> So, I admit that I'm finally getting into this "let Claude help you write code" stuff, and I'm enjoying it a bit for the stuff I, honestly, just don't want to write; but ... I still read it. I still review it. I still look at the code like I'm peer-reviewing it and go, "Uh ... I don't like this area at all. That's going to be really hard to debug at 3am" and so on.
I used to. I've stopped in recent months, only because I just can't keep up with the pace it's churning out the code. If I was to read it, it would take multiples longer to develop anything, maybe into orders of magnitude longer. Occasionally I'll dip in just to get a sense of things, especially if it's struggling with something, or at the opposite end, if it's completely trivial. But I'm hardly reading anything now.
Why? You own the pager, I assume. You own the mental hit when something you let go live (especially with your name on the PR) leaks customer data or deleted someone’s work.
And if you’re not reading your own work, is someone else during the PR? Are you reading other people’s PRs?
How do you know what your product does and how it does it?
From what I understand for most people it isn't a conscious choice, it happens slowly over time. People naturally don't want to waste time, the code is there and if you don't look too closely it works, so they start skimming instead of going in-depth, expecting anything majorly wrong to pop out. But those things probably won't because generated code is very good at looking extremely high quality at a surface level no matter how bad it actually is. So eventually even the skimming starts feeling like a waste of time so it tapers off too.
When the combustion engine was invented, and we got the means by which we could accelerate our trip by 10x, and at the same time scale it to multiple people, we didn't tell the humans to keep pushing the vehicles by their hands, didn't we?
As a developer you are more akin to a car mechanic, who’s still expected to know how the engine works even a century after it was invented, rather than a driver, who is just the user in this parallel.
Mechanics I've been to generally have no idea about how things actually in the car work - from what I could understand, area is full of recurring problems, and this exactly benefits mechanics to solve them through trial and error approach rather than understanding much how underlying things work. Pretty much close to what I would say SWE will turn into, there's no other choice IMO in foreseeable future.
I think you underestimate the skill of more experienced mechanics. Tractor (as in 18 wheeler) and master mechanics tend to know what’s going on under the hood in detail.
I’m sure there are many of those, but like everything, there are tiers. I’m sure we’ll get something similar in SWE, but my hope is that you’ll still be able to choose to be a high tier engineer if you wanted to
Evidence so far does not suggest people driving off a cliff so while a valid concern it's not a likely one. We also acknowledged that the benefit of using a vehicle is such that it outnumbers the risks it may introduce. We never said there will be no risks attached.
We’ve only been on this train for 3-4 years, and in that period, we’ve already invented terms for this kind of vibe-coded, highly-breakable crud. We’ve also had a few, relatively high-profile in their spheres bugs come out and hurt people’s real, lived experiences.
And that’s just the stuff where the house of cards failed quickly.
Software by definition has always been and will remain broken in one or another way. AI makes no difference or whatsoever. Arguably, it will help raising the quality of software.
Exactly. That would mean going back to square one, and I also personally don't review the code anymore but I am more focused on asking the model to demonstrate the value it created through benchmarks, workload-generators, and e2e tests.
Mostly it proves as a valid approach, barring the bugs the model can introduce to value-demonstrating benchmarks which can of course skew the evidence on hypotheses, and thus code trajectory the model opts to go with.
The problem I see with this is really that I am not anymore under the control but I am not sure I see other alternative. I am becoming more and more like a system observer with surface-level understanding of the system rather than the engineer with zoomed-in level of understanding of how the code actually behaves. Perhaps we're transitioning into a QA roles present.
You guys are so daft about it. The fact that you do not see what work goes to keep company running and be responsible for thousands of people still having their jobs…
Some work is 24/7 basically, when you have to keep business afloat there are no sick days or worse days. Your brain is 24/7 preoccupied with the work.
Meanwhile you walk out after 8 hours and stop caring at all because - someone else does
Someone else grinds to provide you with employment so there is work at all and the company keeps sailing.
I am sure you guys are smart, adults. stop being so childish and immature. You are better than that
> StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.
I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.
Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.
The barriers are far more understanding the very counterintuitive set of rules and expectations of the site than they were accumulating the points (though I don't think the decidedly odd set of things that require a certain reputation to do help at all).
I love the implication that thousands of people, from a broad spectrum, who all had the same negative experiences with what was obviously a serious endemic problem with the site, all just needed to understand the policy better. That was clearly the issue.
If thousands of Americans travelled to a tiny country where cars drive on the left, and all tried to drive on the right as they do at home, would that make the country in the wrong? Would it be a "serious endemic problem" with the country?
Out of 10 times I asked for this, somebody replied with a link once. Most people do understand that they have violated the rules, they just don't agree with the rules.
If you knew how it worked, you would have understood that answering questions is only indirectly about "helping people", by hopefully building something that third parties can make use of later. The objective is not "the OP's problem was solved", but "the OP's question was answered" (which requires that there is a recognizable question extracted from analyzing the problem; and that there is one such question; and of course, those third parties are better served if they are all routed to the same place where the best answers are already written.)
If you were there to volunteer troubleshooting, or the programming equivalent of "tech support", you were in the wrong place. If you were interested in going back and forth with suggestions to help debug a program, you were in the wrong place. All of that is supposed to happen before the question is posted. The question is about why a specific thing works a specific way, or how to accomplish a specific atomic objective.
I believe the disconnect here is you're describing how some wanted it to work vs. how it played out in the real world. In practice, it became an unrewarding place to contribute high quality original content to.
I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.
The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.
Your observations can largely be applied to pretty much forum out there. Every single one was hijacked with either ignorant/stupid people without intelligence and/or bots pushing particular topic. Oh and the SEO managers, how could i forgot those.
And now when the knowledge is a golden mine for all sorts of openai/claude/other IA, the situation will likely exacerbate further.
I really miss a place where intelligent people can talk and exchange ideas with mutual respect. It seems like all these places are largely gone by now.
I think this was able to occur as genuine new user growth disappeared. So the engagement of the community churns and opens room for off topic discussion. Then politics being what it’s been enters.
I feel like hiring is all a bit broken. Roles get flooded with applications, it's chance whether your CV gets through, then there's hiring rounds that seem designed to make you quit the process before they have to filter you out.
I'm on the other side, and my main tip (at least if there's people like me!) is: avoid the usual AI signs.
For one role we got ~70 applications and all CVs looked obviously AI-written. I don't know whether the people did actually do any of the things mentioned and I don't have the time to find out, so the AI-written CVs are a discard-signal for me. (Either those people delegated a very important task to AI and didn't even bother to check, or they are bad using AI and don't know -- I want neither)
Any CVs that signal they were actually written by a person I will actually look at.
> For one role we got ~70 applications and all CVs looked obviously AI-written.
Were those ~70 applications all of them, or were those ~70 applications the result of an AI filtering from a larger amount?
If the latter, are you sure your AI is not filtering out the hand-written CVs and giving you the ones that have been AI-assisted or AI-written (with or without "the usual AI signs")?
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