Comment by ivantop

12 days ago

Honestly, I am also at a faang working on a tier 0 distributed system in infra and the amount of AI generated code that is shipped on this service is probably like 40%+ at this point.

I'm not surprised at all here, last time I worked in a FAANG there was an enormous amount of boilerplate (e.g. Spring), and it almost makes me weep for lost time to think how easy some of that would be now.

  • It’s not just boilerplate. This is a low level C++ service where latency and performance is critical (don’t want to get into too much detail since I’ll dox myself). I used to think the same thing as you: “Surely my job is safe because this system is very complex”. I used to think this would just replace front end engineers who write boilerplate react code. 95% of our codebase is not boilerplate. AI has found optimizations in how we store items, AI has alerted us to production issues (with some degree of accuracy, of course). I worry that traditional software engineering as we know it will disappear and these hybrid AI jobs will be what’s left.