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- cross-posted to:
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I don’t think this is an AI issue. It made things slightly worse (and probably a lot worse for junior devs) but work in IT/development always sucked and led to burnout. If you read about prehistory of the industry (The Soul of a New Machine for example) few people worked as engineers for more than a decade. They would work extremely hard on couple of projects, burn out and move on to managerial positions, become architects or something. Then more and more people started to aim for Principal type jobs thinking that they will do programming forever. Well, the fact is that programming as a job mostly sucks. It’s possible to find great team and interesting project but it never lasts. You usually can’t make any decisions and are just doing what you’re told, even if you know it’s stupid. There’s always some boring maintenance work that no one likes. There’s support which robs you of your free time…
In my experience, fun projects last a year or two and then management changes, team members change, projects end and suddenly you find yourself in a completely different environment. It’s tiring and yes, people do burn out all the time. And yes, we keep doing it because coding is a fairly good work and we like it. With or without AI.
I’m okay.
As long as AI doesn’t replace me.
There is no denying that AI is transforming the field of software engineering. Some engineers worry that AI might take away their jobs. Frankly, that fear is entirely understandable. However, I do not believe that resisting change or assuming the profession itself will vanish is the right approach.
Don’t see AI only as a threat. Look at the bigger picture. Technology has always changed how we work, and every major change has created new opportunities. Keep learning. Keep growing. Stay curious. Strengthen your ability to think, solve problems, and create.
The industry may look very different a few years from now. Some roles may disappear, and some skills may become less valuable. But that doesn’t mean opportunities are disappearing.
Change your mindset. Keep moving forward. You will find opportunities far greater than what you can see today.
If AI makes it easier for my company to replace me, then it also means it’s easier for me to replace my company.
Maybe this is the best time to become self employed.
If you ask an LLM for Pong, it will give you Pong, or rather a Pong, a simulacrum average of all the Pongs in its training corpus. But it won’t be your Pong. You will not have decided the color, shape, and size of the paddles, or the background color, or speed of the ball, or the language it’s written in, or the way to architect the code, or any of the other aspects, so many that they can’t be enumerated. It’s not possible to describe exactly what you want to the LLM because that would be the code itself. Anything short of that and you will have omitted something, forcing the LLM to make a choice all on its own. Write your own damned Pong.
That’s the thing people don’t want their thing as long as it works
the more detail you give, the more detail you’ll get.
The only difference is that unspecified things will be filled in by random selection of ideas around the average.
Devs now have ability to go high level when safe, and go detailed when needed. So much about pong is easy and obvious so the llm can just do that for you and speed things up.
This is a tool for going faster, especially over the trivial stuff. The code didn’t go away, you can still edit it.
but it won’t be your pong
Yes, yes it will. I can change it to do whatever. My tool wrote the code based on my guidance.
If some stuff is trivial, then it is fast to do. If it’s not trivial, time needs to be spent on it.
The amount of delusions that vibecoders need to ingest constantly to keep their beliefs is crazy.
Also, why the fuck do you need your pong project to be done so fast? If you’re doing it as part of your job, just do your fucking job, and if it’s as a hobby, then do it instead of playing with a garbage generator to try to make it do it for you.
Also, no, it won’t be your pong because it will be built on stolen code. If you copy paste the code of someone else and say you made it because you changed the name, you didn’t make a pong, you’re just a piece of shit that lies about it.
If some stuff is trivial, then it is fast to do.
Unfortunately this is not true. That is why the word “boilerplate” exists.
That’s what deterministic code generators are there for. Or macros/metaprogramming.
Are you seriously saying the code is stolen because it’s copied? Are you stating you do not copy code from stack overflow?
Please bare in mind that AI from a month ago is shit compared to AI today so opinions on AI coding need to be constantly updated.
And lastly, who the fuck cares if Pong was AI coded for work? If it works, it works. Do you want a medal for coding it your self? Do you predict an edge case that would break AI’s version of pong? There are absolutely somethings where perfect code and good enough don’t have any real world impact.
Code under a license that you appropriate to yourself is stolen, yes, don’t play stupid.
The typical slopbro defense of “no but it was shit ten minutes ago but now it’s amazing and perfect” is bullshit, everyone knows it, and it’s just a hypocritical loophole used to block every critic. Most of the critics on LLMs from months and years ago are still very valid, and while I try to be charitable I cannot find a scenario where this argument would be used in good faith.
As I said, if your pong is for work, you should do your fucking work without contaminating it with slop, and if it’s not for work there’s no speed requirement. “If it works, it works” is such an absurdly moronic argument, I don’t even know where to start. Experimenting on humans is horrible, but brings advances to medicine, and “if it works, it works”. Planting evidence on someone you believe is guilty is illegal, but they end up in jail so " if it work, it works".
I’m done, there’s no way I can delude myself any longer into thinking that slop users do it innocently, when you have such obviously shitty and worthless arguments, there’s no way you could be dumb enough to believe them. This is obviously a bunch of bad faith arguments and nothing more.
Tell me specifically why you think a game of pong written for work with AI and vetted by a human is inferior to a game of pong written by a person if they perform indistinguishably for the person playing pong.
Because it is made through stolen data, while destroying the environment and basically the world.
“What is the difference between a synthetic diamond and a blood diamond, if they are chemically and structurally identical in the end?”
As I said, these arguments are so unbelievably stupid that they cannot be said in good faith, and each reply has been proving it.
So, your issue isn’t the AI being probably the most dangerous thing since the invention of the nuke or the quality of the response. It’s the fact they don’t have closed loop cooling, a better sources of energy, and they used data on the Internet?
What is the actual percentage of people make their own changes after generating a project with an LLM? Most people give the wheel to the LLM and prompt their way out of the resulting mess.
Unionize NOW
For those in UK - I can recommend UTAW (a branch of CWU)
There has always been a lot of contention between developers and management, they seem to fight with each other for position and leverage like a wrestling match.
Its usually IT / Dev management and business management, and the devs get a lot of collateral damage.
But AI has introduced something new to this struggle, its removed the fun of coding and the accomplishment of craft. Now both sides feels like they can use AI to replace the other, where managers are taking up coding and coders are becoming their own companies. And while that adds more grist for the mill, the customers are thinking they’ll replace both and just code and manage their own applications.
That is a lot of uncertainty, and the promise of being able to make a killer app is democratized but that means the ability to make lots of money at it is much more improbable.
Uncertainty and how the game has changed from sporting contest to win or lose high stakes, just makes this not fun anymore.
All this, combined with all these people thinking the promise of being able to make a killer app being democratized being delusional. All we’ve actually seen is existing software getting worse and nothing important having emerged from this brave new vibe-world
No way bro. Yesterday I would have agreed with you but the new Doofus 12.3 model that just came out an hour ago is so revolutionary. Trust me.
Well played
I don’t know what we can do, except understand and accept that this is happening. It’s a horrible thought, but you can’t deal with change if you stay in denial. I think it might be time – if you’re working in software – to think about a possible future outside the tech industry proper.
So the author’s points are:
- this is bad
- I have no ideas
- quit?
He sounds a bit depressed, yes.
It might be right that part of the software industry has just entered a downward spiral like a stalled jet. They could not make anything of value and quality and have commited to lower quality, less value, in a race to the earth surface.
Consumers don’t demand better quality because their expectations have reached zero. What these companies produce is worthless to them.
But there exist other areas where software delivers massive value and I think in two years or so, good developers which still know how to code and to maintain and debug old stuff, will be worth their weight in gold for such companies, because the sloppers won’t be up to the job.
Also, paradoxically, I think this will make companies to rely more on open source. In the last weeks I heard from two different companies that their suppliers - firms which were delivering stepper motors with firmware and such - are not any more able to make their stuff work. One company has resorted to do the testing for their supplier.
And there is a lot of software that needs to work. More than ever.
This is why companies are resentful towards software developers: They need them.
You know it was made for youtube because it just rambles on and on and says the same things over and over again and nothing at all. Gotta fit in those ads, right?
?
I wish it was that simple to just quit the industry. But it’s impossible to find another job that doesn’t make me homeless at this time.
It all sucks.
So keep grinding against the burn out hoping to not get fired is the way.
llms should get rid of managers. devs have the knowledge. llms give them more resources. i see a future where they all do it for themselves. we dont need big companies.
Reminds me that the whole premise of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is that an entire planet outsourced it’s upper management to AI.
i get your meaning but thats not where i was going. i dont see managemebt as decision makers since i work at a big xorporation. i meant, have ai do the admin work. the reporting.
Does that actually fit your experience?
Fits mine
Never read a blog post that I agree more with
