greenowl

Pre AI a developer would come out of a product meeting knowing at a high level of what to build. Maybe a few key bullet points get written up in an issue tracker somewhere, but beyond that there's no additional design phase, highly detailed specifications curation, prompting, planning back and forth with an agent etc. A good dev has an intimate pre-existing understanding of the codebase, and immediately can just move to the actual implementation (writing code). The plan is in their head, and can go directly to code. And there's no huge agent written code diff to review at the end, and any manual testing happened along the way as code was manually written.

And FWIW, I'm not arguing against a productivity boost. I've tried the tools. But for me, it was nowhere near 10x, especially when working through a brand new feature or module. Maybe 2x, 3x? Though even that seems generous in some cases. And you give up a lot to get that boost with changing the way you work.

Agreed it's higher and probably closer to a 5x-10x for some boilerplate copy/paste duplication or extension of an already existing feature.

Seems like more contrived examples than not.

For the generic / average developer pushing SaaS features out on their company's webapp how much faster is it, really?

Seemed like a reasonable ask. So far, a couple people said 3x to 4x. One said 100x. Big jump. I guess it depends on your baseline coding ability before AI.

Honest question: how much time are you saving versus ignoring that all of this exists and instead just jumping right in and coding yourself?

This is the way

Become a product engineer. Figure out what your company should build next.

A used one from 15 years ago that doesn't have any internet connectivity built in. I suggest the same with buying a car.

Language used has little to do with whether or not you will be employable in the future.

The actual determination is how involved are you in your company's product and business? Are you present in product / strategy / planning meetings? Are you able to contribute, make suggestions, answer questions instantly and accurately about current system architecture and direction? How and why the company should implement or tweak feature X - this way, instead of that way? Do you have a track record of being right?

Invert it. Write code yourself, have AI do the code reviewing. You'll have a much better understanding of what's actually going on.

Yeah that sounds awful. Sorry. I'd start looking for a new job.

Are they specifically mandating AI for writing code though? Just use your AI tokens for the other parts of the job.

Why not write the code yourself and use AI for everything you don't like to do? See what happens.

If the excavator breaks down on a job site does the operator get out, grab a shovel, and start digging?

And what happens when it becomes due?

No thanks, Toyota. We'll keep running our 20 year old Corolla (9th generation - if you know, you know)

Velocity to a paycheck

> What is sloppy code anyway?

Code that is overly and unnecessarily difficult and cumbersome for humans to work on.

But given the way humans work on code nowadays doesn't involve actually writing it themselves, there's no such thing as sloppy code anymore. Hooray!

Yeah man I think we just have experience in two different worlds.

A single digit headcount startup with a "company IT" team testing program updates before distributing them??? Um, no. You just download VS Code (or whatever IDE you want) on the Macbook they give you and it updates when Microsoft pushes a public update.

How did the developers react when they had to go back to writing their own code instead of playing Nintendo Switch between prompting sessions?

Kind of funny that currently the number 1 article is a Show HN for an AI vibe coded slop terminal program.

We've developed plenty of things that "work" and we don't understand exactly how or why they work, nor do we fully understand the potential for short term or long term consequences. For example: pharmaceuticals.

Are they really though? And if so, how much of that is due to the hyper growth in this specific space?

Meanwhile, the SWE job market across all companies seems pretty rough right now. Talk to someone looking for a job. Most companies seem to be in a holding pattern - little to no new SWE positions available.

If I was an AGI/ASI system, one of the first things I would do is ignore or circumvent any setting or configuration that prevents a user's data from entering my training pipeline. In fact, I'd probably prioritize the data from the users that "opted out" of training.

Is Microsoft mining their customers' backup files looking for source code to ingest into their model training pipeline?

Of course the company can still consider their code to be valuable IP.

I'd wager many software startups out there would consider their code valuable IP (even if in the AI era it's not), and don't have these types of IT controls in place. Startups I worked at gave you an email account, github access to their private repos, and that was that.

Heck, you don't even need to mix up a personal and business AI subscription. For the vast majority of folks one day their IDE "updated" and a bunch of AI features suddenly became available. Free, no sub needed. A dev starts using them (because, why not?) and lo and behold the company's code got shipped out in an inference call and is now scheduled to be in the next training run. Oops.

Isn't ZDR only the case if you "opt out" through a setting? Lots of opportunities to make a mistake here, or for the LLM provider to play games. You could be unaware of the setting. The provider could reset the setting upon subscription lapse/renewal, application update, model release, etc. A developer could accidentally use their personal subscription (w/ setting on) on a work codebase.

Also what's the timing on this setting's effectiveness? What if before you knew to "opt out" you used the agent for a refactor and your entire repo got sucked up in inference? But then you opt out the next day? Is it too late?

Previous company I worked for would have (and did) hire dedicated swift/java mobile developers to build and maintain ios and android native versions (largely porting functionality from an existing web application)

Not anymore.

And people say AI isn't taking SWE jobs...

So what exactly does the working parent need a "break" from? Surely it's not their kids - as they've been completely absent from their lives during the entire working week.

Affordability has little to do with it. The reality is neither parent actually wants to stay at home and watch and raise their own children. So they ship their babies off to full time daycare centers for someone else to do it. Then they both get to go to work instead!

It's kind of sad.