Which is to say, if it's a thing you love spending your time on and it tickles your brain in that way, go for it, whatever it is.
But (and still first takeaways) if the goal is "making good and useful software," today one has to be at least open to the possibility that "not using AI" will be like an accountant not using a calculator.
Do we have to understand the 100 years of history behind the tool or the ability to use it? Some level of repair knowledge is great. Knowing the spring vs ink level is also helpful.
If you have ever gone running the ability to coordinate four limbs, maintain balance, assert trajectory, negotiate uneven terrain, and modify velocity and speed at will is completely unknown to 99.9% of mortals who ever lived and yet is possible because 'biological black box hand wave'.
You're basically becoming a manager. If you're wondering what AI will turn you into just think of that manager.
Modeling software in general greatly reduced the ability of engineers to compute 3rd, 4th and 5th order derivatives by hand when working on projects and also broke their ability to create technical drawing by hand. Both of those were arguably proof of a master engineer in their field, yet today this would be mostly irrelevant when hiring.
Are they lesser engineers for it? Or was it never really about derivatives and drawings, and all about building bridges, engines, software that works?
joe_mamba•1h ago
>ai-generated code is throw-away code
Mate, most code I ever written across my career has been throw away code. The only exception being some embedded code that's most likely on the streets to this day. But most of my desktop and web code has been thrown away by now by my previous employers or replaced by someone else's throwaway code. There's no shame in that and no pride in that either, I'm just paid to "put the fries in the bag", that's it.
Most of us aren't building DOOM, the Voyager probe or the Golden Gate bridge here, epic feats of art and engineering designed to last 30-100+ years, we're just plumbers hacking something quickly to hold things together until the music chairs stop playing and I have no issue offloading that to a clanker if I can, so i can focus on the things I enjoy doing. Do you think I grew up dreaming about writing GitHub Actions yaml files for a living?
Oh and BTW, code being throwaway, is the main reason demand and pay for web SW engineers has been so high. In industries where code is one-and-done, pay tends to scale down accordingly since a customer is more than happy to keep using your C app on a Window XP machine down in the warehouse, instead of keep paying you to keep rewriting it every year in a facier framework in the cloud.
vjerancrnjak•1h ago
There is similar mindless glue in all tech stacks. LLMs are trained on it, and successfully do more of it.
Even AI companies just wastefully do massive experiments with suboptimal data and compute bandwidth.
dgxyz•1h ago
What the hell are we really doing?
What looked sensible to me is designing a table, form and report in Microsoft Access in 30 minutes without requiring 5 engineers and writing 50k lines of React and fucking around with kubernetes and microservices to get there.
LLMs just paste over the pile of shit we build on.
spion•37m ago
hot take speculation: we base a lot of our work on open source software and libraries, but a lot of that software is cheaply made, or made for the needs of a company that happens to open-source it. the pull of the low-quality "standardized" open source foundations is preventing further progress.
Hamuko•43m ago
m463•40m ago
Kind of like designing a better social media interface probably pays 100x what a toilet designer would be paid, but a better toilet would benefit the world 1000x.
esafak•13m ago
joe_mamba•3m ago
For example, I went to visit SF and I was expecting to be blown away given the immense wealth that area generates, but was severely disappointed with what I saw on the street. I used to think my area of Eastern Europe is a shithole, but SF beats that hands down. Like there's dozens of places on this planet that are way nicer to live in than SF despite being way poorer by comparison.