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116
Software Engineers Are Facing an Existential Crisis As They Drown In Horrendous AI Code (tech.yahoo.com)
submitted 6 hours ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] Armand1@lemmy.world 7 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 56 minutes ago) (2 children)

In my experience, AI is an amplifier.

Good engineers will produce more good code, because they ask the right questions, know what good looks like and check the output.

Bad engineers will produce reams more bad code. The mistakes they make will be amplified. They will give wrong and incomplete instructions, won't see what the problems is with the result and will ship it anyway.

This amplification also means people will spend a larger proportion of time reviewing than coding, which I think is less interesting.

All of this is stuff that can, to some extent, be addressed with policy. You help and instruct juniors, encourage people to better understand and own their code, or at worst reprimand them if they don't.

You can adjust expectations of product managers and explain to them that more is not better, as it always has been. Faster development can often come with bugs and tech debt and this is more of the same.

All I've said above is puts aside the ethical arguments of using or not using AI of course. That's a separate can of worms entirely.

[–] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 3 points 43 minutes ago* (last edited 40 minutes ago)

Nah, good engineers are retiring, bad engineers are running rampant. You give yourself away calling us engineers, we were never, except for some yearly title increase instead of money. Just programmers, and that is fine. Engineer is a whole other thing from the steam age, my BSc was in Math, worked fine to get me in.

[–] tty5@lemmy.world 1 points 25 minutes ago* (last edited 13 minutes ago)

Bad & meh engineers get praised because they "waste" less time directing ai and reviewing output - barely working is good enough in the race to market.

I've seen things as serious as a privileged user for one customer having admin access to all customers being discovered during the last minute pentest literally days before the planned product launch. That product is supposed(and likely will) to move 250M USD for customers in the second half of this year. Under the current policy at my day job, coming all the way from the top, reviewing ai generated code at all should be an exception reserved for 0.1% most critical code. Yes, in finance.

[–] Epp@lemmus.org 7 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

It seems I'm the only software engineer on Lemmy who loves having AI. It's not perfect, but it's so much better than doing everything from scratch and it's far more reliable for solving obscure runtime errors than chasing down all the typically dead-end results on a search engine for the stack trace. Or maybe I'm just the only one willing to endure the down votes. Either way, AI has been an exceptional boon in my daily workload.

[–] NegentropicBoy@lemmy.world 5 points 34 minutes ago (1 children)

I see an LLM as my good-but-not-perfect assistant, there to code up boring bits "loop thru this data and extract...", "improve this bit of code please", and to help with errors "why does this code give that error".

I never let it do big slabs of code, and always run and check its code incrementally.

It is my code and the LLM just makes it easier to do. Thanks LLM.

[–] Mondez@lemdro.id 2 points 28 minutes ago (1 children)

This is probably a fine and responsible way of using LLM, but sadly the loudest voices are those crowing about coding being a "solved" problem and bragging about being 10x more productive by doing very little and certainly not reviewing refactoring and understanding the generated code.

Only gotcha for this is LLM is being offered well below cost, will you still want yo use it at 5x or 10x the cost?

[–] Epp@lemmus.org 1 points 25 minutes ago

No. I stopped using Copilot after the price increase. Now I do everything locally using Qwen. There's a significant decrease in quality, not because Qwen is inherently worse, but because I only have 12GB of VRAM, but at least it's affordable, and still better than no AI.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 5 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

im pretty sure this isn the reason, its the dread of being laid off, and unable to find another job, because these companies think AI replaced them. i had one person i know that was laid off since 2023, and another had been put on hold indefinitely.

[–] python@lemmy.world 1 points 59 minutes ago

There can be different reasons for different people. I personally have zero fear of being laid off (strong worker protection laws in Germany) and finding a new job this year was surprisingly easy (50-ish applications with no cover letters -> 3 interviews -> 3 offers) and I still feel the exact dread that is described in the article. The industry sucks in multiple different ways rn.

[–] GasMaskedLunatic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 34 minutes ago

The actual article: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/software-engineers-crisis-drown-ai-code

[–] PattyMcB@lemmy.world 12 points 3 hours ago

Yep... I'm leaving the industry after 20+ years because of this industry hellscape

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

1000004246

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 3 points 2 hours ago

If you want to burn the world to see how hot it gets, you'll have to compete with AI for that as well. It's already doing that pretty well.

[–] farmgineer@nord.pub 55 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

I was doing a code review this week. There was nothing wrong with the code in terms of structure or performance, but it was doing this really weird operation with an ID after DB insert. I asked about it and the author was like "yeah, that's weird; I don't know why the AI did that. I'll remove it." My dude, I know you can write good code. Don't be lazy!

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 11 points 3 hours ago

I worked with a guy that 100% used AI to dev everything. didn't even check to see if it would work before submitting a MR.

It got to the point that I stopped reviewing them and just rejected them outright with a simple comment, "doesn't work".

eventually he was fired. the evidence? the four months of shitty MRs he opened. the best part was, when I said "doesn't work", I was never wrong. none of his changes worked.

[–] terabyterex@lemmy.world 22 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

i dont understand that. i use ai for help reading through old stuff or to help me remember how tondo a thing i havent done in two years but blindly copy pasting blows my mind.

[–] vividspecter@aussie.zone 3 points 2 hours ago

I suspect it's the same people that blindly copied stackoverflow code without understanding it. Which is likely where the LLMs are getting most of its answers from in the first place.

[–] saltesc@lemmy.world 14 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Same. I also code up about 50% of stuff so all the structure is there, effectively as guardrails, before using AI. Then prompting it instructions that are effectively the solution, so it doesn't come up with its own.

Then, read through it all, replace things that could've been done better, and test.

On average it's maybe 15-20% quicker than manually coding the whole lot. Try skip any of those steps and the chances of it blowing out increase to the point I just end up doing it all anyway and it's taken twice as long because of it.

It's alarming when people don't even check.

[–] gnutrino@programming.dev 9 points 2 hours ago

On average it's maybe 15-20% quicker than manually coding the whole lot.

Out of interest, how much is this 15-20% increase in productivity costing in tokens?

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The lazy part is not questioning the bullshit they noticed and did nothing about - not using the tool

[–] farmgineer@nord.pub 9 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I disagree on that; we lose the muscles we don't use and I've already seen that happening. It's also making people want to jump straight to implementation without proper design and I think that's a recipe for trouble.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone -4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Again, cowboys have been skipping steps and doing things lazily and poorly well before AI. Everyone knows people who jump straight into an IDE instead of following proper workflows. Yes, skills you don't practice take a hit. In a professional setting there is such a substantial productivity hit to avoid all AI use, compared to correct and proper use. It will soon be infeasible to take such at anti AI stance and remain in the industry

[–] farmgineer@nord.pub 4 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

cowboys have been skipping steps and doing things lazily and poorly well before AI

Of course, but I think not understanding what they're committing is more dangerous than before (even allowing for the classic "I copied and pasted this from xxxx site"). This is also true when people are fully trusting AI to review code as well.

We use AI for code reviews which I do find useful. It's still wrong part of the time (sometimes ridiculously so). So far, it's also failed to provide accurate documentation for various repos which seems like something rather basic. I'm not against all AI (though I do have ethical and environmental concerns with several of the commercial options). I will not have them write code for me, though.

As for the future, we'll just have to wait and see. I've seen a lot of AI budgets exceeded and/or cut. I do think it's not there yet for a number of tasks but is suitable (again minus certain concerns) for others.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Machines cannot take responsibility for problems, which is why I feel containment barriers cannot be entirely AI. AI reviews are fine (and catch a lot of wild issues humans miss) if a human genuinely reviews it too

I've lost count of how many snippets I've reviewed that were verbatim pasted from stack overflow pre-AI lol

My view is that humans produce a lot of garbage, and AI tooling currently amplifies your productivity. If you're careless, don't take pride and normally commit tech debt then with AI tooling that's going to be amplified 10-100x. The more careless you are the faster you can commit more garbage - especially if you're skipping on unit/integration/functional testing

[–] Schal330@lemmy.world 2 points 56 minutes ago

Machines cannot take responsibility for problems, which is why I feel containment barriers cannot be entirely AI.

Where I work AI is being pushed hard, but the company has made it their policy that there must be a human in the loop. Ownership of the code written by AI is down to the person using the AI. "Oops, don't know why the AI wrote that!" Is not a valid answer to bugs being introduced into production.

I'm seeing senior engineers of 15+ years no longer writing code and churning out a ton more work. They are disappointed they don't write code anymore but working with the AI is the job they have to do to be able to afford to live. They say the cognitive load has shot up for them, they are constantly spinning plates.

To make the plate spinning job easier they have implemented guard rails to ensure the agents don't do anything stupid. I'm seeing a number of stories posted to Lemmy where the AI does dumb shit but the stories don't apply any accountability to the developers using it.

[–] setsubyou@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

I think not understanding what they're committing is more dangerous than before

This kind of reasoning applies to every new tool. 20 years ago I was saying the same thing about work from co-workers who started programming on Java and didn’t understand what their beloved HashMap actually does under the hood.

Eventually we adapt to either the new tools or to the new dangers, the ones who don’t just become fossils.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 17 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

If I got an AI-written codebase hard to navigate, I'd bill the AI usage it took to clean it up and, on top of it, the hours I have to put to actually do the job. We can definitely use AI to write good code, but it takes the kind of professional criteria that vibe coding lacks in order to do that.

[–] raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 0 points 1 hour ago

We can definitely use AI to write good code

Get a different job. Now!