Comment by nsonha
Comment by nsonha 9 days ago
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.
Comment by nsonha 9 days ago
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.
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.
Apologies for implying you are claiming to be an expert software engineer: I took the "senior" in the title and "25 years of experience" in the post to mean similar things as "expert".
I don't doubt this is doing something useful for you. It might even be mostly correct.
But it is not a positive advertisement for what AI can do: just like the code is objectively crap, you can't easily trust the output without a comprehensive review. And without doubting your expertise, I don't think you reviewed it, or you would have caught the same smells I did.
What this article tells me is that when the task is sufficiently non-critical that you can ignore being perfectly correct, you can steer AI coding assistants into producing some garbage code that very well might work or appear to work (when you are making stats, those are tricky even with utmost manual care).
Which is amazing, in my opinion!
But not what the premise seems to be (how a senior will make it do something very nice with decent quality code).
Out of curiosity why did you not build this tool in a language you generally use?
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.
Same argument can be said for not using any tooling really. "Tech is the easy part". No difference typing code on notepad and having zero process/engineering infrastructure I guess. Because stakeholder management is the main engineering skill apparently.
Btw, AI doesn't just code, there are AIs for debugging, monitoring etc too.
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.
>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.