Pointless rant. Please ignore. I'm a software developer and we all know how AI has changed our industry. How we work or why we're fired and why we can't afford PCs.
Anyways, we're already all forced to use AI already and we're already atrophying the minds of our juniors. It's great.
New team meeting and one of our managers tells us that we're never going to write code anymore at all. The AI will read the JIRA ticket and create the pull request (change request to the codebase) on GitHub. Our job is to only review the code on GitHub and then rank how well AI did and then comment and then get AI to fix it. We have to do this so we can improve the AI process. Which is funny because none of the people who plan this AI shit are data scientists. The only way they can change things is by promoting, it's not like we're releasing our own coding models but anyways ... He's like, now you should be able to do much more work and just review PRs all day now and that we should never be doing only one thing. You can only tell AI through a GitHub comment to fix a mistake and then you can start reviewing the next thing.
We were like, if it's a simple fix why can't we just fix it?
"Because we need to improve the AI process"
But then, I have to context switch.
"Yes that's the point you can come back to it later"
Why come back to it later when we can solve it now? We can even use AI to solve it now.
"No, we want you just comment on the PR so the bot can handle it"
Context switching is free apparently... It's actually infuriating because apparently we're not using IDEs any more. I personally use the GitHub plugin to review PRs in my IDE but no one else seems to do it so I don't think they even took that into account.
These guys have auto merged AI code that's taken us weeks to unravel and which we still haven't fully been able to fix. They just merge shit all the time and a lot of it is fucking slip. AI merged hundreds of tests and no one cares when they break. They didn't configure prettier because AI doesn't use it so it breaks out formatting when humans do it.
I ranted to my own manager for 30 minutes about it today and he was just as upset because every developer is now asking what exactly are they doing. My manager asked me what I would do. I said the process sucks but what are we supposed to do as devs. If I review 20 PRs a day, how is the company going to ensure my skills are gonna be sharp? What are we doing about taking in ideas from regular devs? How do we ensure code ownership when we're just merging tickets we don't write and code we had no hand in shaping?
Sorry. I actually thought I had faith in my company with AI because they were coming up with thoughtful approaches but it seems like utter incompetence.
Software developer w/ 25+ years of experience here. My condolences, this sounds like a shitty situation. But it’s definitely not the first time I’ve heard a story like this.
To be perfectly honest, my professional opinion is that if we can’t, as an industry, get away from the “all AI all the time” mode of operation you describe here, we are completely fucked.
I’m looking to retire early anyway, so I will likely get out soon. But I feel awful for young engineers who don’t have that luxury, and who will be expected to maintain AI-written spaghetti code without having the years of experience writing and understanding complex code using their own brains.
I was in industry for 10+ years until I got laid off. I'm looking to start a circus now. The job market is all slop and I want none of it.
That was a casual way to mention that lol
Haha I've also been a circus performer for around 10 years? It's not entirely out of nowhere
Haha gotcha. I had to do a double take at first to see if you meant that metaphorically. Hope it goes well!
Your monkey, your circus.
I'm 40 something and I didn't make FAANG level money. I still need to work for at least a little while but I am still planning to retire early as well.
I definitely feel for the next generation as well. Every new job I usually did my best to train the juniors and try to put them on a good career path. It seems like it was already difficult with the thirty million line problem and just how much sits in between the code can be a lot. Now add in AI and it's just a mess :/
What’s up, fellow non-FAANG senior engineer? :)
Same here, always tried to go out of my way to help junior folks out. A lot of other people our age I know seem to be wanting to get out soon as well. In some ways I’m hoping the AI bubble bursts soon, but I realize that will likely be catastrophic for the economy as a whole. It’s a shame the bubble has gotten this big.
Shoulda bought bitcoin.
AI is trash, but bitcoin was a real life changer. It let me retire in my 30s
Wow, what a useless comment. Bitcoin is trash just like AI, and the fact that some people got rich from both does not change that.
My point is that they're both not trash. Just AI
And not just monetary value. Permissionless means it always works, whereas cards are a confidentially and availability nightmare
Leave it to a crypto bro to brag about making money and then give the usual fake talking points about crypto, in a fucking thread about AI in software engineering. Get a life.
its going to be a law of diminishing returns if they hold on to more senior devs in the industry and wont hire any juniours down the line, creating a artificial shortage.
Ohhh, they'll ditch the seniors too.
The seniors are already building chicken coops and/or automating small farm practices. We'll come back in 2029 when all the big orgs get SoWs to greenfield all the broken shit. Then we'll triple our rate and go back to work a for year then retire. Or maybe that's just me.
I feel bad for the slew of juniors being 'AI-promoted' to maintain large production codebases and infra. They will have nobody to turn to when things go sideways other than their ever-worsening AI tooling. This means they will never actually be seniors in their mind or practice. But will have all of that responsibility.
I’m also wondering whether senior engineers will be able to come back in 5ish years to charge exorbitant rates to fix all the broken stuff. But for me, unless the rates are truly out of this world, I’ll probably be happy just hanging out with my goats and chickens. Their loss, I guess.