Engineers that didn't move past src.v35.final.zip version control don't really have jobs today, either.
replyI seriously don't see how version control and LLMs are comparable. A deterministic way to track code changes over time, versus an essentially non-deterministic statistical code generator that might get you what you want, and might do it in a reasonable time frame, and that might not land you in a minefield of short-term-good/long-term-bad design points.
reply> an essentially non-deterministic statistical code generator that might get you what you want, and might do it in a reasonable time frame, and that might not land you in a minefield of short-term-good/long-term-bad design points.
replySounds like a human? The ‘statistical’ part is arguable, I suppose.
You would be absolutely shocked how many software projects are still run, to this day, without source control at all. Or automated (or manual) testing. And how many hand crafted artisanal servers are running on AWS, never to be recovered if their EC2 instance is killed for some reason.
replySure, but that’s a small and shrinking market. Not a source of economic security or growth for its employees, nor for most of its companies (though some have defended niches).
replyI've seen growing companies running multiple million ARR through systems like that. It's way more common than you'd think if you're a professional software developer.
replyThere is an absolute embarrassment of modern tooling in other categories I have no problem whatsoever embracing. I'm not a holdout for being stuck in my ways. Maybe I value things other than expediency at massive cost. Maybe I speak just as well to computers as I do to humans.
replyI'm sure I will have no problem whatsoever remaining in the employ of a firm that trusts me to make products and tooling that still push the envelope of what's possible without having to resort to the sheer brute force of trillion parameter-scale models.
There is no massive cost. For 80% of the brute work that needs to be done day in and day out LLMs provide code as good as a senior engineer provided you have sufficient competency in steering the model, but done at breakneck pace.
replyAround the turn of the century there were the same exact arguments being made about automated testing (not just TDD, but any automated tests at all!)
replyI ran the statistics myself and my company is spending 40% less time doing feature development since AI agents began to be used en masse and pushing 50% more tickets without any noticeable increase in regressions.
replyAfter 18 months the hard evidence is in place. And much like replacing bare-metal servers for many use cases where evidence shows that the burden of k8s or the substitution of shell scripts for Terraform, it's time to move on.
I don't really see a place for no AI usage in line-of-business software apps anymore.
What did you use to fill the time you aren't doing feature development in with? Or are you all now working 20 hour work weeks?
replyFaster feature development, more strategic thinking in how to keep the dev pipeline full, doing braindead mechanical improvements that pay off tech debt that would have otherwise not have management sign-off to justify, writing GUI-based tools for support teams that previously had to scour reams of shell scripts, spending more time on refining specifications and estimations, writing throwaway concepts of different design ideas in order to have better architetuce discussions based on real code instead of pseudocode, clearing out the backlog of bugs that used to be terribly annoying to reproduce and that now I can just throw brute compute for resolving.
replySounds awful. Just filling the time with worthless stuff. You are basically a liability. Wouldn’t like to have you in my team. Less is more (nowadays more than ever)
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