Jupp. There is definitely skill atrophy going on. I also think he is hinting at the core reason why this shift in the industry is basically inevitable. It's the economics of it. Let's assume that...
Jupp. There is definitely skill atrophy going on.
I also think he is hinting at the core reason why this shift in the industry is basically inevitable. It's the economics of it. Let's assume that today's models can't deliver software of the same quality as a skilled developer. That I think is fairly uncontroversial. The economics of getting software at 80% the quality level for a fraction of the cost just makes this the sane path economically. If it bugs out 20% of the time, you can likely afford to pay someone to put a bandaid on it for a fraction of the cost. The question is if the software is good enough, not if the software is good. In many cases the answer will be that it is good enough even if it is a bugridden mess that is impossible to maintain.
As for myself... I agree that there is a reckoning happening in the industry and I have felt a bit of an identity crisis looking at what these models are capable of. Well, I'll stick around for a while longer. I enjoy the people I work with and have fairly large degrees of freedom, but I'm not sure if I will stick around till the end of my career.
Honestly we’ve all been doing this for many years already by hiring contractors to build entire platforms by themselves with very little oversight. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in, the...
Honestly we’ve all been doing this for many years already by hiring contractors to build entire platforms by themselves with very little oversight.
It doesn’t matter what country they’re in, the company makes the decision to hire like 100 contractors to build the thing and like 5 devs to oversee it and the whole project is a massive dumpster fire and somehow makes it to prod anyway and then the company is stuck with it for years until they decide to rewrite it and rinse and repeat.
Now it’s just 5 devs overseeing the AI in those companies that do things like that.
Not all companies do it that way, though. My company hired full time workers in other countries so that devs are always producing code 24 hrs a day and we are definitely dealing with slop, but we were before, and on some teams the AI has actually helped enforce code standards.
The massive issue we’ve having is that it often produces code that looks right, but isn’t. It’s so easy to pass on your own misunderstandings to the agent that sometimes we end up with features that, for example, don’t take into account established scope and permissions requirements. This seems like something that will be solved with time, though.
We already had years and years of overall software quality becoming a trash fire. I don't think anyone is excited about OS updates anymore, and practically every application has something that...
We already had years and years of overall software quality becoming a trash fire. I don't think anyone is excited about OS updates anymore, and practically every application has something that people feel breaks after an update. Software is getting larger and larger and consuming more resources to do the same things, as heavy frameworks are stacked up and companies rely on JavaScript crude for desktop and mobile applications. Things are slow on expensive (and getting more expensive) hardware when they don't need to be.
And that's just from the user-facing side. The industry is full of people who don't know what they're doing and software robustness is a constant fight between the people who care about quality and the people who just want to say LGTM and merge. And that attitude stacks up technical debt that makes work harder in the future or bites you with a production incident.
Now that LLM usage is everywhere, that fight is getting harder. People throw PRs down faster, apparently look at and test them less, and more people are just rubber stamping them without looking at the chances. This is essentially shifting a massive amount of work onto more senior developers who are baby sitting more.
Just the other day I caught someone submitting a config file change with a unit test testing the configuration, and multiple other people approved the PR before I blocked it. Not testing the configuration loader/parser, which always has through tests; Claude made a new test file to test that the configuration changes were set as it expected. Seriously, you don't write code to test runtime configuration (which already has full coverage for the functionality the config drives).
Software quality is cooked, and the experience for end users is going to get much worse if this madness doesn't die down. And probably kill people as this affects cars, planes, heavy machinery, infrastructure, etc..
I'd hope medical device companies learned from THERAC-25, but hey, it's the future now. Let's just let Claude worry about it. /s
I’d like to get out too… but what are the options? I mean yes I could do anything else but I’d be giving up 15 years of experience and the income that goes with it. I could plant potatoes in a...
I’d like to get out too… but what are the options? I mean yes I could do anything else but I’d be giving up 15 years of experience and the income that goes with it. I could plant potatoes in a field but it’s backbreaking labour that pays nothing. Where do we go from here?
Preferably to something that isn't next in line to be gobbled up by agents+harnesses. Hard also to find a field that has the same benefits (salary levels + other benefits). Something that allows...
Preferably to something that isn't next in line to be gobbled up by agents+harnesses. Hard also to find a field that has the same benefits (salary levels + other benefits). Something that allows for focus at the same level is kind of rare I think. Let me know if you find it!
I wonder if we will see a flip of wages where technical work becomes nearly worthless and manual labour becomes very expensive. As long as Western countries are using cheap imported labour or even...
I wonder if we will see a flip of wages where technical work becomes nearly worthless and manual labour becomes very expensive. As long as Western countries are using cheap imported labour or even illegal immigrants to do all the manual labour that seems unlikely. There is a common argument in Canada that 'Kids these days don't want to do manual labour and work the fields'. They are somewhat right, but I don't think it's the work that is the problem, it's the wage. I would have gone to work the fields in my youth, hell I might even do it now, but it's brutal work so I expect at least $100/hr and I want to be able to retire before 50.
No, if anything a hypothetical drop in demand for skilled knowledge work would increase the labor pool of people for manual labor and drive the pay down even more. Technical work pays more because...
No, if anything a hypothetical drop in demand for skilled knowledge work would increase the labor pool of people for manual labor and drive the pay down even more.
Technical work pays more because a limited number of people can do it and it takes a large upfront investment in time to be able to do it professionally. Unskilled manual labor is something that anyone who's able-bodied can do.
Things like agriculture don't have more of an automation push because people are already paid next to nothing and developing the automation would cost more. Robots largely took over heavy manufacturing decades ago—it's largely large machinery building cars, for example. (Except for cheap commodities where it's cheaper to pay people in a heavily-outsourced area, like sewing shirts.) People do the dexterous in-between jobs, but that's the next big push. There's a reason why Hyundai/Boston Dynamics is working on hands for Atlas right now.
Personally I've been thinking about being an indie game developer. It tickles the main reason I got into software in the first place, which is because I found it fun basically, and it tickles the...
Personally I've been thinking about being an indie game developer. It tickles the main reason I got into software in the first place, which is because I found it fun basically, and it tickles the creative itch.
That is kind of a moonshot in terms of being a long term career replacement though. So yes, let me know if you or @archlevel find something out.
I’m gonna stick with it until they lay me off and then I’ll go for a masters in whatever looks good at the time. I’ve got leadership skills and so far they’re just making me do both development...
I’m gonna stick with it until they lay me off and then I’ll go for a masters in whatever looks good at the time. I’ve got leadership skills and so far they’re just making me do both development and project management so thats kept my income safe for now.
I went through a bit of a doomer phase like last year or the year before but then my company started paying for me to use AI to develop and I actually kinda like it. I get things done in hours...
I went through a bit of a doomer phase like last year or the year before but then my company started paying for me to use AI to develop and I actually kinda like it. I get things done in hours that used to take me days, and our teams cadence hasn’t caught up so right now that leaves me time for completing things on my own years-long backlog like refactoring/cleanup/new features to make releasing easier.
In the background Ive always been kinda doomer, I left a job in healthcare where I was actually helping people to be at this job where no one needs me to do the work that I do but it pays like 4x was I was making in healthcare so I’m just taking their money while I can cause I’m sure that this isn’t sustainable and eventually our society will need everyone to do useful work.
I think that attitude has kinda helped me a little, like, I was always working a useless job, AI has just made it so less of my brain power is spent on said useless job.
Software development wasn’t ever really my life’s calling, I was always just decent at it, and even more decent at leading projects, so AI making it such that I don’t have to write code much any more doesn’t really bother me. Its actually fine, cause people interrupting me with meetings all day made writing code really difficult, and I cant keep people from doing that, so its nice I don’t have to write code any more. This is much less stressful than having to write code and not having the time to do so.
Ufff. This hits nail on the head. Not sure did I use idiom correctly, but that's my main issue with all these AI staff. More responsibility, more velocity, more automation, and you still...
Ufff.
As long as you can find more overworked software developers, and push them hard until they burn out trying to maintain a minimum standard of quality, you can keep the “AI”-driven labour alienation going.
This hits nail on the head. Not sure did I use idiom correctly, but that's my main issue with all these AI staff. More responsibility, more velocity, more automation, and you still responsible for the resulting mess.
I honestly stopped to point errors in AI generated documentation made by other people, why bother. Maybe I'm just burn out.
Jupp. There is definitely skill atrophy going on.
I also think he is hinting at the core reason why this shift in the industry is basically inevitable. It's the economics of it. Let's assume that today's models can't deliver software of the same quality as a skilled developer. That I think is fairly uncontroversial. The economics of getting software at 80% the quality level for a fraction of the cost just makes this the sane path economically. If it bugs out 20% of the time, you can likely afford to pay someone to put a bandaid on it for a fraction of the cost. The question is if the software is good enough, not if the software is good. In many cases the answer will be that it is good enough even if it is a bugridden mess that is impossible to maintain.
As for myself... I agree that there is a reckoning happening in the industry and I have felt a bit of an identity crisis looking at what these models are capable of. Well, I'll stick around for a while longer. I enjoy the people I work with and have fairly large degrees of freedom, but I'm not sure if I will stick around till the end of my career.
Honestly we’ve all been doing this for many years already by hiring contractors to build entire platforms by themselves with very little oversight.
It doesn’t matter what country they’re in, the company makes the decision to hire like 100 contractors to build the thing and like 5 devs to oversee it and the whole project is a massive dumpster fire and somehow makes it to prod anyway and then the company is stuck with it for years until they decide to rewrite it and rinse and repeat.
Now it’s just 5 devs overseeing the AI in those companies that do things like that.
Not all companies do it that way, though. My company hired full time workers in other countries so that devs are always producing code 24 hrs a day and we are definitely dealing with slop, but we were before, and on some teams the AI has actually helped enforce code standards.
The massive issue we’ve having is that it often produces code that looks right, but isn’t. It’s so easy to pass on your own misunderstandings to the agent that sometimes we end up with features that, for example, don’t take into account established scope and permissions requirements. This seems like something that will be solved with time, though.
We already had years and years of overall software quality becoming a trash fire. I don't think anyone is excited about OS updates anymore, and practically every application has something that people feel breaks after an update. Software is getting larger and larger and consuming more resources to do the same things, as heavy frameworks are stacked up and companies rely on JavaScript crude for desktop and mobile applications. Things are slow on expensive (and getting more expensive) hardware when they don't need to be.
And that's just from the user-facing side. The industry is full of people who don't know what they're doing and software robustness is a constant fight between the people who care about quality and the people who just want to say LGTM and merge. And that attitude stacks up technical debt that makes work harder in the future or bites you with a production incident.
Now that LLM usage is everywhere, that fight is getting harder. People throw PRs down faster, apparently look at and test them less, and more people are just rubber stamping them without looking at the chances. This is essentially shifting a massive amount of work onto more senior developers who are baby sitting more.
Just the other day I caught someone submitting a config file change with a unit test testing the configuration, and multiple other people approved the PR before I blocked it. Not testing the configuration loader/parser, which always has through tests; Claude made a new test file to test that the configuration changes were set as it expected. Seriously, you don't write code to test runtime configuration (which already has full coverage for the functionality the config drives).
Software quality is cooked, and the experience for end users is going to get much worse if this madness doesn't die down. And probably kill people as this affects cars, planes, heavy machinery, infrastructure, etc..
I'd hope medical device companies learned from THERAC-25, but hey, it's the future now. Let's just let Claude worry about it. /s
I’d like to get out too… but what are the options? I mean yes I could do anything else but I’d be giving up 15 years of experience and the income that goes with it. I could plant potatoes in a field but it’s backbreaking labour that pays nothing. Where do we go from here?
Preferably to something that isn't next in line to be gobbled up by agents+harnesses. Hard also to find a field that has the same benefits (salary levels + other benefits). Something that allows for focus at the same level is kind of rare I think. Let me know if you find it!
I wonder if we will see a flip of wages where technical work becomes nearly worthless and manual labour becomes very expensive. As long as Western countries are using cheap imported labour or even illegal immigrants to do all the manual labour that seems unlikely. There is a common argument in Canada that 'Kids these days don't want to do manual labour and work the fields'. They are somewhat right, but I don't think it's the work that is the problem, it's the wage. I would have gone to work the fields in my youth, hell I might even do it now, but it's brutal work so I expect at least $100/hr and I want to be able to retire before 50.
No, if anything a hypothetical drop in demand for skilled knowledge work would increase the labor pool of people for manual labor and drive the pay down even more.
Technical work pays more because a limited number of people can do it and it takes a large upfront investment in time to be able to do it professionally. Unskilled manual labor is something that anyone who's able-bodied can do.
Things like agriculture don't have more of an automation push because people are already paid next to nothing and developing the automation would cost more. Robots largely took over heavy manufacturing decades ago—it's largely large machinery building cars, for example. (Except for cheap commodities where it's cheaper to pay people in a heavily-outsourced area, like sewing shirts.) People do the dexterous in-between jobs, but that's the next big push. There's a reason why Hyundai/Boston Dynamics is working on hands for Atlas right now.
Personally I've been thinking about being an indie game developer. It tickles the main reason I got into software in the first place, which is because I found it fun basically, and it tickles the creative itch.
That is kind of a moonshot in terms of being a long term career replacement though. So yes, let me know if you or @archlevel find something out.
I’m gonna stick with it until they lay me off and then I’ll go for a masters in whatever looks good at the time. I’ve got leadership skills and so far they’re just making me do both development and project management so thats kept my income safe for now.
I went through a bit of a doomer phase like last year or the year before but then my company started paying for me to use AI to develop and I actually kinda like it. I get things done in hours that used to take me days, and our teams cadence hasn’t caught up so right now that leaves me time for completing things on my own years-long backlog like refactoring/cleanup/new features to make releasing easier.
In the background Ive always been kinda doomer, I left a job in healthcare where I was actually helping people to be at this job where no one needs me to do the work that I do but it pays like 4x was I was making in healthcare so I’m just taking their money while I can cause I’m sure that this isn’t sustainable and eventually our society will need everyone to do useful work.
I think that attitude has kinda helped me a little, like, I was always working a useless job, AI has just made it so less of my brain power is spent on said useless job.
Software development wasn’t ever really my life’s calling, I was always just decent at it, and even more decent at leading projects, so AI making it such that I don’t have to write code much any more doesn’t really bother me. Its actually fine, cause people interrupting me with meetings all day made writing code really difficult, and I cant keep people from doing that, so its nice I don’t have to write code any more. This is much less stressful than having to write code and not having the time to do so.
Ufff.
This hits nail on the head. Not sure did I use idiom correctly, but that's my main issue with all these AI staff. More responsibility, more velocity, more automation, and you still responsible for the resulting mess.
I honestly stopped to point errors in AI generated documentation made by other people, why bother. Maybe I'm just burn out.