Comment by dilyevsky 9 days ago
what are you going to do when something suddenly doesn't work and cursor endlessly spins without progress no matter how many "please don't make mistakes" you add? delete the whole thing and try to one-shot it again?
>No one says you have to code like those influencers. You are a software engineer, use AI like one, iteratively.
This is my issue with all the AI naysayers at this point. It seems to all boil down to "haha, stupid noob can't code so he uses AI" in their minds. It's like they are incapable of understanding that there could simultaneously be a bunch of junior devs pushing greenfield YouTube demos of vibe coding, while at the same time expert software engineers are legitimately seeing their productivity increase 10x on serious codebases through judicious use.
Go ahead and keep swinging that hammer, John Henry.
I have just checked my article — the word "expert" isn't in it, so not quite sure where you got this from.
I'm working in the field professionally since June 1998, and among other things, I was the tech lead on MyHammer.de, Germany's largest craftsman platform, and have built several other mid-scale online platforms over the decades.
How well I have done this, now that's for others to decide.
Quite objectively though, I do have some amount of experience — even a bad developer probably cannot help but pick up some learnings over so many years in relevant real-world projects.
However, and I think I stated this quite clearly, I am expressively not an expert in Python.
And yet, I could realize an actually working solution that solves an actual problem I had in a very real sense (and is nicely humming away for several weeks now).
And this is precisely where yes, I did experience a 10x productivity increase; it would have certainly taken me at least a week or two to realize the same solution myself.
Like AI could write code perfectly as soon as I thought of it, and that would not improve my productivity 10x. Coding was never the slow part. Everything that goes around coding (like determining that the extra load here is not going to overload things, getting PMs to actually make their mind up what the feature is going to do, etc.), means that there's simply not that much time to be saved on coding activities.
My grievances are simple: an expert programming utilizing AI will be a truly dangerous force.
But that's not what we get in this early stage of grifting. We get 10% marketing buzz on how cool this is with stuff that cannot be recreated in the tool alone, and 89% of lazy or inexperienced developers who just turn in slop with little or no iteration. The latter don't even understand the code they generated.
That 1% will be amazing, it's too bad the barrel is full of rotten apples hiding that potential. The experts also tend to keep to themselves, in my experience. the 89% includes a lot of dunning-kruger as well which makes those outspoken experts questionable (maybe a part of why real experts aren't commenting on their experience).
I find it hard to believe that when the AI generates crap code, there is absolutely nothing you can do (change the prompt, modify context, add examples) to make it do what you want. It has not been my experience either. I only use AI to make small modules and refactor instead of one-shoting.
Also I find "AI makes crap code so we should give it a bigger task" illogical.
Why do you HAVE TO one-shot? No one says you have to code like those influencers. You are a software engineer, use AI like one, iteratively.