Technology

Hell, even with smaller projects, you're going to have debug cycles and if AI is driving those cycles, it will be acting as a new coder for each invocation (which happens multiple times per prompt for systems like claude code).

So you'll get shit like duplicate helper functions, other code not using those helper functions anyways, debug code added and then not removed, errors and warnings using a variety of styles, overly verbose and redundant arguments, support for enhancements that don't even make sense in that context, confidently incorrect assertions about what is and isn't happening or possible, etc.

My manager wants me to make a presentation that sells some AI debug solution but the hand holding I have to do for it to actually understand and not give useless conclusions means I don't even believe in it. Or the case where it did help, turns out it didn't even use the tools provided by the solution and was just CC.

I've mentioned the cycle of being impressed with what these LLM-based systems can do and feeling like I might have been unfairly critical, and then running in to a major issue that justfies the earlier critical view. Last times I mentioned it, I said I was in the impressed (but skeptical) part of the the cycle. Well, I'm back to the "this might just be a complete waste of resources" part of the cycle.

I wonder how many engineers they’ll have to pull out of retirement in a few years to fix a lot flawed logic.

Imagine being a horse waking up with a human torso and micropenis.

very interesting concept. another example might be railway drivers who are merely appendices to the vehicle. the vehicle largely drives itself, the driver is mostly there to check tickets, answer passenger's questions, etc.

Well, they are, but not for the takeaway the article gives. The article is so close, but fails to extract the accurate conclusion.

First are what he calls the "lazy" engineers — workers who rely heavily on AI to write code, answer questions, prepare updates, and complete tasks with minimal engagement.

Then there are the "craftsmen," experienced engineers who bear the burden of understanding, reviewing, and fixing the growing flood of AI-generated code.

This is accurate. You have a set of "developers" who just need to make a good showing on the telemetry, whether it's "tokens used" and/or prominence in commit activity. They are not held to account on actual productive outcomes, just that they supervised a credible volume of AI activity. If the AI generates code and tests and the AI is satisfied that the code passes the tests, then their job is done. You have another set of developers that have to live with the nightmarish consequences of the first, because they just generated a pile of shit that would have been better not to exist at all.

'The craft they loved is dead'

Wrong takeaway, the craft is alive, but mismanagement is diluting it with bullshit.

Incidentally, this isn't new, but the magnitude is new. I have had significant segments of my career consumed by management insisting that I somehow make the bottom dollar offshored developers "productive", and similar pattern, if they "looked busy", management was happy, and management didn't care about whether the work was useful, because frankly they couldn't tell. They could tell if some volume of "stuff" was happening and they just settled on that, and if the "stuff" alienated customers, well that was the fault of those "craftsmen" for failing to properly manage the output from the "lazy" engineers.

Investors really are dumber demographic than MAGA.

Herd behavior.

Yup. I'm watching my artform die in real time. Not only will my career no longer exist in the form I enjoy it, but the art form itself will die. Nobody is going to appreciate artisan code like they do other forms of art.

I believe open-source software will continue to provide a refuge for artists.

Yes. My work is open source, and pretty unchanged. We get some AI pull requests now that take longer to review than doing the work ourselves.

I think a key difference is that there was never any tolerance for bullshit in my team's code base.

We don't have thousands of points of boilerplate, or a big pile of "not invented here" crap code.

So we don't have somewhere for the AI to really shine.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that code can be art but I was never able to express myself on that level at my corporate jobs. I was always limited to writing code that aligned with the company’s rigid style guide, and never allowed to implement new design patterns that would’ve improved things but deviated from the way things were done in the existing codebase.

Thus, I’m not too miffed about being forced to use coding agents at work because writing corporate-sanitary code already felt like a robotic process before LLMs existed. Personal hobby projects and open source contributions are where we can express ourselves freely and create our art the way we want to. They’ll never be able to take that from us.

I really hope you're right. My company is still in the "use as much as possible" phase, and my manager is quoting Jensen about "you need to use half your salary on tokens!". I'm looking for other work, but everyone is looking for vibe coders at the moment it seems...

I've gone from really loving my job, to hate my life.

Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job... Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.

I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.

It's all idiots telling professionals they're wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can't get the code past review because "it does too much". 30 fucking lines of code "does too much". Pompous morons.

We're a threat of competence, and they're excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.

Yeah based on WYEA’s articles recently I would say that is the case. As providers move to token based billing, trying to find a way to break even, the rising costs will lower usage, which will probably then drive up costs further as the (imaginary) capital has already been spent on the DCs.

I call it "Turing's Revenge" where, once the bot can pass the Turing test, we find out the hard way if humans are intelligent... and we appear to have a lot of failed models, mostly in management.