AI code assistants currently are like that senior dev who knows everything, has experience in everything, and always likes to help everyone. But sadly he does a lot of shrooms in his spare time and sees things that aren’t there. He also has quite the opinionated ideas about what good code should look like.
That implies that you just can’t let him do the quality assurance. He can write code. You can ask him stuff. And he excels at debugging.
But you can’t let him plan the architecture. You can ask him about his ideas and select the ones that are actually good, though.
And you definitely can’t let him review his own code. Someone else has to do that.So if they literally just let the AI do everything, there is absolutely no way anyone has a chance to ever review the result because AI code is harder to review (for now), and AI loves to repeat itself (for now).
And sure, they can tell it to write tests. But AI is dogshit at writing tests. It tends to forget the important cases, test the wrong thing, and/or obsess about completely irrelevant implementation details.
I also tried the multi-round approach with a committee of agents trying to iteratively find and fix flaws. It only works well for finding bugs, not fixing them (for now).But while AI can’t replace me, it is really nice to have as a tool - just like I have syntax highlighting in the IDE, I have a code assistant that can autocomplete a few lines of code, find out why my code misbehaves, or tell me what some library method is supposed to do. Sure, I have to still verify the results. But often, finding the bug or information was the hard part.
Coding assistants are great. Just don’t let them write too much code at once. You need someone who still actually understands the codebase. That sadly can’t be an AI (yet).I really love when I ask the AI to do something, and it gives me 40-50 lines to do it, and I tell it there’s no way something like that should take that much code, and it’s like oh, ya you’re right, here’s a 5 line version using something from from the standard sdk.
I’ve tried to put in its memory to not do things like that, but it keeps doing it.
Even without external libraries, it routinely comes up with solutions that are at least 3-4x the complexity and LOC than how I would implement it.
It’s because the average quality of code that they are trained on is like that. Most code that is written by humans is slop, and the models represent that.
Producing overly complicated solutions to uncomplicated problems
It often can do it better if you prod it though. Its just so weird that its really hard to get it to do that. It knows how even if it is trained on poor over complicated stuff.
The engineer added that employees are now pressured to ship products as fast as possible, leaving them with little time to review Claude’s output or understand the code being created.
Companies have always pressured software teams to ship products as fast as possible.
What’s new is the part where all of the worst coders can shit out code a lot faster and pretend like they’re doing a good job. It used to take them a while to write garbage that they didn’t understand or review themselves, but now they can do it so quickly that it makes the actual good coders look like they’re taking a long time.
This is why you absolutely have to have documented coding and review standards. The idea that you’d ship any code that has never been reviewed by a human is horrifying.
The idea that you’d work 12 hour days is so stupid to start with. I’ve seen people consistently work that long and… surprise, they don’t actually work that long. They work about the same as anybody else and goof off the rest of the time. I doubt you can even just press enter for that long. People just don’t work that way.
AI in engineering is an accelerator. If you are producing slop software, which most teams are, then it’s just going to accelerate the rate at which you can produce shitty software and bad code.
If teams are producing high-quality software, then it accelerates those teams’ ability to deliver that quality.
AI in engineering is an accelerator.
Yes, and most engineers effect on the product can be graded on [-1, 1] scale. And I find that the -1s accelerates faster.
If teams are producing high-quality software
I had one of those. My seniors are getting dumber though, and we have twice as many prod bugs as a year ago. I had an outage because someone didn’t properly trim an input for fucks sake recently.
This is exactly it. I’ve worked with 2 different teams in this new era. One has all strong engineers and good review and testing standards. The other has 20% bad engineers that should have been fired years ago and’s weaker testing culture. The result is the strong team is delivering higher quantity software faster than ever, and the other team is going fast with much worse results. The quality is very bad, and the good engineers still there are quitting.
The good engineers spend their whole days just trying to keep the ship afloat and minimizing the harm from the bad engineers. They hate it and are burning out fast.
I was going to say i could automate pressing enter if they give me a job
Sorry, you need a degree and twenty years of experience for this entry-level position.
I don’t hate Claude Code or whatever. I hate the company pushing you to constantly churn out shit so you need to turn to these tools to keep up pace or get fired.
Architecture decisions or code quality? Fuck it just ship.
You have concerns about an approach? You’re the enemy to your coworker’s promotion. Get out of the way.
It’s all just so depressing. It will all come crumbling down. It’s a matter of when not if. But god I hate this ride right now.
Time to lean into the slop extra hard. Use AI to create massive PRs, use AI to approve the PRs. Automate sending slack alerts when a feature ships. Be loud, really show some massive “Productivity”.
A guy I don’t really like at work does all sorts of AI induced PRs. I think he thinks it makes him look good. It probably does, to management.
I got reprimanded for asking if a guy’s extremely weird code was something he wrote himself. He went crying to my boss about how I’m mean on PRs. Fuck you, William. I hope your house catches fire and you pass out while asking Claude for help.
Hey William, I’m having trouble understanding this code, it looks a little weird, can you walk me through it in detail, and explain how you came to writing it like this?
Our place measures PR counts so a ton of tiny ass PRs is actually the move.
I’m sorry for your shitty workplace.
I want to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride.
Oh it’s way worser than that. Its erasing our skill
If you’re just hitting enter you’re doing it so wrong.
I‘d love if I could just hit enter but the garbage it shits out unsupervised is just soo bad.
Agents are brain gang banging him.
If I’m forced into Claude Code or something similar, I will be looking for a new job. Ideally a different role in my company to keep my benefits and not have to completely start over, but if I have to jump ship, I will. Fortunately, our security and GRC teams have explicitly blocked Claude Code for the time being. I still have the tools built into Visual Studio, but I seldomly use them, and when I do it’s basically as stack overflow, and that only when I can’t find what I’m looking for through web searches first.
We had someone from our Networking team come over the other day and say that he could tell our summer interns were gone because our AI usage dropped by over $1000 / month.
Look I’m all for the AI hate but this is just stupid. I’m aware this might not be the most popular opinion here but be warned
Honestly if I were to change jobs atm asking about their AI policy and usage would be one of the first questions that I’d do and if they don’t use it well and haven’t figured out how to integrate it in their company (as a tool, not necessarily as a product) then I’d end the meeting then and there.
I’d quit my current company if they prohibited AI tools. Fortunately they don’t force us to use them, nor but we’re all encouraged to find actually uses for it (which in Software Engineering are a ton). If one of my colleagues wouldn’t use AI in any way I no only would consider them less productive, I’d consider them a worse engineer because it shows they can’t adapt.
AI in general and Claude Code as an example is an AMAZING tool. You just gotta use it properly. I still own the code I ship even if I understand it in less detail than before (that’s the trade off by being able to ship many more features than I could in the past).
I’ve been in this company for a few years now and just in the past months there are so many projects I have done that there was never an opportunity to do so ever since I joined because it would be days/weeks of work and now it’s a couple of hours while I work on other shit.
And people/companies that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in AI every month are idiots who are just throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. My company pays me a 100$ month subscription and many colleagues have even cheaper ones. Thats like 1% of my salary and it for sure increases my productivity many orders of magnitude of that.
You’re right, and the person you’re replying to is, too.
My take is an analogy (strictly from the cells in my brain lol) -
The “ground” we all stood on, that previously felt ~flat (trying to be brief here) rapidly shifted under all of us, and very suddenly merely standing in one place, meaning anything from keeping a job, retaining enjoyment (even understanding) of the craft and crafted thing, an ideological stance, a hundred other things -
The ground sloped suddenly, and merely remaining in one place became a struggle not to slide and tumble downhill. And so we all are, tumbling downhill, at varying rates of speed and control, and it seems like the slope might be getting steeper, though at least much more slowly, now…probably.
Resulting from the sudden slope, the most experienced became wildly capable, that shit is real (at least at present). The least experienced? Those who need to get the experience, and to pay their bills, experience their lives, and to maybe later become the wise arbiters? Well, fuck them. Fell into the bottom of that new slope. Fuck everyone else, too, actually, hits everyone in lotsa ways, slope don’t care.
It’s all fucked, the ground has become a maw.
spoiler
Sidenote (most important note) - when there is a swing back - doggedly insist on training, helping, spending time with the juniors, it’s your biggest and truest value throughout this all, AND SEPARATELY your heaviest punch back
Nah, fuck AI. I will pivot careers. Anyone that claims to be a developer but generates all of their code is just a modern day script kiddie. Idgaf about efficiencies because the ethical implications of AI are far worse than the extra money I can make for a company.
I will never be an AI code reviewer, because that’s all prompting is. Like I said, I’ll pivot careers out of dev work before I do that. Pick up a trade and work until I’m 80 if I have to, but that’s still better than being one of Claude’s bitches.
Outside of the ethics of AI, the idea of sitting in front of a screen and being a “prompt engineer” takes everything I enjoy out of coding. If it was that or death, I’d choose death.
I have not found AI code to be so helpful. I actually use it a lot less and more strategically than back when it first became viable. It can save a lot of time in the right situation though.
The reality is that these tools are not going away. Thinking that will happen is not realistic.
They’re part of the deal now. People who refuse to use them will simply become obsolete. It starts in technology, but it will quickly move around.
Thinking you can just avoid it isn’t practical. It is no different from cars displacing horses and computers displacing typewriters.
Think of how absurd it would sound if you came across someone who refuses to use a computer and only a typewriter.
Reminder here that the culprit is capitalism, not LLMs.
Voxium said he wouldn’t mind the situation if workers were given more time to check the code.
“Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude,” he added. “There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore.”
Some people might look at this and wonder what the problem is – who wouldn’t want to be paid to do very little? But most people struggle when their work has no meaning. Voxium told Business Insider that if engineers lose the opportunity to understand the code and solve difficult problems, “there is nothing left … Not even our soul. There will be no purpose.”
He added that the real problem is corporate leaders’ obsession with pushing out more features. He said management often judges success by sprint cycles, pull requests, and the sheer number of features shipped, even when those additions do little to improve the product for users.
no this is just bad engineering
you can do what you want with or without ai or capitalism
if you skip the engineering part it will be very likely, shit
who wouldn’t want to be paid to do very little?
Oh that’ll change soon enough as well in the downwards direction.
Yeah, still a sweatshop with air conditioning and free coffee and junk food.
I like this take.
Capitalism was the jet fuel that got us here, but now we need to shed our boosters and switch engines to something made to run longer.
That’s how every ecosystem eventually grows. First come the weeds aimed at colonizing new areas as fast as possible. Then come the small plants, then the shrubs, the trees until it’s a self sustaining forest of different species.
Capitalism created LLMs.
People are clever; we invent things.
LLMs are just a tool. Tools can be used by people; the problem is when people are used by tools, which is what is happening in this case.
See Corey Doctorow’s latest tour of YouTube promoting his idea of reverse centaurs (which, for the life of me, I can´t figure out why he didn´t call minotaurs).
Also it’s a really shitty tool that doesn’t actually fix a problem. Unless you are rich and that problem is ‘I have to pay my employees’
Sure. You can talk about the LLM gestalt, if you’d like, that’s worth examining, as with any other tool; especially stuff like progressive brain rot.
But listening to the complaints people have about LLMs, it’s mostly that it’s being improperly used to replace human labor. Improperly in the sense that it can’t actually do the job it is replacing humans in, which is a separate discussion of what kind of world it will be when there are no jobs for humans to do.
LLMs are used responsibly by people doing their own work. For instance, Linus Torvalds used Claude to find errors in the Linux kernel (I think), that he then fixed himself.
The problem is that capitalism, especially oligoplic capitalism, will create worse products at lower prices (or higher profits), and it will do so on the shortest timeline, ignoring things like future lawsuits over security flaws and future lack of programming talent and erosion of consumer trust.
I can´t figure out why he didn´t call minotaurs
Minotaurs still convey the idea of super human strength, he was trying to convey the idea of limited power output of a human with the limited mental capacity of a horse.
Ah, thank you. The problem has been bedevilling me for weeks and I think this is the solution.
I initially thought it could be because the Minotaur isn’t exactly half-man/half-animal as the centaur is, but a hybrid of the two; often represented with hoofs for feet, etc., which is another expression of what you’re saying.
I guess calling them reverse centaurs visualizes the change that is happening in the relationship between human and machine. We used to be the head but we’re the butt now. It makes you reconstruct the image in your head.
In truth there already was a downward trend before LLM’s exploded where tools were continuously used against people. “Enshitification” most people call it but it’s really just free range capitalism. Generations of economy majors have been doing exactly what they were taught. Increase short term shareholder value at any cost. It’s unsustainable and LLM’s are just another accelerant.
I guess calling them reverse centaurs visualizes the change that is happening in the relationship between human and machine. We used to be the head but we’re the butt now. It makes you reconstruct the image in your head.
Yes, but the minotaur is frequently just a person with the head of a bull, instead having to invert a centaur, which is already not a familiar image. In talks, Doctorow defaults to “Bojack Horseman”, an acknowledgment that reverse centaur is perhaps too much imaginative labor for his audience.
Agree on the MBAs–capitalism eating itself.
Yeah, my shovel sometimes convinces me to commit suicide while evaporating water to keep it running.
Sweat is an evaporatve cooling system used to regulate the temperature of the mechanism that keeps a shovel moving. And if you’ve never considered killing yourself over the prospect of spending all day with a shovel, I can at least be confident you’d make an -excellent- archeologist.
(But mild humor aside, I do understand your point.)
By definition not. The majority of the code in GitHub is some volunteer project on a permissive licence .
People are working 12 to 13 hours a day
yeah I’d write a diatribe about the best work in the world under those circumstances too
The coder does the first 4 hours, Claude does the next 9. You team up the next day to review each others work at lunch. Log 13 hours on your timesheets. 14, because you worked during lunch.
workers spend 12-hour days pressing enter
If only that could be automated somehow.
I feel like you are being sarcastic, but this actually is a solved problem :
An elegant solution. I wonder if it is more efficient than a 1TW data centre.
Seriously, though, we use AI in the worst way possible. I like writing code, I hate checking someone else’s code. Why aren’t AIs doing the checking and engineers doing the coding?
Forget “human in the loop” - let’s shoot for “reviewed by AI”. Deep down, we know the humans are barely paying attention when they check Claude’s homework.
Forget “human in the loop” - let’s shoot for “reviewed by AI”
yeah uh, nah, thanks. I would not trust it any more than I trust the current shit show.
I can attest this does work well. Having LLMs review your plans for how to do something and point out what you missed works well too. I also have my local LLM review creative writing without writing anything, give feedback about my Blender renders and other artistic things, and be a sounding board for ideas in general. Be warned that Qwen has no mercy and will shit all over your passion projects.
You absolutely can do that tbh.
The drinking bird only works if it’s dipping it’s velvert covered head into water, the lower water temp creates a temo difference moving the liquid in the glass tube within the bird
I’ve heard the same from developers at work “doing this using AI makes it boring, but at the same time I feel silly if I write everything from scratch”.
I’m not a developer but I do make little tools for myself at work. I used an LLM to assist with adding some features recently, nothing I couldn’t easily do myself. It did a fine job and made minimal changes, all totally readable and for the most part the same way I would have done it.
I have a new tool I want to make, and it’s hard not to just turn to the LLM, since it’ll save me many hours on a script that nobody else will ever see. It’s really taken the fun out of it. I’m proud of what I made, even though nobody else will care, but doing this my usual way will feel like I’m using the wrong tool out of perversity.
I dunno. I hate everything.
Hey thanks for sharing I’m in basically the exact same boat. There are also pressures in the work place to use it because of the time savings. Personally I try to keep a balance and work on things myself most of the time and if the LLM is used it’s more like a buddy coder then a magic code generation tool, but sometimes it’s just too easy to use it that way. I think it’s important to take pride in your work, so keep doing things your way when you want!
I look at it this way: if you prompted an LLM to generate it, then you didn’t “do” it, you basically installed an outside piece of software that just happened to be generated on-the-fly.
That maybe true if youre single shotting. At some point, but that’s rarely the end. It takes iteration and experience to get LLMs to do useful work in most cases.
Creating something while not using the most efficient way possible has always been something that created the most unique, personal and opinionated results, because working on the task transforms both you and the product you are aiming for. These “inefficient” workflows also create the most useful and popular things, btw.
You are not “using the wrong tool”. You are doing it for yourself, for your mental wellbeing, for a sense of purpose. Whatever the LLM spits out is not YOUR code, it is SOME code. You should really reframe this for your own good.
I felt that way until I just stopped using it entirely
I’ve only tried it the once but it did a great job and caused me the consternation from my previous comment.
It is disappointing knowing it actually works some of the time. I guess I just don’t care. I have my lines and I don’t cross them.
I’m sure there are some great uses of Microsoft software or Nvidia hardware, but I’m not going to use them unless forced to by work.
It basically added three small functions and their command line args to a sub-500 line Python script. I’m sure if helped that my function and variable name are verbose, like dictionary_of_fruits_with_dictionary_of_attributes.
My work provided the tool and asked me to try it.
I like to give it unnecessarily complex tasks and work on a hobby.
I’ve heard similar things from the people I know forced to us AI for work. That at the output requirements are now novel and highly accelerated under the assumption AI will make it possible.
I would like to apply for this software engineer job where all you do is press enter. I’m willing to work from home or go to the office everyday. I will press enter on holidays and weekends as well.
I know some people think like you, but it’s the most soul crushing shit in the world when all you do is wait for others.
Corporate jobs has always been soul crushing, and that’s why the cushy office jobs pays nicely. Because it drains you
- Accept 10 jobs
- Make a script that presses enter on repeat
- Deploy script
- Collect 10 salaries
I like where your head is at but I’m an Enter pressing purist. Scripts fail and don’t give you the the confidence to know your true enter pressing quantity.
If the company wants enter pressing slip then scripts are the way to go. If they want to know with 100% accuracy no enter presses were skipped then I’m their guy.
Oo! Them! Hire this one!!
Their resume says “Enter Pressing Specialist” so they have the edge
Claude tested my script, all I had to do was press enter
/s in case it wasn’t obvious
Will you accept a $20,000 a year salary without dental and vision?
Depends on how many times I need to hit enter during my 8 hour shift. If it’s something like 200 times then yes. If you need something more like 7,200 enters pressed in an 8 hour shift then that would break down to 15 enters per minute which requires a little more dedication. I that event I would like to ask for $23,000 a year.
I would also like for the company to pay for any repairs or replacement of my Enter button in the event something stops working.
20.000 a year without hope or prospects.
And that’s not even talking about code review.
No time for that, we’ve got to hit the sprint end date!
Just let AI do it! What could go wrong???
