Comment by happytoexplain
10 hours ago
>I suspect that many of the loudest voices pushing back against AI coding tools never practiced programming as a hobby or saw it as especially fun, and the fact their job is changing won't make them start now.
This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.
I've never particularly enjoyed programming on its own merits, but also think AI is crap. Its mainly because AI clearly accelerates the parts of programming that I've found tend to lead to software projects falling apart, ie not understanding the code
The last 20 years of experience have told me that that's the #1 variable that correlates with the death of a project, so I'm in no hurry to speed that along. People have been trying to find some way to skip that difficult step of actually understanding what's happened since programming was invented, and its always a bad idea - because that process of internalising a projects structure is the single most valuable thing for a project. Creating a project structure that can be internalised by human beings - and then doing that - is software engineering
There is some truth to that, thus i wonder, if they will not solve that by creating architectural harnesses. Like look at repo x. Condense its coding style and architecture into a prompt. Remember that prompt everytime you create a new module.
But i get where you sre coming from
I agree with your take if we talking about large complex industrial software
but guess what ???? most software don't
Timmy don't need to understand how landing page works in order to sell his cookie startup online
see where I am going ???? You are not get replaced
AI just replace people that work in "dirty and crude" work, think of its like wordpress plugin fixer from third world country
this is part of industry that you never touch and not want to work
>"dirty and crude" work
Which is what we used to tell the junior to do.
It only remains to explain this to the management... That does not work with code, engages with AI only in the form of chatbots, but demands everything to be "AI native" and won't be there to deal with the consequences.
>This makes no sense. Everybody I know, including me, who hates the big picture of what AI has done loves programming immensely and does it as a hobby as well as a job. The people at my job who are most positive about AI are those who didn't particularly enjoy programming. You're applying Occam's Razor backwards.
I think I know people in both camps who feel both ways. I'd say it's all just noise at this point. What's clear is some people like it (for now) and some people don't (and probably won't ever). I've gone from liking it to not over the course of the last year. I used to love programming/the craft, and then got burnt out of it, so I loved it because it made building things easier again after I stopped caring about that, and then it made work hellish when everyone basically stopped caring about the craft at all.
I would agree with this. Programming/coding has been a portion of my job as an Ops engineer for last few years, but it was the part I liked the most. So I’ve been pretty heavily against AI use.
However there are other folks in my company who, with very little programming knowledge, have produced viable, workable solutions for our company to use. All projects that were in my list of TODOs that I hadn’t gotten around to.
It was in that moment that I realized I’m very quickly going to be surpassed if I don’t adapt and move quicker with AI solutions. Since then my output has increased a bunch.
I’m not the most stoked on it, but as with all companies, results are far more important than the journey. So long as it works and is at least mostly maintainable, leadership does not really care how we got there.
But all of this was forcing my hand because people without the foundational skill set were creating equivalent output to my artisan, bespoke solutions. Writing is on the wall.
I think you're entitled to your opinion, but want to point out that there's 2 different axes on the graph here. You are unhappy about LLMs' affect on your working conditions, but also concede it's inevitable and the labs are at least somewhat sincere in their predictions of it displacing a significant amount of the value in the software engineering market.
It's not necessarily a given that the person you're replying to agrees on the latter, and therefore they might not be stoked on you starting off by agreeing with them but going on to make an argument that supports the companies responsible for the very thing they're complaining about.
I think there's a contradiction in you stating that management thinks LLM-generated output is "maintainable". They went to business school, they don't know what that means. It's your job to explain to them the consequences of shipping code faster than the people whose job it is to understand it can do so.
I don't know if it's just me, but I find that with a disciplined approach (or even an undisciplined one for some personal projects), LLM generated code is quite "maintainable" nowadays for the sorts of things that matter: adding new functionality, fixing the odd bug (usually a missed edge case, or behavior I didn't think-through well enough). They're also secure enough for me not to be overly concerned.
Granted, I stick to frontier models and avoid cheaper ones, but if it quacks like a duck...
1 reply →
> It's your job to explain to them the consequences of shipping code faster than the people whose job it is to understand it can do so.
The problem we’re collectively running into is that nobody knows if this actually poses a problem anymore. We’ll find out in 5-10 years, but businesses and clients can’t wait that long.
As a side note, I don’t think it’s fair to blame the “management” for setting expectations around AI use. They’re driven by market forces. If competitors are producing slop and customers are gobbling it up, then from a business perspective it _is_ a mistake to abstain from AI use.
What I’m finding quite fascinating is that we’re in a weird spot right now where we’re both expected to produce slop AND understand it / be responsible for it. Seems unreasonable.
There's plenty of us who enjoy programming and still welcome AI. The act of programming isn't the product. Some products do good in the world and are difficult to fund.
I feel the opposite, pushing keys was never the enjoyable part, deciding what types go in what places, uninteresting, switching between editor and terminal, boring at best, trying to translate errors to SO search queries and back again, maybe possible, dealing with under-documented dependencies, frustrating.
My goal has always been to create something and use it. Ai still requires we do the intellectual side of programming, that interesting side of programming. I get to do more of that now that while the bot handles that annoying stuff. I'm a the happiest programmer I have ever been. I spend more time writing human these days, because the bots are really bad at that.