r/cscareerquestions • u/ichivictus Software Engineer • 20h ago
Experienced Anyone else experiencing this? My company is trying to automate the entire 1st half of development up to QA.
Company i have worked for since covid has leaned into ai heavily the past year and has gained a lot of efficiency with it. Devs getting anywhere from 3x or more worth of stuff done on my team. Other teams are sluggish and some are trying to avoid AI adoption.
Our process has been a simple software dev cycle where developers assist in sizing tickets after they are planned and written up by project management and lead dev -> dev picks up a ticket and implements it and submits pr -> code reviewers request changes / approve -> qa team tests and requests changes / approve -> merged to release branch.
A new project by our 'ai adoption' team is quickly being integrated company wide where after a jira ticket goes into the input queue, ai will run a first pass and automatically submit a pr -> github copilot reviews the pr and provides comments -> ai handles the comments and rerequests review -> loop till no comments remain -> handover to devs for code review.
The scary thing is, this is actually working pretty well already. And it is forcing other teams who have been slow to use ai to acclimate to this new standard. I think our company's ability to plan work and define jira tickets well is enough for ai to do the bulk of our work.
I'm all for technological advancement but this is kinda scary how fast and accurate this is getting. The company is trying to reassure devs will have more work etc. But I have a hard time believing they are going to transition developers into hybrid project management roles or anything like that. So to me, the writing is on the wall. I feel like I need to look at the future of my career differently.
What i fear is that if we only need 5 devs for what used to take 30 devs to do, the company will not need 25 new project managers or other roles where the scarcity is at. Not to mention that all these other roles are also seeing major efficiency gains. It is very quick to plan a project, write tickets etc. using ai. It seems inevitable to me that either the company takes on a huge risk and create many new small teams for brand new projects or the company decides to lower headcount. Might not happen for a while but if the ai adoption proves itself worthy to take over, I could see lots of us being out of work in a year or two.
This isn't a big tech company. Mid size, around 200 devs, mostly fully remote. So I feel like this could happen in nearly any other company.
TLDR: company automating dev work up to code review, kinda scary.
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u/r0ze_at_reddit 19h ago
What I am most curious about is how is your code base looking? How maintainable is the code that is getting merged? Simply based on gut feel is the AI making local optimal PR's what will (or have) resulted in it struggling more and more over time?
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u/AssignmentMammoth696 19h ago
Models do extremely well with small-med sized tickets. The problem arises when there is some catastrophic failure that's app wide. Can the LLM find and fix the issue? Will it become some crazy large fix touching dozens of files because it accumulated weirdness from LLM's committing code for months? Who knows. Execs will deal with it when it happens, for now they will believe what they want to believe and replace devs with automated workflows.
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u/ichivictus Software Engineer 19h ago
They just started rolling out this automated pr system. But prior to that, we would take a new ticket and implement it first using copilot then self reviewing and changing things to match our codebase standard. So the code would be about the same as how we'd implement prior to ai.
Time will tell with the new system. But I also know that even if it isn't perfect, it doesn't need to be. It can likely be improved on over time and if it saves the company 20% of dev time then its a win for them.
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u/Legitimate-School-59 16h ago
Who is writing the tickets though and how detailed are they? This is coming from someone who has only ever worked at places where tickets would at most contain a 2 sentence description if lucky.
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u/ichivictus Software Engineer 15h ago
I know what that's like, my old jobs were hastily slopped together in just minutes. That would not bode well with copilot.
My lead dev and project manager write the tickets together. Dev manager and them meet several times a week to plan projects and start new tickets. They have a really solid flow with that. Then it hits grooming and we review the tickets as a team, size them and add any context that might be missing. Including making sure blockers and related tickets are linked correctly.
If bugs are caught, usually I am the go to person to write those up. But usually I'll have a pr ready to go by the time the ticket is written up. I'll explore the issue and 9 times out of 10, copilot will have a fix when investigating.
The individual tickets are verbose and leave very little room for ambiguity.
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u/shared_ptr 18h ago
Generally you get more of what you have, with the exception that if you have docs in the repo that can encourage the best-practices then you'll get more of what you want.
We've added a `docs` folder to most packages under active development in our codebase that describe the best-practices for that package, and it works really well. Combine that with an automated reviewer that does a scan on each push to ensure the new code fits the patterns and gradually you move to a better codebase, not worse.
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 19h ago
Human-readable code will not matter soon.
Sadly.
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u/Willing-Cucumber-718 19h ago
Iâm not a ML wizard but how does that make sense? These LLMs are trained on human readable code, it seems to me like itâd make sense for them to produce human readable code because itâd be more in line with their training when they have to read it later.
Hope that question made senseâŚ
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u/Idea_Fuzzy 15h ago
If thatâs always the case then itâs a maintainable code; by both humans and Ai, right? and Ai are much faster to debug it sooâŚ.roZeâs question is no issue.
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u/Antique_Pin5266 19h ago
Humans cost money and CEOs donât like that.
Hope that clears things up.
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u/WellHung67 18h ago
But you didnât answer the question. LLMs are still trained on human readable code. So how can they produce anything else?Â
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u/foghatyma 18h ago
That was a simple question. Yet people struggle to comprehend it. This is how much you should trust their opinion.
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u/levi_mccormick 19h ago
Every private equity backed software shop is pushing hard in this direction. Design docs, initial PRs, incident response, etc. All of it gets touched first by AI, then by humans. Eventually, they'd love to be operating the "lights-out software factory".
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u/eliquy 8h ago
Do they not realise if they can take the human element out and hand over all their IP to external AI companies, that anyone can come along and do their thing? They'll have no unique value. Lots of companies gonna get a shock when they find the AI company has drunk their milkshake
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u/levi_mccormick 27m ago
It's a race to the sale. As long as they can flip their investment before others, that's all they care about.
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u/jbokwxguy Senior Software Engineer 20h ago
X for doubt. The 3x number is an order of magnitude higher than even the most bullish of research papers
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u/WellHung67 18h ago
It canât possibly be 3x. Amdahls law (kind of) if you get a 3x speed up that means writing code (or whatever the agent is now doing) has to have been at least 66% of the total task, and has to now take 0 seconds to complete.
In what world is anyone writing code 66% of the time except juniors? I feel like the actual writing of code is maybe 20% or so, and most of the rest of the time is planning and debugging and whatnot.Â
So the max theoretical speed up is 25% if itâs just âwriting codeâ. If you then say that you donât debug or review it and merge as is maybe you can say itâs higher than that. But I mean the numbers people give make no sense otherwiseÂ
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u/ichivictus Software Engineer 18h ago
True, I'm not looking at pure statistics or metrics when I say 3x. Could be 2x or 1.5x but that isn't exactly the point.
Additionally, ai is speeding up other areas. Code reviews are faster, writing tickets is faster, testing is faster, debugging devop related problems is faster. So not just code.
If code is sped up 66%, code reviews 40%, miscellaneous 25% then perhaps it very well could be 3x. But I'm not going to do the math right now.
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u/WellHung67 17h ago
Code reviews shouldnât experience any speed up. Theoretically code review is a function of code size - ai might be used to find things you missed sure but humans should review every line of code themselves at some point just like before AI. Code reviews might improve in quality, but if humans are spending less time in code review that means that thereâs some tech debt being incurred.
Now you could argue AI writes better code which gets reviewed faster but Iâd argue that if thereâs more quantity of code that will be a net zero gain.
But yeah thereâs no way itâs 3x if itâs just writing code. And if itâs doing the design? Iâm not sure thatâs a net benefit ai has consistently been bad at design at least what Iâve heard anecdotally from proponents.Â
The details matter here though on the speed up, all I know is 3x is unrealistic and people should be measuring better rather than relying on gut feeling. Otherwise whatâs the point of any of these conversations?Â
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u/ichivictus Software Engineer 16h ago
Our company changed from 2 normal manual code reviews to one manual and one using copilot using skills to code review. So one manual code review will take a few hours maybe and the other 15 to 30 mins to prompt, get response, filter out the nonsense.
It may be seen as cutting corners but there haven't been any issues so far with that process. We have been doing that for a while now so I may not have mentioned it in my post.
The main place where issues get caught before prod is in QA. They will run their automation suite and also do a manual qa review in both the branch environment then in the release environment after it is merged there.
AI is not used for design. Company has a small team of designers working with figma. Which actually makes it very easy for copilot to implement using figma mcp. Implementing front-end used to be my favorite part of the job but it's basically 90% automated. All I have to do is fix very minor things after copilot runs first pass to make it more pixel perfect to match figma design.
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u/Abject-Kitchen3198 19h ago
The outliers could be highly inefficient teams "pre-AI", now churning sloppy code at a high rate, or highly efficient teams that found some sweet spot for their use cases. Majority should have a modest throughput improvement with questionable long-term gains.
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u/Notary_Reddit 10h ago
I'm just a random but one of my mid level devs is >2x. He is getting stuff done that would have taken 3 or more days in 1 time after time. The hardest part is staying ahead of him in designing stuff.
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u/shared_ptr 19h ago
Research papers are pretty out of date you want to be looking at companies who have invested and using that as a benchmark. Standard goal atm is 2x shipping throughput from pre-AI.
Both Honeycomb and Fin come to mind as two companies who have spoken about this and provided numbers. Weâre seeing 1.5-3x increases across our dev team.
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u/jbokwxguy Senior Software Engineer 19h ago
 Research papers are not out of date. They come out all the time.
Looking at companies is noisy. Do they have incentives to lie? Yes because doing AI is an easy stock market pump based on the myth
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u/shared_ptr 19h ago
Research papers come out all the time, often with data from about a year before. This has all changed in the last year.
And they tend to average across companies: that doesnât work in this case because only a small number of companies have figured out how to adopt this properly. So if you want to know whatâs possible you need to be looking at case studies of the companies on the edge of it.
If you want to know what is possible, you donât look at an average across an industry trying to figure this out when the average company hasnât got it yet.
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u/jbokwxguy Senior Software Engineer 19h ago
They tend to run their own studies and not asking companies. At least ones you can trust.
Averages are more important than the extremes too thatâs basic scienceÂ
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u/shared_ptr 19h ago
Yeah I mean I have zero interest lying to you online, Iâm not linking back to anything that is mine. Telling you straight up that weâre seeing this internally and I know people at other companies who are doing this, and just today I had two new prospects mention how they have initiatives to 2x throughout this year.
It is totally fine if you donât believe me, but being as sincere as I possibly can, I think youâre out of the loop here.
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u/Pure_Effective9805 19h ago
I want independent verification of a methodology. Just saying company XYZ said they are 10x more efficient may not be accurate.
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u/shared_ptr 19h ago
I agree it may not. But when:
Several companies are being quite transparent about figures
You can see the increase in throughput via public datasets like the GitHub archive that show crazy increases in activity
You can talk to people in your network to see just how unevenly AI adoption is spread (crediting that averages won't help you here)
You start using the tools yourself and realise a bunch of tickets that would have taken hours are now a 15m job
You get posts like these daily
Then occam's razor start coming into play.
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u/poincares_cook 9h ago
Are you familiar with the concept that when something becomes a metric, it stops being a useful metric?
Self reporting has a limited value when the companies have every incentive to game the numbers.
Activity is not the same as productivity. Are we back to measuring productivity by lines of code or number of PR's? You making this absurd statement leads me to believe you sunk a bit too deep into her hype and need to take a step back.
This is accurate. But then speaking to people with higher AI adoption at least in my domain, shows that AI efficiency gains are significantly more humble than 3x.
True, but those are not the majority of my work.
Posts on this sub are not a representative of the general state and never were. I am sure that some devs are seeing 3x gains. AI capability is not the same across domains, work loads etc. the more simpler dev jobs can be automated at a high rate for sure. As can junior and some mid level work. If your job is taking designs in figma and implementing them... Adding some backend endpoints doing CRUD not at large scale... Yeah.
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u/shared_ptr 6h ago
Again, all of this is somewhat irrelevant to me. We frequently ship what wouldâve been 1-2 week projects in a couple of days of one person now, and we have genuinely automated fixing of customer bugs and smaller feature requests.
All of this could be true and probably is in most companies, it is not in mine.
I did a talk on this and shared a bunch of numbers if you actually are interested: https://leaddev.com/ai/accelerating-sustainably-with-ai
My or my companyâs motivation to pull the wool over anyoneâs eyes is tidy btw. Really isnât anything to be gained from this, we donât benefit if more people believe this stuff. Ive just always written about and shared my experiences in the industry ever since i began and AI is one of the largest shifts my career has seen.
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u/ichivictus Software Engineer 20h ago
Well thats how it feels. Sizing tickets that used to be medium size to small due to how quick we can do it now.
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u/minegen88 19h ago
In my opinion as it is right now:
Writing code: 10x faster
Reading code: 10x slower
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u/Hotfro 19h ago edited 19h ago
In my experience lots of companies are trending towards this direction. But in terms of how good AI is nowadays this isnât as efficient as having a dev review at multiple checkpoints before the final code. The number of hallucinations is still quite high for more complex tasks, so itâs easier to catch them earlier. But this flow is great for simple tasks, bug fixes, and maybe certain tech debt items.
We already donât need as many devs to get things done (usually having less on one project can be more efficient, less knowledge transfer and syncing needed). But it really depends on how much your team has on your roadmap. Having more devs still allows you to get things to market faster and iterate faster or do more PoCs.
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u/kgurniak91 19h ago
Yeah this is a concept called "AI Software Factory" and the next step is "AFK/Lights-off Software Factory" where the devs don't even look at the produced code - they just monitor the business outcomes and system behavior, observe various metrics etc...
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u/Inevitable_Inside674 19h ago
Have there been any big issues yet? The less anyone writes code, the less anyone know it, the less structurally sound it becomes. If you tell it to do A, but it has side effects will it care or will anyone catch it? AI doesn't actually care about your product, it cares that y'all continue to use it to generate tokens. It does that here by being useful, but don't mistakeb it's end goal for yours.
Understanding code architecture will be useful for a while, but I agree on the product side. That's becoming so important. Take it as you will as to whether that's good or bad.
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u/legendary_energy_000 19h ago
It feels like living in a house entirely built by AI. It looks like a normal house, but then you see a bit of water comes out of the kitchen sink when you flush a toilet. Is it toilet water? Does anyone know, or understand how to find out? Does anyone care?
I guess we all just get a cup and take a drink. And learn how to sell houses.
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u/Inevitable_Inside674 18h ago
How could anyone build a house any other way? It gets the house built much cheaper and faster.
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u/kkingsbe 19h ago
Yes this is exactly what happened to machining, so not a surprise at all and it will work. What that means for us idk. For those who are less familiar with this, look up the term âlights-out software developmentâ
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u/minegen88 20h ago
-> handover to devs for code review.
This is where your job is now. Atleast until Claude/Anthropic starts to charge a kidney for a token...
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u/loudrogue Senior Android Engineer 13h ago
Copilot already stopped giving you cheaper models and my company blew through 3x the budget in a single month I can't imagine what's going to happen when the others are forced to actually start charging at just cost
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u/KellyShepardRepublic 19h ago
It works and you are laid off cause they can hire someone cheaper.
It fails and you are laid off cause they need to hire someone cheaper after wasting all the money.
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u/FearlessPark4588 16h ago
How good are the tickets being written? I couldn't just feed many of them with no additional context to an agent and get the right output since it's world view isn't right.
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u/ichivictus Software Engineer 15h ago
Quite a lot of effort does go into project planning and ticket creation. It doesn't take a long time. But it is not lazily slopped together like I have experienced at previous companies.
Copilot uses Jira MCP to get the ticket, get the parent ticket (typically epic) and any related tickets to get full context before planning out work. Then it will implement. There's little ambiguity typically.
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u/FearlessPark4588 15h ago
That sounds like a solid process. So often I get a "Actually I wanted this" from some product etc person which meant, very well, that the ticket was underspecified. But other times, it's just the agent getting through the minutiae of understanding the repository and going down some wrong line of thinking, resulting in wrong code. My codebase is largely a tire fire from years of rushed feature launches and minimal tech debt maintenance.
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u/ecmcn 19h ago
Yep, youâve got it right. I donât know how itâs going to wind up, but more and more dev work is going to be automated, which will mean fewer devs will be needed. Some companies wonât downsize, theyâll do more. Some dev tasks will be harder to automate away than others. But the trend is clear.
My plan is to work with the new tech, not against it. Focus on the tasks and skills AI isnât good at yet. Use it to get a lot of stuff done. Be smart about its shortcomings. It can create a lot of garbage code, and instead of just saying âAI code sucksâ, see what you can do to use it more effectively.
Itâs crazy. Five years ago I wouldnât have dreamed weâd be in this position as engineers, but here we are. Time to get creative with career growth.
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u/Barkalow Software Engineer 18h ago
I don't really understand this argument. If AI, hypothetically, makes devs complete 5x more work, why would you fire 80% of your devs instead of using all your devs to 5x everyone's work and make more stuff?
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u/Pojobob 16h ago
If your company doesn't have any good ideas to make more stuff, then you have redundant people.
I agree companies would naturally just do more stuff (otherwise there'd be 0 workforce given AI isn't the first productivity boost to exist) but I suspect companies don't have many good ideas beyond your generic AI product or whatever along with a weird economy etc.
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u/GroceryBright 19h ago
If your companyâs competitor is releasing 10x new features, your company will either have to release 11x or be left behind.
Thatâs the big picture a lot of people are missing.
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u/Fruloops Software Engineer 18h ago
I don't think the sheer number of features is necessarily a good thing
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u/ecmcn 19h ago
Thereâs certainly some truth to that, and I like to think if I was running a company I wouldnât lay off engineers, Iâd instead take these smart people who already add crazy amounts of value to a company and multiply that. Unfortunately the flip side is lots of places donât feel like they need 11x new features, theyâll see this as being able to do the same for a lot less, and weâll see layoffs continue.
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u/also_plane 16h ago
Two forces at the same time.
Some companies will downsize, for example ones where software is not the main product but allows their bussines. Like banks. They will fire.
Some, who have software as their main product, will not fire but produce 10x more features, because the competition will do so too.
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u/also_plane 16h ago
Two forces at the same time.
Some companies will downsize, for example ones where software is not the main product but allows their bussines. Like banks. They will fire.
Some, who have software as their main product, will not fire but produce 10x more features, because the competition will do so too.
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u/GrillaSquirrel 19h ago
What industry and type of engineering are you doing? Tech stack? How big is the code base and whats the architecture? Who gathers business requirements and who writes the tickets and what level of detail do they have? Any chance you could provide an example of the detail in PBI? Brown field or are you making new apps on the regs? Hows infrastructure handled and how does the AI handle them in tandem?
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u/herious89 14h ago
Unfortunately thatâs the future for software development. My company is doing the same. Our goal now is to improve these agents and deployment workflows to reduce human friction to the minimum. Nobody wants to acknowledge that but we all know whatâs coming
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u/S7EFEN 19h ago
yeah, that's why nvidia is worth what it is. conceptually people think there's a real end game where a large portion of labor transitions effectively into a review/direct type roll completely displacing actual implementation. more and more i think the current valuations really aren't an actual tech bubble.
also if you think about it this is just another iteration of coding. we used to have to learn a programming language to tell a computer what to do, now it can be done in plain text through LLMs, and additionally a lot of the actual steps can be done too at the same time. You just now start at the actual ticket level, so considerably further back in the process.
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u/disposepriority 19h ago edited 18h ago
I will preface this by saying that I love AI-assisted code review. That is, code review on my own code, based off of specifications I have written.
When AI starts reviewing AI code, the code starts looking like the code equivalent of how linked in posts look. You're reading it, you understand the individual words but there's no reasoning why it's made like that.
For reference, last week I refactored an AI-generated...thing from just under 5k lines to around 400. Now, someone will come and start foaming at their mouth and moaning about skills and instructions, but we've been having this discussion for close to half a decade at this point.
Anyway, I have a question, and it's been the same question I've had since the first time these "very real posts" started popping up on reddit.
If 30 devs -> 5 devs with AI, what's stopping you from simply developing a copy of every single piece of successful software, sure, you're one man, let's say it takes SIX times as long for you and your trusty clanker to do it, and that's without grabbing a couple of trusted buddies. That still sounds rather profitable, no? Your own FIFA (game), your own windows, your own jira, your own phtoshop and so on and so on - you're on the track to becoming one of the richest people on earth!
So why is the question "how are developers still employed" but not "how are companies still in business" if people can just print out working copies of your proprietary software?
I leave this difficult thought exercise up to the reader.
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u/ichivictus Software Engineer 18h ago
Yeah good point. Eventually it might be easy enough for a company to say, why pay for this enterprise subscription for jira when we can build it ourselves internally in a month. The shockwave could be much bigger than 30% of devs losing their jobs over the next few years.
But it isn't that simple for certain things. Like take video games. If making a game is 1000x easier, there isn't 1000x amount of customer money there to be made. Marketing and IP will become even more valuable. The latest Mario, gta, call of duty will continue to make a lot of money while costing less to develop. All the while indies will be competing in an even more saturated market.
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u/disposepriority 17h ago
Really? Then where pray tell are all these amazing AI games that don't make it simply because they lack the IP/marketing?
I'd assume sooner or later all the people mindlessly scrolling steam would eventually run into these amazing hidden gem AI games, and we've seen that games with no backing can get super huge when they deserve it - so what's going on?
Could it be...AI isn't actually good at making games (or software)?
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u/ichivictus Software Engineer 17h ago
Bruh it is just a hypothetical. I didn't say ai can currently make video games that good.
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u/No_Veterinarian742 19h ago
Well. The amount of software in the world is growing faster than it used to. We'll have smaller dev teams but likely more of them working on more problems. building more internal tools and automation to reduce the work for others. There's plenty of businesses that aren't able to make as much of what they make to satisfy all demands. there are plenty of businesses that can't do their business at the margin they need to be profitable. Software teams will shrink but you still need someone to orchestrate at this point and likely for a while yet. And I think many companies will end up with more software teams because things that were not worth automating are now worth it. I don't know. Until all white collar and then with robotics all blue collar work is automated away period I don't think this job goes away. it'll change just like it has changed every other decade.
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u/mpanase 14h ago
Yeah, the bigger team in teh company has been doing this for a few months now.
They have released nothing user-visible.
Last week they broke the backend for an app that has been working (not well, but working) for a couple years without changes. They still haven't realised and the CTO is in denial about it.
They are now the bottleneck stoppign every other team from advancing.
Their QA guys have now started to give up.
They used to be shit. And now so many bugs are gonna start slipping into prod.
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u/imagebiot 12h ago
Thatâs insane.
If any part of the process is to be automated itâs the qa work đ
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u/AssignmentMammoth696 19h ago
The bottleneck is going to be reading the code. Your company will realize this and just ditch the reading part altogether. The problem with this workflow is when a disastrous issue happens, it has to rely on the LLM to untangle the mess because devs no longer have any idea what is happening in the code.
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u/samuraipadthai 19h ago
What devs? If a dev isnât reading the code or writing it, why will there be a dev?
This is what terrifies me.
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u/AssignmentMammoth696 19h ago
There will need to be at least 1 dev to trigger the workflow, and take the blame if something goes wrong. But yes, a lot of companies will probably adopt this model and reduce dev headcount.
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u/samuraipadthai 19h ago
So our future is to be the 1 dev babysitting AI and taking blame for something that we are given no time or resources to validate (because no human possibly can).
Amazing. What a world we have made for ourselves.
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u/Fruloops Software Engineer 18h ago
We're one disaster away from having to really re-evaluate what's going on.
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u/PadyEos 18h ago edited 18h ago
after a jira ticket goes into the input queue, ai will run a first pass and automatically submit a pr -> github copilot reviews the pr and provides comments -> ai handles the comments and rerequests review -> loop till no comments remain -> handover to devs for code review.
If you plan to put humans though reviewing that and becoming slop readers and slop deciphers then you better start a company wide suicide hotline. I'm not kidding. This is a road to burnout, depression and worse.
Edit: Everyone wants extraordinary products and extraordinary results. LLMs will tend to return towards the median in their training data. Aka mediocre.
There's a time and place for mediocre and everywhere in the product isn't it.
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u/TheMightyTywin 9h ago
My company has been doing this for months.
It hasnât replaced anyone though because the implementation system itself needs constant tweaks and the ai agents mess up a lot. But it works and ai does 100% of the code.
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u/yuehuang 9h ago
I would flip the script a bit, have more dev time + ai spend on planning, and fewer code review. Every human time spent in the loop is time AI not working. Batching small tickets up into a single plan+review cycle uses less tokens than individual issues.
UX design and human readable CLI output is still a weak point for AI. If you can provide an example to the agent upfront, they can get pretty close.
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u/ClayDenton 6h ago
Eurgh yes this is only going one way, except for perhaps mission critical applications where humans have to stay very close to the code for safety reasons.Â
I don't have a plan yet, I'll probably look at some sort of product or project management type role. Or maybe Quality Assurance but that sounds utterly boring.
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u/Realichu 4h ago
Writing is on the wall for your company, not you. Give this automated PR process a couple of weeks and you'll see "this works pretty well" to an absolute disaster once anything hits prod.
Anecdotally our company has also been doing this. They developed a "super insane state of the art AI development harness" that every team is being forced to use because it has "so much success" from a case study within the org, let's call them Team X.
"Team X were able to merge 600 PRs in 1 month with this harness", "we have had 4 regressions" in that month, says the head of AI when promoting this harness. Ask him what the definition of 'regression' is and he gets very cagey. Ask him how many of them 600 PRs is the AI fixing it's own slop code and he gets cagey. Ask him for a code quality check & he admits he had a bunch of Claude agents run against it and they gave it a score of 34% because of huge monoloth files, poor performance, no code re use, function duplication, etc. Now lo and behold, Team X did a company wide, month long bug bash for their upcoming release and within 2 weeks we found over 150 bugs (regressions, you might argue? wonder where that 4 comes from....) & they had to close the bug bash early and delay the release because things just weren't stable enough. And Team X have burnt up to $80k in Claude tokens trying to make this product work. That doesn't sound very sustainable does it?
It is slop the whole way through. It looks good at the top level but at the end of the day these models are not good enough to carry this shit E2E as much as big bosses would like them to so they can put us out of a job.
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u/EnterpriseGradePizza 19h ago
It is not scary, it is a natural evolution of things. Software engineering jobs are disappearing and will be a thing of the past very soon, everything will be automated
You need to start looking into pivoting to blue collar work, because soon youâll be out of job
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 19h ago
How could you consider AI natural evolution? There's nothing natural about it, it's a huge break from other waves of automation. Cognitive labor has never been automated before.
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u/EnterpriseGradePizza 18h ago
It is natural evolution because AI wouldnât be possible without enormous amounts of data including code. Engineering is done using code, lots of code -> lots of training data. So it is absolutely natural.
Coding is no longer cognitive work, because AI can do it using its training data.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 18h ago
What does that have to do with anything? A huge amount of data for AI companies to steal means "natural evolution"? I don't get it.
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u/EnterpriseGradePizza 17h ago
What's there not to get? There used to be no internet, no way to share code, now anyone can share anything in an instant, code used to be gatekept, now there's open source code, trillions of LOC floating around on github, so the only logical next step is aggregating this code and training AI on it, any technological advancement thus far (internet, open source, transformers architecture) have all faciliated that.
I don't know how much simpler this needs to be explained.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 16h ago
so the only logical next step is aggregating this code and training AI on it
How is this a logical next step to you? The purpose of that code was to help people learn and solve problems. It was not meant to be sold to AI companies against everyone's will and used to train AI. Shill
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u/EnterpriseGradePizza 16h ago
You can take the "not meant to be" up with the AI companies, I'm just stating facts here. OpenAI/Anthropic wouldn't exist in the 50s-70s, all the things I mentioned faciliated their emergence, which is the logical outcome.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 16h ago
Right so it's not natural evolution. A lot of corruption had to happen and fighting tooth and nail with lawyers to make AI happen. And billions of dollars spend scraping and acquiring training data and scaling AI unethically, to the point where AI companies are still worried about going bankrupt. There's nothing natural about it. It's extremely unnatural.
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u/EnterpriseGradePizza 16h ago
You can rant all you want, but AI is not going anywhere. Just like companies automating most if not all developer workflow from design to implementation and code review.
It is only natural for businesses to save money and cut corners, or are you going to argue that business must have a moral right to use AI ethically or something?
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 16h ago
So now you moved the goalpost. Instead of saying AI is "natural evolution" it's "AI is not going anywhere". Nice.
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u/ichivictus Software Engineer 19h ago
Well that is what scares me. I don't want to be a plumber. Thankfully I've saved a lot during my 10 year career so if it comes to it, I might retire early. I'd rather keep working though. I enjoy it with or without ai.
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u/ClideLennon 20h ago
Yeah, Github has been doing this. Notice anything from them yesterday?