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.
In case it wasn't already clear to you, they're having you train the AI so it can literally take your job and they can lay you off.
Oh no they don't, they think they're having them train the AI to lay them off, but it's absolutely not what's actually happening.
You can't just train the AI. Not unless you own some of the more sophisticated RAG-based solutions that tell the AI how they should behave. Or if you're producing your own LLMs. But in both cases - the process is vastly different if you want it to actually work (for RAG, you have to actually write some consistent knowledge base and build a MCP server around it). Now they're just chatting with the robot.
Like - buddy, your coffee machine ain't gonna get better the more times you click the espress button.
Source: I'm engineering my own kb framework for AI to know how to write code EXACTLY like I do. And I need that only because I want to focus on architecture and devops now that I mastered and burned out of fullstack.
You mastered fullstack?
Not that I learned every single fullstack technology, library, pattern, etc. By mastered I mean I have accumulated enough experience to be able to deliver an entire medium-scaled fullstack project all by myself in the spacific stack and architecture that I have at this point tested through and through.
I have my set of personal patterns, practises, habits, guidelines and designs that I can just describe in my personal wiki and believe it or not, I'm still super early into this project and AI is already really good at replicating my way of thinking.
Now with that I can focus on stuff that interest me the most right now, which is Rust and DevOps. And all that without sacrificing my fullstack expertise, because by documenting it into the wiki, I also solidify all my progress in a form that I can get back to and unfreeze things that I may forget.
Are you writing this wiki by hand?
Idk dude this sounds pretty delusional. Think about what you're saying here.
Ok maybe this checks out then
I mean yeah, that's the whole point. Why wouldn't I? I'm obviously not teaching the AI the common knowledge, I'm just cherrypicking what's the best of it and also explaining my personal concepts. It's not that much content really, it's not like you have to be a galaxy brain to write good software.
AI can already write complete software, but it'll be horribly unstable. You can't have a stable app without clean architecture, and you can't have clean architecture by mixing billions of concepts and unrelated solutions. It's just a mess - there's so many ways to solve a problem, AI knows them all and is super bad at staying consistent.
Shitty input means shitty output. Most code on the world is trash, so obviously AI is already deranged. You have to provide clean, simple and consistent input and that's what I do, really. I just pick my dream team of concepts, make sure they never overlap and that it is complete.
But it doesn't eliminate the human out of this loop. Obviously you can't prepare AI for anything. AI is great at covering the vast expanses of repetitive parts. But if you have some more niche problems, or ones that require a more dedicated and creative approach - you still have to jump in.
And it's much easier to do so when you're stepping into a codespace that already looks very familiar to you.
South Park needs to revisit and update that episode. Dey Turk er jerbs!