Humans are obsolete dead meats
Reminder here that the culprit is capitalism, not LLMs.
Voxium said he wouldn’t mind the situation if workers were given more time to check the code.
“Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude,” he added. “There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore.”
Some people might look at this and wonder what the problem is – who wouldn’t want to be paid to do very little? But most people struggle when their work has no meaning. Voxium told Business Insider that if engineers lose the opportunity to understand the code and solve difficult problems, “there is nothing left … Not even our soul. There will be no purpose.”
He added that the real problem is corporate leaders’ obsession with pushing out more features. He said management often judges success by sprint cycles, pull requests, and the sheer number of features shipped, even when those additions do little to improve the product for users.
Capitalism created LLMs.
People are clever; we invent things.
LLMs are just a tool. Tools can be used by people; the problem is when people are used by tools, which is what is happening in this case.
See Corey Doctorow’s latest tour of YouTube promoting his idea of reverse centaurs (which, for the life of me, I can´t figure out why he didn´t call minotaurs).
One… use --dangerously… they asked for speed, thats how you get it. Two… if you have great tests, you don’t really need to know every detail of the code. The risk just shifts from a dev designing bad code, to a dev designing bad tests.
I dunno I’ve seen too many times where Claude Code will just rewrite a test it doesn’t like and say it’s good. Combining that with —dangerously or —yolo is a recipe for disaster.
You do have to keep some tests for yourself, and don’t let claude touch those (or even see them ideally).
Though I have been reading that you can actually have a second agent manage tests. That way it’s motivation is to find bugs. So if anything it will hallucinate failures.
That said… if corp is pushing AI, then they get the result. Most of the time it will be fine. When it isn’t it’s the AI we have been encoraged to use’s fault.
AI code assistants currently are like that senior dev who knows everything, has experience in everything, and always likes to help everyone. But sadly he does a lot of shrooms in his spare time and sees things that aren’t there. He also has quite the opinionated ideas about what good code should look like.
That implies that you just can’t let him do the quality assurance. He can write code. You can ask him stuff. And he excels at debugging.
But you can’t let him plan the architecture. You can ask him about his ideas and select the ones that are actually good, though.
And you definitely can’t let him review his own code. Someone else has to do that.So if they literally just let the AI do everything, there is absolutely no way anyone has a chance to ever review the result because AI code is harder to review (for now), and AI loves to repeat itself (for now).
And sure, they can tell it to write tests. But AI is dogshit at writing tests. It tends to forget the important cases, test the wrong thing, and/or obsess about completely irrelevant implementation details.
I also tried the multi-round approach with a committee of agents trying to iteratively find and fix flaws. It only works well for finding bugs, not fixing them (for now).But while AI can’t replace me, it is really nice to have as a tool - just like I have syntax highlighting in the IDE, I have a code assistant that can autocomplete a few lines of code, find out why my code misbehaves, or tell me what some library method is supposed to do. Sure, I have to still verify the results. But often, finding the bug or information was the hard part.
Coding assistants are great. Just don’t let them write too much code at once. You need someone who still actually understands the codebase. That sadly can’t be an AI (yet).I would like to apply for this software engineer job where all you do is press enter. I’m willing to work from home or go to the office everyday. I will press enter on holidays and weekends as well.
Will you accept a $20,000 a year salary without dental and vision?
Depends on how many times I need to hit enter during my 8 hour shift. If it’s something like 200 times then yes. If you need something more like 7,200 enters pressed in an 8 hour shift then that would break down to 15 enters per minute which requires a little more dedication. I that event I would like to ask for $23,000 a year.
I would also like for the company to pay for any repairs or replacement of my Enter button in the event something stops working.
