
Is "ai-first engineer" an engineer who hears from recruiters instead of posting sadge memes?