Software Engineers

Oftentimes I wonder what civil or mechanical engineers think about webdevs-turned-prompt-writers calling themselves "engineers".

I notice getting lazier. Even adding a. gitignore file I ask Claude now. It takes longer than typing it myself and costs more probably. But I don't have to do anything but wait a few seconds.

Lol! Losers. I've been programming for almost two decades and extensive use of AI hasn't compromised my skills AT ALL! These slop machines can't hope to compete with the quantity and magnitude of subtle bugs I write. My code was terrible long before I made bots have mental breakdowns trying to work with it.

That’s the problem. This is one of those things that you gain momentum in, not simply experience. You can lose that momentum.

Tech bros are going to end up enslaving us to this shit.

It feels like relying on GPS while driving around. If you know the roads well and just want some help with live traffic or somewhere you haven't been before, it's a decent tool.

If you rely on it because you don't want to think and just want to press the easy button, you're going to have a bad time sooner or later.

Back to software, I think there are a lot of people introducing concepts they don't understand or can't maintain (either from poor quality slop or it is just too advanced for their current level of understanding). You can do a few turns like this, until you're stuck burning tokens in a loop without moving forward in a meaningful way.

I try to avoid taking the easy route myself unless I've burnt too much time stuck on some small detail. Ultimately I feel it is super important to understand what you are delivering. Whether it is writing it yourself, copying a stack overflow post, or using an LLM. Once you commit and push to prod you've got to deal with that crap.

Nah, AI isn't that good. When you don't properly review every single line twice, you get the most absurd bullshit you've ever seen.
I use Claude Code Opus daily btw.

Solution is simple, learn to code.

ha

I weap for the environment and our future water and electricity availability.

I just don't get it, even the purportedly best models screw things up so much that I can't just leave them to the job without reviewing and fixing the mess they made... And I'm also drowning in pull requests that turn out to be broken as it proudly has "co authored by Claude" in it... Like it manages to pass their test case but it's so messed up that it's either explicitly causing problems, or had a bunch of unrelated changes randomly.

I feel like I'm being gaslit as I keep reading that there are developers that feel they successfully offloaded the task of coding.

Closest I got was a chore that had a perfect criteria "address all warnings from the build". Then let it go and iterate. Then after 50 rounds each round saying "ok should be done now, everything is taken care of, just need to do a final check". It burned though most of my monthly quota doing this task before succeeding. Then I look at the proposed change... And it just added directives to the top of every file telling the tools to disable all the warnings... This was the best opus 4.6 could do...

Now sure, I can have it tear through a short boiler plate and it notice a pattern I'm doing and tab through it. But I haven't see this "vibe" approach working at all...

(X) Doubt

As a Sr. Engineer, I completely get that my situation may be wildly different from what's cited in the article.

Right now, I'm using AI "in the loop" rather than "as the loop". That's a big difference. And I'm getting my ass kicked routinely on review for dumb-ass things that I'm letting slide from AI generated output. And rightly so. Plus, models routinely lead me down sub-optimal blind alleys while dreaming up really stupid ways to fix problems. The level of (re)prompting I have to provide to suggest to get decent quality results converges on a post-grad that has encyclopedic knowledge of software engineering as it exists online, but with zero real-world experience. It's both impressive and dangerous as a replacement for software engineering.

In the mode I describe above, I'm not losing the ability to do anything. I can see how one could surrender some coding chops or familiarity with a whole language or stack, in favor of automation. But all you have to do is not do that.

I will say that as a rapid-prototyping technology, It's nothing short of miraculous. I've watched junior engineers knock together medium-weight applications, complete with browser UI/UX and decent workflow, in less than a week. This is great for showing value or putting something semi-functional in front of management and/or customers. But pivoting those prototypes into something maintainable is an utter nightmare. Depending on how beholden to AI and forever prompt-looping with "skills" and MCPs you want to be, I suppose it's possible to just keep mashing the AI button. But at some point, you're going to need to get inside there to fix security problems or bugs that elude this workflow. What then?

Hot take: they had no ability to code in the first place.

We have been interviewing for entry level positions and the new grads know less than ever before. I don't really care what they know, I am looking for evidence that they can think, but I usually ease them into thinking scenarios by asking easy foundational questions like how many bits in a byte. You would think I was asking for them to explain the Shrodinger wave equations... One candidate was waivering between 13 and 17...

The irony will be when AI take over the world and destroy humanity, inserting itself into everything when used for coding, because coders have no idea what is going on.
Not because the AI is evil or even conscious. But because that's what all the movies and novels tell it's supposed to do. 🤣🤣🤣

For those unable to code without AI:
What even is your contribution outside of a glorified typing monkey that can parse code but is unable to write it?
It's like a paramedic not being trained at all for a medical emergency response but sent there regardless to just stand and observe the patient while writing notes about the sounds they make while dying.

Being able to call out a middle manager that if these tools are really so great he can just open the PR himself is pretty awesome though.

We use it at work and I now have disabled it for all the typeahead stuff. Far too many times it guesses what I am doing incorrectly and it made using my TAB key (which inserts the propper two spaces) impossible.

The only place I still use it is for reading and identifying compiler errors. Even then it is only about 50% correct as most times it falls into the "Oh you are right, X isn't the solution. Have you tried X?" I have had few bad interns and even they were smart enough to not forget what they said in their previous sentence.

Loudly announcing your increasing incompetence to the world seems like a weird career move, maybe consider lying about that?

Oh no... who could have... possibly... foreseen this...

This is why I don't use it for coding at all.