Comment by tecleandor
3 hours ago
Junior software engineers not being hired is not the same as not needing them. Now I have to fight senior employees that do worse things than junior employees (and produce worse software than two years ago), because they delegate their work to the AI without checking or reviewing anything at all, or questioning the AI architecture "decisions", and we have more incidents than ever...
It's really depressing watching brilliant software developers and engineers producing the worst, unmaintainable code imaginable, and being okay with shipping it because it's passing the test suite. Assuming the test suite is any good anyway (because holy crap, the nonsensical tests AI writes...)
Your code used to be a masterpiece, so well crafted it's easy for AI to tweak and modify because you've got everything so logically organised and scoped... and now this is what you're producing? Hard to debug monstrosities that only an LLM can realistically bolt new features or tweaks onto, because it can do the kinds of refactoring necessary each time.
We use to talk about the fact that code should be readable because you spend more time reading it than writing it, but I think that misses the key part that readable code is also typically easier to debug. If you can read and understand the code, you can follow the logic when things are wrong in production, and you can more easily reason about the emergent properties of interactions between the complex systems that are involved.
I always like to say that LLM-produced test suites aren't for testing software correctness or validity, they're for testing to make sure that stuff that was previously in place stays unchanged. This, of course, is six-in-one-hand-half-a-dozen-in-the-other since the agent will often just update tests to match the updates it just made, but I do find value in providing some kind of continuity to a codebase that's being modified at breakneck pace. YMMV
Yep. The only reason for automated testing is to enable future refactoring, which might be needed for future development. If we only wrote software once, we wouldn't need automated tests. You'd just write the software, test manually as you go, then ship it when you're happy. Ideally not all future development would even need any refactors. A good software architecture would allow one to add features simply by adding more modules of code. But, of course, we don't know what the perfect software architecture is from the start, so we need to assume someone will one day need to refactor.
Your code used to be a masterpiece? Ours was more… Amazon basics wall art.
I jest, while in agreement with this whole comment. We used to care about fostering informed developers and maintaining high standards and good quality software.
I literally compared it to being an expert woodworker. Beautiful ornate decoration. Rich, sturdy mahogany, one of a kind, beveled edges and a fantastic stained hardwood.
Now it’s the 30$ Ikea cardboard stuff.
My biggest question is how many tables does the world need, and how many woodworkers will be required to build + maintain those table factories.
> Your code used to be a masterpiece
Do you even see anything underneath that rose tint ?
this is so accurate it hurts. the amount of my coworkers who just outright have handed any and all thinking over to the computer is staggering. its not just senior either, plenty of devs at the lead and staff level are producing complete garbage that has to be rolled back within an hour of deploy because it is extremely broken, no one verified, and it passed automated checks.
there are several features over the last few months that were obviously made and deployed and no one even launched the dev server and tried a single thing to verify if it was right. just "pull my ticket, do my ticket, push my ticket. i am a developer."
Managers can be even worse. I’ve seen an entire roadmap mostly AI generated. Director+ across the company approving based on it having the right keywords, without nuance or detail.
I’ve seen monthly and quarterly executing results AI generated with plainly wrong factual information.
same here, i call it aids (ai delusion sickness) and some companies i've seen have it bad
Yeah, it's not actually really about coding, it's about thinking. Anyone with any software experience knows the job is 90% thinking and 10% typing. At first I thought AI agents were just a faster keyboard, but no, they think for you too. For many people it's going to be very difficult to force themselves to think when they have a magic thinking machine that makes it look they thought it through.
> just "pull my ticket, do my ticket, push my ticket. i am a developer."
IME a lot of people are now subject to output-rate expectations that preclude doing much else, honestly.