Someone needs to force licensure on you motherfuckers
Pretty much the case for every junior developer I know atm. It sucks for them because the business demand they create at the pace of a senior or lead but they never get to learn.
Being a junior developer means being a negative productivity part of the team for a year or more until trained well enough to start delivering things at pace. Most juniors i work with are struggling to produce anything coherent with AI and i can for the most part output quicker with my eyes closed typing with one hand but thats because I know what im doing. They will never get to the point of knowing because the demand is they instantly outsource their brain to a robot which at that point if the task is copy paste a ticket description why wouldnt i just do that myself?
Whats gonna happen is the talent pipeline to becoming a knower of things is basically just going to stop and then there will be no developers anymore. Its also doubly sad because training juniors up is my favourite aspect of the job because its the only part that brings actual real joy and material benefit to a human being.
Whats gonna happen is the talent pipeline to becoming a knower of things is basically just going to stop and then there will be no developers anymore.
If things go as advertised, which I think will thankfully be impossible due to so much of the Super Intelligence being snake oil. Fingers crossed that this is all just a very costly setback and that people who enjoy software dev will be able to continue to do so.
Hopefully. Im getting bored of devs telling me that writing code is redundant and basically telling me im some old fuddy for actually wanting to hand write code. Whats the rush for? Nobody is gonna give a shit how many features you ship in your life.
Why write code by hand for an hour when you can spend 3 hours getting Claude to instantly spit out subtly wrong code while saying, “you are absolutely right” to your critiques and still not fixing it?
Half the fun of writing code is spending hours coming up with a plan, building a skeleton, then implementing something, only to find a better way to do stuff during that process and scrap the original idea.
I hand write everything because all my code is directly used by my non programmer co-workers for design and drafting automation. I usually keep my tooling to ~200 lines just because that’s an amount of code that can be easily read on a single (vertical) screen.
I’ve had a couple folks try their hand at it and they’ll somehow re-implement the entire backend with bonkers functions then have a final business logic script that’s 1k lines. It also almost never works since testing integrated design tooling requires you to actually do drafting and data analysis work. Something the LLMs are very incapable of doing.
I usually keep my tooling to ~200 lines just because that’s an amount of code that can be easily read on a single (vertical) screen.
Meanwhile me a few days ago: “I’m copy pasting this one line about a hundred times because I’m way to lazy to try and put functions inside an array without the old ass compiler complaining.”
Unrolling doesn’t count, that’s clear. 1000 lines hitting 5-10 levels of indirection when the whole process could have been done with like 2 levels, or utilizing some existing abstractions.
Theoretically you need to ship fast so you have first movers advantage. But now everyone can ship everything fast so there is not as much point to being the first mover anymore, if you post anything anywhere about what you’re doing it can be cloned before you take your pants off before bed. So the two options are develop fast in secret and only build business relationships with specific other companies in person, or actually take the time to make your product significantly better than the competition in some way, so long as socially necessary labor time to ship an MVP is actually significantly reduced, which is only the case if you never review the code ever. Which could quite obviously lead to some problems down the line.
Whats gonna happen is the talent pipeline to becoming a knower of things is basically just going to stop and then there will be no developers anymore.
Whats gonna happen is the talent pipeline to becoming a knower of things is basically just going to stop and then there will be no developers anymore.
Steve Balmer will be devastated
Tech bros being so hostile against unions because they think they’re so much better than the lowly labourers with their amazing wages and job security is really biting them in the ass now. Not sure if even a strong union could stop the AI shit from happening everywhere, but at least the mass layoffs could’ve been fought against
A lot of tech workers are given stocks as part of compensation too so their interest is affected by that, too.
Strong unions, amazing wage labourers? Where do I find that?
bootcamp
That’ll be why. He spent 6 weeks learning “how to code” (follow a youtube tutorial) 2 years back, then immediately stopped using the skills he didnt already have.
It’s like learning to cook from a hello fresh trial subscription then buying takeout for the next two years. You’re not gonna remember how to cook because you hadn’t even started to learn!
Eh, if he had 7 years of work experience before starting to use the slopper I doubt the bootcamp had much to do with it.
Oh that’s what 8YOE meant smh.
My exaggeration aside, the point moreso was that the understanding of fundamentals you get from these re-skilling farms is capped off.
If you were lucky your employer treated that like an apprentice scheme, but many just saw bootcamps as a way to systemically depress wages to avoid outsourcing to Asia. We have an industry that is still treated like a highly academic field, but in practice a massive chunk are simply the reserve army of labour who were never expected to remember more than the basics, and with LLMs those basics can be deferred to someone else until you’ve forgotten those too.
In the fable of John Henry vs. the steam driller, he had to work himself to death to produce faster than the machine and beat it in a race. But a tunnel’s a tunnel and the rail baron was able to ride through the steam driller one just fine.
If the steam driller couldn’t actually drill and just painted a fake but convincing enough tunnel on the side of a cliff, Henry wouldn’t have had to work himself so hard. If the rail baron dies in a tragic train wreck because it crashed into painted cliffside, people will still want trains and trains will need tunnels to get through mountains.
I think the problem is that in this scenario, vibe coding can be just good enough for the corpos, that they don’t care about everything that’s broken with it. As long as the new feature is shipped it doesn’t matter if it broke 6 other features to get there. I think there will eventually be a point where the rot becomes too much though
tech bro getting in a coding competition against AI and winning but all the really fast typing gives him carpal tunnel syndrome and he can’t jork anymore
I am no developer (anymore) but it is clear as shit that using LLMs to code is going to seriously atrophy the average developer. The unacknowledged problem about LLM coding is that its biggest cheerleaders are either like Mitchell Hashimoto who are like the top 1%ile coders in the world, or some idiot who couldn’t write code for shit and is now empowered to bootstrap their own B2B SAAS with Claude Code. The biggest worry for me is the effect it will have on documentation because LLMs are so good at reading code, I feel people will be less incentivised to document for humans.
It’s also going to saddle us with mountains of shit code that no one understands. Technical debt is going to overtake US debt, if things continue as now.
It’s not just developers and code. The C-suite, middle-management, and other professional laborers I work with internal and tangentially to IT are also using this shit, and it fucking shows. The lies and contradictions the executives tell at the all-employee calls don’t stand up to even a scratch of scrutiny like they used to. Basic concepts like architecture and security are being mangled and misinterpreted by people who had expertise and that I once respected.
A VP in my company, who has absolutely no tech, programming, or engineering credentials, was recently invited to a local business summit as an “AI expert” because he’s forcing Claude on everyone in the company regardless of what use it is to that employee or department. The VP was extremely pleased with himself and it’s given him an even greater sense of false confidence in what he thinks he knows about LLMs. I imagine this same scenario is repeating itself across the world. It’s a really incredible house of cards
My C-suite has been using ChatGPT to review contracts instead of hiring lawyers
You already have crap code being hastily slapped together for purposes like people adding onto something for their own career advancement (see: Pointless GUI changes, especially Google products) and constant crunch time.
This merely hastens the rot.
C suite wants to replace the former with the latter. They desperately want it to work and force it on their companies. When it doesn’t work, often that doesn’t really matter because their product is basically bullshit in the first place.
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This is something I experienced in part. Software development is a skill that you will very quickly lose if you stop doing the hard parts. My employer demanded more and more code produced faster and faster. Tokenmaxxing bullshit. I felt myself degrading and worked very hard to reacquire the skills I was being forced to lose.
In a similar position over here. Unfortunately ive taken to doing some hobby projects for this, which is fun but also chews into time I could be doing more important things.
I like messing with old flip phones.
Qualcomm BREW is, without any doubt, up there in the top 10 worst operating systems of all time. It’s definitely up in the top 5 pieces of software I viciously hate.
It’s 200% spaghetti code.
Needless to say the development experience is ✨TERRIBLE!✨ Everything is done in the most ass-backwards ways you can imagine, stuff like the printf engine thingy is broken and doesn’t even support most formatter arguments, and there’s no protections in place.
No memory paging here folks! Something like a double free will immediately fuck up the entire operating system.
Development is a pretty hellish experience.
Which is annoying because having my own stuff running on my LG VX10000 is so SO satisfying! But you know, AuDHD, so I hyperfixate on it every couple months.
But, yeah, my skills with that platform do atrophy! I have to refresh myself on stuff whenever I get back into it.
Human in the loop (of bottomless helplessness)
So it looks like ai still can’t take over white collar jobs.
As a coder (who doesn’t use AI), I just don’t understand this. It’d be like forgetting how to speak your native language… even worse, something thousands of times simpler than a real language. And not only that, pretty much all the major concepts are the same regardless of the language you use : there’s nouns (variables), verbs (functions), control flow (if statements), objects (classes and data structures)…
Chances are they just never learned the basic concepts in the first place.
This is the worst time to get into programming. I feel so bad for all the kids that are gonna miss out on actually learning things, having to interact with open source communities and documentation.
Half the fun of the whole field is just slowly learning all the different ways things work and how they’re implemented. Going through old mailing lists and seeing months long discussions and fights about features that are now just “a 6hr Claude loop decided this”.
It’s a great time to get into programming as a personal hobby rather than career. I don’t generate code for myself, but it is useful to ask AI to essentially scan Internet forums for obscure error codes and usually it extracts the actual solution. But that is just using it as a search engine.
Lol get owned nerd.
Ragebait. These tools are only capable enough to generate acceptable code since about a year tops.
