Comment by ramesh31

Comment by ramesh31 9 days ago

>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.

necovek 9 days ago

> expert software engineers are legitimately seeing their productivity increase 10x

It's funny you would say this, because we are really commenting on an article where a self-proclaimed "expert" has done that and the "10x" output is terrible.

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ManuelKiessling 9 days ago

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.

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- necovek 8 days ago
  
  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?
  
  Reply View | 3 replies
  
  ManuelKiessling 8 days ago
  
  Because I wanted exactly this experience: can I get to the desired result — functionality-wise, if not code-wise! — even if I choose the stack that makes sense in terms of technology, not the one that I happen to be proficient in?
  And if I cannot bring language-proficiency to the table — which of my capabilities as a seasoned software&systems guy can I put to use?
  In the brown-field projects where my team and I have the AI implement whole features, the resulting code quality — under our sharp and experienced eyes — tends to end up just fine.
  I think I need to make the differences between both examples more clear…
  
  Reply View | 2 replies

achierius 9 days ago

I think some of the suspicion is that it's really not 10x in practice.

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Macha 9 days ago

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.

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- nsonha 8 days ago
  
  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.
  
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  achierius 8 days ago
  
  There are two levels to this.
  1. Tooling obviously does improve performance, but not so huge a margin. Yes, if AI could automate more elements of tooling, that would very much help. If I could tell an AI "bisect this bug, across all projects in our system, starting with this known-bad point", that would be very helpful -- sometimes. And I'm sure we'll get there soon enough. But there is fractal complexity here: what if isolating the bug requires stepping into LLDB, or dumping some object code, or running with certain stressors on certain hardware? So it's not clear that "LLM can produce code from specs, given tight oversight" will map (soon) to "LLM can independently assemble tools together and agentically do what I need done".
  2. Even if all tooling were automated, there's still going to be stuff left over. Can the LLM draft architectural specs, reach out to other teams (or their LLMs), sit in meetings and piece together the big picture, sus out what the execs really want us to be working on, etc.? I do spend a significant (double-digit) percentage of my time working on that, so if you eliminate everything else -- then you could get 10x improvement, but going beyond that would start to run up against Amdahl's Law.
  
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  necovek 8 days ago
  
  If you were to really measure speed improvement of notepad vs a tricked out IDE, it's probably not much. The problem would be the annoyance caused to an engineer who has to manually type out everything.
  No, coding speed is really not the bottleneck to software engineer productivity.
  
  Reply View | 4 replies

LtWorf 9 days ago

Weren't you the guy who only writes HTML? Maybe let domain experts comment on their domain of expertise.

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johnnyanmac 9 days ago

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).

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shove 9 days ago

“Maybe you didn’t hear me, I said ‘good morning steam driver, how are you?’”

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