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- Hacker News
- 5k is rookie numbers. My PM sent me an 80k line PR and told me to yolo it into production last week.by ckvibubueu
- In my opinion, software engineering was never mainly about programming. Programming is a rather small part of the software engineering cycle.
Programming by hand is one way (it also works with AI), to make decisions. Decisions about scalability, maintainability and sanity of your software. And still this will pay off!
To me it sounds as if he is a very bad software engineer.
by dreieinsvier - > Well, as much as people lose all their muscle by been bed-ridden, he's lost all his brain by being AI Assisted™.
Wanna know the answer of those who lost all their brain cells to that?
"If there are bugs, it's only because the prompt was off. I'm a better prompt-engineer than your business partner, so this could never ever happen to me."
And off to the couch they go sit and shut their brains off.
- It seems to me the author is gradually accepting the fact that business people (and their grandparents) can now produce thousands lines of code.
This was not feasible a year ago.
Now, regarding the quality of the code, the edge cases etc, surely someone familiar with the failure modes can review and prompt the AI better. But that doesn't negate the fact that these people are producing huge amount of code using natural language without any programming background.
A skill that used to take many months (if not years to master) and require handcrafting the software line by line is now done in English with almost no understanding of programming primitives.
And I'd argue that if the models, harnesses and IDEs keep getting better then a layman learning few software best practices would outperform a team of senior developers writing code manually.
Therefore, the developers refusing to adapt and adjust will find themselves gradually in a position where a layman can easily outperform their economic output by a huge margins. And in my opinion, the author just found himself in this position, and still in denial of what is happening.
by aogaili - AI is not the problem here, but the difference in deep beliefs of the company founders.
When I had partners in my business I studied them first deeply like I was going to marry them because I WAS going to marry them!
You should agree on your values or else the company will go nowhere. One founder will raw one way and the other the opposite making the boat to stay in the same place.
I have a software company and the opposite problem: I am obsessive about testing and meta programming. We write way more testing code than code, we automate everything with meta programming.
It was clear several times that we tested and automated way more than necessary. We automated things that only used once for example(although we used later multiple times on other projects).
So we had not the usual problems than companies have like bloat or security vulnerabilities but we had the problem of having software that was was super expensive because we did double or triple the code than the competition with tests that developers hated(they are boring to write). Our software took also way more time to market.
Companies love to buy the cheapest they can today and tomorrow we will see, so that put us in a difficult position. It was specially hard at first, but then this principles gave us an edge(because most companies would compromise early and not reap the benefits later).
Had I a business partner with a different mindset and beliefs, it would have been impossible to me not to change course of the boat in hard times.
BTW we use LLMs with great success. It let's us test even more spending way less than before.
by cladopa - This is literally the recipe for the coming software apocalypse.
Just watch the software engineers who say "Let's be careful" lose their jobs and get replaced by non-technical vibe-coders churning out 10K lines of dirty insecure, unmaintainable code per day... Ticking time bomb.
I swear, good engineers are going to move to North Korea to monetize because of the amount and size of 'opportunities' this will create.
It seems so far-fetched but that's the direction it seems to be heading.
- Doesn't sound like AI is necessarily the root the problem. If he's not the person to test, iterate, and deliver quality with AI, he probably wouldn't be without it. You just figured it out sooner.
Or, if you have reason to believe he's got what it takes - treat it like an leaving opportunity, give him room to make mistakes. This is, ime, what a rookie AI user mistake looks like.
It is easy to get carried away by the momentum. Many have fallen into that trap, not all are irredeemably bad software engineers.
by Valodim - OP and long time lurker here, I'm desperate and looking for honest-to-god advice on what to do.
I am one of those neurodivergent people who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation.
I also enjoy drawing, gardening, and exercise.
I don't own a car because I love walking, and such.
So I'm wondering if it's time to call it quits with programming (for a living).
Luckily I have some savings and I have other interests from years of doing random jobs and businesses, and as much as I love programming, especially with others, I think very few of us still want to program.
I'm like the Last Samurai of programming while everyone is using AI-assisted gattling guns.
Is it time to let go?
by yhcj