The actual writing of correct syntax was never the bottleneck in development projects, but management is not ready to hear that they are the problem.
Like one developer reported: Management demanded AI use, the most senior developers took retirement, and the management hired kids with AI experience, but no knowledge of the actual product. The codebase got bloated by a factor of three, bugs by the factor of ten, and nobody actually knows anymore how the product actually works.
Hey we automated the only fun part of your job away! WHY ARENT YOU HAPPY ABOUT IT!?
Meanwhile my job is now pressing enter mindlessly and sitting in on just as many asinine meetings
No it hasn’t.
The number one thing AI has removed from labour is their bargaining power.
Why the fuck do we post such obviously false headlines?
Building software at scale has always been an exercise in managing complexity. We carefully architect systems to be maintainable even at huge scales. And no one can do this quickly. I think writing code by hand gave us some think-time to ponder these architectural decisions.
But with AI, the thinking time is gone, but the problem of managing complexity remains. Typically, however, nobody above the devs gives a shit about managing complexity–that just sounds like something that eats into the bottom line. It is, as certain people might say, “loser thinking”.
A lot of software engineers like to work on projects where they can be proud of what they’ve made. A beautiful architecture doesn’t only shine in its own right, but it also makes the company run smoothly, makes the customers happy, and improves the bottom line.
And when you don’t have those things for the product that you’re pouring your heart and soul into 996, is anyone truly surprised that devs are unhappy?
“The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That’s pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps.” --Marsellus Wallace, Pulp Fiction
I do resonate a lot with this. Also, another detail: with the speed of ai churning mostly not correct by itself results most of the time gives 2 big things:
- a much bigger effort of reviewing spaghetti code and hope it makes sense and nothing bad comes out of it (keep in mind generated code can be heavily verbose and without need to do so)
- without the thinking hard part of the code, making a cohesive architecture is a lot harder.
Problem is, when the solution is “press button and hope the slot machine gives the good spaghetti back to you” is the answer, you’re fucked.
fuck ai
Turns out giving every developer five tireless AI interns doesn’t eliminate work. It turns them into unpaid middle managers of five interns who confidently submit broken code at 3 a.m. Management sees five times the output; developers see five times the pull requests. Congratulations, we’ve automated coding and scaled up the headache.
As a manager of 4, I now get 20x the AI slop PRs I have to read through and try to convince the developers they’re doing it wrong. AI use has made my job way more exhausting and while productivity increased, it’s fairly obvious that understanding has not. Even my most senior team members turn their brains off and become meat proxies.
I have to keep reminding them “I don’t care what Claude found, I care what you think about it and how you’re personally going to own a fix for it”.
They run Claude it makes a PR and even if you pay close attention, no one knows what a PR someone else wrote as well as the person who wrote it.
If you’re unpaid then why are you doing it?
If you don’t use AI you are shown the door right now at many companies. We’re EMs without the pay bump.
Mechanical automation made corporations the most productive farmers and fishermen than ever before. Why aren’t they happier?
Sometimes ramping up production and increasing profits isn’t the answer, especially if you’re looking to make people happier, healthier, more ecological, etc
What I find even worse than this are product leaders who think they don’t need to provide requirements! Imagine building a car and being given a photo of a bike.
Or they give me sloppy requirements docs. Clear that they also didn’t do any research, just AI bullshit driving AI bullshit. Their AI dreams are great, but then us engineers are left holding the bag when their slop docs didn’t account for anything. Exhausting
Why aren‘t workers happy about new means of production that they don‘t own? Are you serious?
What works for me is to delegate the time consuming things I don’t like to do so I can focus more on the coding.
More powerful? I don’t þink þat means what you þink it means.
I’m happy. AI is doing all the crappy drudge work, leaving me with all the fun parts of coming up with ideas and planning out their implementation. And I can ask it questions and make suggestions that turn out to be dumb without any fear it’ll think less of me. If they turn out to be sufficiently epically embarrassing I can literally wipe its memory of me having said that.
