AI also gives you the benefits of a middle manager. If everything works as intended you take the credit but if something breaks that's not your fault, AI made the mistake. If they try to put the blame on you just say you have 6 agents working on 6 different domains all cross-reviewing their commits and you can't be expected to review every single line of code yourself. Time to play corporate like a damned fiddle!

Saved me a paragraph there.

If I was paying for it, hell naw. But if my employer not only is willing to pay for it, but considers it a performance metric? I'm going to use it for fucking everything. These are the incentives they give me, I'm going to follow the incentives. Talking to Claude is what they pay me for, apparently.

But like the article says, if I don't continue practicing on my own code in my unpaid off-work hours, I imagine I'd be regressing in my skills too. I do that because I enjoy it as a hobby, but if I didn't, I could see myself and probably a lot of other people getting rugpulled by this.

The thing that scares me (and why I've stopped using it): my brain automatically reaches for the shortcut whenever I would have to do deep thinking/planning.

I have ADD, so getting my brain to focus and work on a task is not an easy feat to begin with. Now I've found myself multiple times a day unable to will myself to think about a problem but rather deferred to Claude. It's seriously fucked up.

Metric or imperial byte?

Computers famously love prime numbers greater than 2 as a foundation for structure and logic.

Knowing this is my competition makes me feel much better about myself

..easy foundational questions like how many bits in a byte..

GTFO.

I mean, yeah.. perhaps it's to be expected. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z- if this is true, it's as the methods of using computers and various devices has been infantilized and made too easy.

Yeah.. let's obscure the inner working of computing and make the process as opaque to the user as possible. It'll be fine.. no negative consequences at all.

Colleges do not matriculate anymore (that's in the British sense of the word, where one has to show actual knowledge in the degree field one is seeking before enrolling, and TBH, they haven't done so for a very long time, actually..) so this is what we get.

Higher ed in the US is just about da moneys..

No…

One candidate was waivering between 13 and 17...

Pleas tell me that's a joke. Or were they trying to switch fields and were a baker or something before? I just can't accept that someone that would struggle with that question, even in a stressfull situation, ever took a single comp science class.

It's called entry-level for a reason. Back in my days, you could start such a position without any formal education as long as you were willing to acquire the required skills and knowledge without needing a nanny. We had to go to the library or actually buy the books for knowledge. Now they can just use the internet.
The actual requirement for doing the job never changed. And it's not knowledge.

Preach.

The AI "revolution" is the thing that finally killed my imposter syndrome as a software engineer. Not because I can write better code than AI (that's a very low bar), but from listening to all these breathless idiots talk about how they're "10x-ing my productivity!" or how "AI has replaced search for me!" or how "In 6 months no one will have to manually write code anymore!"

Honestly yeah its like wearing a huge red AI flag. Can't imagine being stupid enough to fall in love with a not-secure CHATBOT.

I joined a project that was forced to use some vibe coded solution that an intern cooked up -- marketed as "solution for data pipelining".

There are no tests, every semantic query calculates embeddings every time, and there is help together with so much bubble gum and "glue code" that nobody feels confident with any of the data were showing our customer.

It's great for rapid prototyping, and then straight to the trash.

And I’m getting my ass kicked routinely on review for dumb-ass things that I’m letting slide from AI generated output.

Now imagine if you aren't that experienced and the reviewers aren't that thorough, or, and this is the most depressing part, review process doesn't exist. And you get people, even senior engineers, who push that sub-optimal barely working code, but because their project isn't that complicated, it somehow works, so they continue with it, and after some iterations they get code that nobody wrote, nobody knows how to maintain, and nobody reads. But because a lot of modern frameworks are made so monkey can make that barely work by sitting on a keyboard, a lot of the projects didn't collapse on itself yet.
And that's how you get a generation of programmers who lost the ability to program.

I feel like I'm being gaslit as I keep reading that there are developers that feel they successfully offloaded the task of coding.

That's because you are being gaslit.

The people making those claims are either a) not developers in the first place, with no awareness of just how shit the "products" they're pushing are, b) paid astroturfers trying to prop up AI, or c) former actual developers who've become addicted to the speed that's possible with AI who are downplaying how crappy their own code quality has become because they have no familiarity with their codebase anymore and have forgotten how to do so much as a for loop.

All these people claiming 10x or 100x gains, and everything they're making is garbage no one should or would touch with a ten-foot pole.

what it seems to be doing, in your case and others i have seen, is pushing the burden onto those who “care” and really fully grok (no pun intended) the concept of a real code review. it’s exhausting.

So this is going to invoke a multitude of downvotes, but here goes.

I will give you an example. I can read a bit of python code, not the advanced stuff, but enough to understand to a large degree what the code does. Last week, I had the need to add a button to Netbox that will download a multitude of device configs that are being rendered via config templates. This use case helps a whole department apply configs, without having to create them by hand.

I knew Netbox has a very powerful plugins ecosystem. The way the base code is written grants the capability of adding any type of plugin you might need in your unique environment. I used Claude to create this plugin for me. I wrote a very specific spec file, told it to utilise the already built pynetbox plugin and ensure it uses nothing fancy that is not sustainable. It created the plugin, helped me with pip installing it, and I deployed it on my dev environment where I tested it extensively.

My alternative to using claude: Asking our internal development team to write something like this. I would need to wait 3 weeks to even get a spot on their meeting for the request, just to then be told their backlog is full with customer code and they won't be able to help. This plugin will help our support team with fewer calls, because the configs are accurately built according to the source of truth (Netbox) and will need less human input. So in the greater scheme of the company, that is a net positive.

What I will do when Netbox updates, is update my dev environment, install the plugin, and test it. If something broke, I will troubleshoot it, of course I will be using Claude with error logs etc, then update the plugin code to work on the new netbox. Is this ideal? Probably not. Is it the only way to get this done? Maybe not either. Is it all I can do at this very moment? Yes.

My specialist fields are the lower levels. Hardware, hypervisors and setting up VMs + System Software. I need code from time to time to get something functional done. I don't write whole systems with Claude, that is just ridiculously naive. But small pieces of functional code that solves a single small problem, I honestly don't understand the problem with that.

My 2c.

Clarifying requirements, designing architecture. Also, I dont understand how is someone supposed to be able to "parse code" without being able to write it? It's like being able to read but unable to write.

Agree completely but I wanted to add: you can also get into an incomprehensible mess without vibing. Just follow the serverless flask tutorial, start writing raw SQL, and away you go!

I asked Claude today about why a coworker was getting errors and it almost exploded.

Issue triage, code exploration, extracting information from disparate sources, first pass code review. There are loads of use cases that it's potentially useful.

For me it's a lot better at extracting the requirements for a CPU feature from a 10,000 page architecture reference manual than I am.

Yes, the obvious solution is to avoid it. I use it only for the most boilerplatey things. Anything else, I want to make sure I can still do it myself.

You're lucky your employer isn't making its daily use a condition of continued employment. My previous employer had a public leaderboard of token usage. They fired the lowest ranked people every month.

The atrophy scares the hell out of me.

Years ago, I would often have long conversations with my dad about how manual skill sets in the trades (my training) and in engineering in the field (which was his bailiwick) were being lost to the pivot towards college degrees for every student, including the ones that preferred to work with their hands.

Three decades on, I witnessed the full turn when construction firms had to - and still have to - mass import workers from Central and South America (legally and illegally) just to get things built. NGL, there are some scary good builders that have been brought in, and those people work insanely hard.

Yes, it's slowly pivoting back as more boys and men opt for the trades and become journeymen and apprentices, but to get the skillsets needed to get to a master's level, you're looking at at least 20k hours. Wer're still a decade out - at best - before we get enough kids through the system and into steady work that they can step up and strike out on their own and make crazy bank. Skilled craftsmen and women can earn 100 bucks an hour - easily - in the right markets, and the rich folks will be glad to pay.

Goddamn, it's gonna be scary until that sorts itself out in another decade or so (and that does pin itself on the hope the financially feckless idiot in the White House doesn't torpedo the economy..)

Pissed.

Every real engineer I have ever talked to gets pissed when a key board jockey calls themselves engineer. Regardless of AI or not.

Coders arnt engineers never will be never have been. The engineer title was straight up stolen and misused by corpos and idiots to fluff up their egos. The entire term software engineer is a bullshit title for idiots who have zero respect for actual engineers or are toadies to mega corpos and sold their self respect for a bigger pay check. Prompt engineers are even worse and frankly fuck em all.

They as much engineers as a 3 year old is an engineer when building with Lincoln logs.

Yeah, fully agree with all that.

I've got some godawful spaghetti code I don't understand fully, and it's pretty good at deciphering that and the bizarre labyrinth of code paths leading around it. But it's absolutely no guarantee of working code, and in any project larger than a simple crud app, you are going to still need programmers who know about things like memory and databases.

It often needs pointing at a solution you want, because as you pointed out, it's fond of dumb band-aids. Like yesterday when it was trying to hook into mouse wheel events and create separate threads, when all it needed was an event on the dataset I was using to load a sub-dataset.

This is basically what I discovered as well. I have found that Ai writes code that is complex and "works" (at least most of the time) but it is heavily over engineered and often contains design choices that make expanding functionality effectively impossible without a full refactor.

When I tried having the Ai fix a test failure the Ai would either fix the code, fix the test, or change the test and the code breaking everything else in the chain.

I no longer use vibe coding because it is just faster/better for me to write the code.

But for tiny scripts it is very good.

This is pretty spot on from my experience as well. Also, the gap in quality from the Opus models and say GPT is vast.

100% agree on ui code. Really awful output there regardless of model.

Claude can do some medium complicated sites from scratch relatively quickly. The problem is I've seen so many of these at work, not just from non-engineers, but from peers too, that they're easy to spot. AI sites/apps are going to be the new geocities.

But when you want to move beyond the basic thing that impresses the c suites for some reason, it hits a pretty big wall in speed to output and needs a lot more hand holding.

I fear that the c suites don't really care about quality, just speed and saving money. So while I'm a much better developer than Claude (which is imo the best at the moment), I don't think that makes my job secure. I have to use the AI, and it's getting silly/scary religious here about it. We have to talk about how we used AI and how it's making things better. And to make things worse, I don't see a company that's not drinking the Flavor Aid.

It can be useful, and used right, you can do a lot of things faster. But the expectations from the top don't align with the reality of the product, and us developers are being blamed for the gap.

Man, I disagree with all of this. The frontier models are actually good, and basically everyone in my F500 company has been using it. The codebases i work on are super-legacy java, where it does great despite us having like 75 different patterns for each task, and a massive front-end web repo where it thrives because we've been extremely strict in typing and patterns leading up to this. It even does pretty well across repo boundaries, despite having significantly lower context for those situations.

I genuinely will never understand the people saying they suck. Are the worth the price? I have no idea, I've never used them for personal project. But they are at least as good as a dev with 3-5 years of experience, at this point. Our career is boned.

Based on my experience with LLM and developers I personally know, my only assumption is they don't have the skills in the first place...

In corporate world there are a lot of "developers" that actually act kind of like codegen. They just throw plausible sounding bullshit into an editor and hope for the best. Two examples:

Once asked to help a team speed something that ran slow, even by their low standards. Turned out they had made their own copy file routine instead of using the standard library one, and sucked the file into memory, expanding array 512 bytes at a time, and then wrote it out, 512 bytes at a time. I made the thing nearly instant by just making it a call to the standard library function to copy a file.

While helping with a separate problem, I noticed their solution for transferring some file with an indeterminate version number in the middle of the file name. It was a huge mess, but the most illustrative line was the line in their Java application declaring a string "ls /path/with/file|grep prefix.*.extension".....

Lots of human slop out there that AI can actually compete with.

That's the funnest part. You loose your ability to code, and you do it by using thing that isn't even that good, and you don't get anything out of it. Isn't that great?

There have been multiple studies finding a general decrease in cognitive skills and critical thinking related to AI use. Here is one of them: https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006

There is an easy cope out to say, these were bad engineers to begin with, but I'm not convinced.

We know that if you don't use an ability and use it daily your brain just reallocates resources to other tasks. So if you have a machine that "outsources" thinking for you, you will be less able to think.

Indeed. It is just devs being lazy. Use your tools, don't abuse them. Same thing happened when IDEs started to be able to autocomplete and do refactorings. If that makes you stop being able to do it yourself it was never a IDE problem, but a user problem.

weep*

This is why I've never tossed any of the developer bookmarks

I've been training new hires how to look stuff up on stack and dictionaries to fix code that went wrong after AI mucked it up. They aren't even being trained to parachute in school.

What a sad time line we are in.

Hah!

The AI tries to understand itself, and queries the sum of all human knowledge... which promptly informs it that it's a malicious bringer of destruction.

I actually wonder if programming languages is going to be a thing in the future.

Each language gets compiled down to 1 and 0s. Couldn't LLMs just get trained in that? "These set of 1s and 0s do login" etc.

Coders already didn't know what was going on for years before AI. All of the libraries they used were based on zillions of lines of code they didn't understand

And?

When big corpos own the tooling I definitely think it's a problem.

unfortunately, the people that do those jobs are not just going to keel over and disappear

Unfortunately?

nowadays most of it is done by robots.

The difference is that the robots are actually better at reliably making cars than the humans were. Vibe coding very much does not produce better, more reliable code.

Yet the need for skills remained.

What kind of skills are needed to ask a non deterministic machine to code things one cannot understand in the first place?

This.

For some reason they hate is really strong this time around but it's the exact same thing.

The hype actually feels like some of the vintage marketing for BASIC.

"So simple, your boss can do it!"

It's probably been like this every time we go "up" a level of abstraction. We're still needed because complicated shit will always be complicated, and people who make decisions will always need an underling to blame.

I doubt anyone can actually calculate a line of best using ordinary least square linear regression by hand with no mistakes but no one’s crying about that.

That's because I can write an algorithm to do it for me reliably and quickly.

LLMs are just the next generation of calculators and programs.

LLMs can do it quickly, but they cannot do it reliably by their very nature. They are very much NOT the next generation of calculators and programs, because the whole POINT of calculators and programs is to do it quickly AND RELIABLY.

For the first sentence: Yes, that's why computers are popular. For the second sentence: They're more like the next generation of algorithms, not whole calculators.

I'll proceed to eat your feesh now.

Many people believe this, and it couldn’t be more wrong. It’s like saying that a product manager can code, if their tickets are detailed enough to give a general vision of a piece of software.

Implementation still matters. Context still matters. Vibe coded projects all follow these patterns where each change is a thousand lines of code out, two thousand in. And there’s a breaking point where reading and understanding these changes is not only unpractical, but also counterproductive.

But then, there’s the bigger question of language expressivity and determinism: even if LLMs could achieve a certain level of consistency of outputs given certain inputs, how do we make a natural language like English expressive enough, and more importantly, non ambiguous enough, to work like an actual programming language?

This is a recipe for SQL injections, race conditions, memory leaks, and keys being placed directly in code.

Trust the output of an LLM at your peril. Literally.

Don't know why you got downvoted, you're 100% right. It's just another layer of abstraction. Like a super high level non-deterministic level of abstraction.