In my experience, AI is an amplifier.
Good engineers will produce more good code, because they ask the right questions, know what good looks like and check the output.
Bad engineers will produce reams more bad code. The mistakes they make will be amplified. They will give wrong and incomplete instructions, won’t see what the problems are with the result and will ship it anyway.
This amplification also means people will spend a larger proportion of time reviewing than coding, which I think is less interesting.
All of this is stuff that can, to some extent, be addressed with policy. You help and instruct juniors, encourage people to better understand and own their code, or at worst reprimand them if they don’t.
You can adjust expectations of product managers and explain to them that more is not better, as it always has been. Faster development can often come with bugs and tech debt and this is more of the same.
All I’ve said above is puts aside the ethical arguments of using or not using AI of course. That’s a separate can of worms entirely.
It can work as you say, but some companies are pushing 10x (or whatever) with fewer people, so quality is guaranteed to go to shit.
Bad & meh engineers get praised because they “waste” less time directing ai and reviewing output - barely working is good enough in the race to market.
I’ve seen things as serious as a privileged user for one customer having admin access to all customers being discovered during the last minute audit literally days before the planned product launch. That product is supposed(and likely will) to move 250M USD for customers in the second half of this year. Under the current policy at my day job, coming all the way from the top, reviewing ai generated code at all should be an exception reserved for 0.1% most critical code. Yes, in finance.
Insane stuff.
Hopefully, those are the sorts of companies that should fail or get sued, so they learn their lesson. Not holding my breath though.
Companies have been doing insane shit for the sake of saving a buck or getting to market fast for decades, it’s nothing new. AI may or may not just make it worse.
I’ve read that because they have less and less experience actually writing code junior developers are having trouble analyzing the code produced.
Provlem being is that it is not an equal amplifier.
Good engineer spends a morning going back and forth and maybe gets something done that wild have taken them all day.
Bad engineer puts first draft slop in production in a couple of minutes.
Bad engineer gets to put out something every few minutes, good engineer works too make it actually right instead of merely looking specifically right.
That’s true, but spaghetti code was always faster to write than good code before as well. I will agree that the speed gap probably has grown though. That’s why tools like AI need discipline.
If managers and engineers don’t understand that their code will turn into garbage and the business will get reputational harm and lose customers / get sued / have more tech debt to fix and they’ll eventually learn their lesson. In the meantime it’s going to be a painful process where upper management see extra speed, expand their scope or downsize their staff, then learn that they have crumbling foundations and need to adjust. This has publically happened a few times already. Things will stabilize in time.
Complication is, broadly speaking, much of the decision making only thinks to when their current bonus stock vests. So long term thinking is not well rewarded. If you think long term, then your short term thinking competitor screws you up long enough anyway.
I strongly suspect the next step is for a dramatic reduction in the compensation for software development. If it’s not really significantly any more profitable than another trade, then you won’t see as many people who seem to actively hate it trying to do it anyway.
Reminds me of a conversation I overhead, a guy trying to impress a girl with how much money he was going to get back in college. He was going into software development to make big money. Girl asks “but I thought you were majoring in communications, why do that if you want to do software?”. “Oh, well, I tried but I couldn’t understand the course work, so dropped it, figured I’d just get some degree, and then just get some certification and do software development for the money without the dumb coursework”. Basically since the late 90s we’ve had a flood of those types, and this phenomenon just exacerbates the problem.
Good engineers will produce more good code, because they ask the right questions, know what good looks like and check the output.
So what’s the point then ?
There have been coding frameworks like game engines for decades, if system coding is beyond your ability.
If AI can’t write usable code from the start its worthless.
Maybe you’ve misunderstood something.
No matter what framework or language you are using, AI can make the development process faster. It can help you debug a problem, write tests and refactor code. In some situations, it will be faster than writing code yourself, in others not.
exactly; well said
No it’s not because it causes brain damage. If you look at slop all day you no longer produces good code even you’re good engineer, you’re producing slop code because your standards keep getting lower and lower until you become bad engineer but you even haven’t figured it out. If good engineers would produce good code with AI we would have working software. Look how quality of software lowered after AI. We used to say that developers from coding bootcamps were bad now we’re lowering standards even more to praise investors.
You only have to snorkel through the mile of shit if you let the shit-pipe in in the first place.
The Shawshank Software
Yep… I’m leaving the industry after 20+ years because of this industry hellscape
If I got an AI-written codebase hard to navigate, I’d bill the AI usage it took to clean it up and, on top of it, the hours I have to put to actually do the job. We can definitely use AI to write good code, but it takes the kind of professional criteria that vibe coding lacks in order to do that.
We can definitely use AI to write good code
Get a different job. Now!
have you seen some human written code before? Someone who knows what they’re doing with AI can definitely generate better code
- it’s not AI, it’s statistical word prediction with ZERO understanding of context
- yes. statistical word prediction can be better than some idiot programmers. But I don’t compare my kitchen machine skills with those of a toddler either.
well, you’re free to die on that hill I guess
Taking what you give it into context it’s kind of the whole selling point of LLMs. If you get garbage output maybe you’re using it wrong. In the end it’s just a tool, if you can’t use it, that’s on you.
im pretty sure this isn the reason, its the dread of being laid off, and unable to find another job, because these companies think AI replaced them. i had one person i know that was laid off since 2023, and another had been put on hold indefinitely.
There can be different reasons for different people. I personally have zero fear of being laid off (strong worker protection laws in Germany) and finding a new job this year was surprisingly easy (50-ish applications with no cover letters -> 3 interviews -> 3 offers) and I still feel the exact dread that is described in the article. The industry sucks in multiple different ways rn.
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Computers are too powerful. Any kind of horrendous slop is now capable of running acceptably.
Until it doesn’t and you don’t understand the code.
No one understands the code. It’s far too complex and abstracted. In any case, just get another computer and/or toss in more code. There’s 4TB of storage and 64GB of RAM, so what? You want a purple circle, that’s going to take at least 55 library calls through dozens of languages.
