r/cscareerquestions • u/Conscious_Ruin1849 • 1d ago
Experienced This comment summarizes the current state of SWE the most accurately
Taken from the DHH AI crashout vid's comment section.
Im sick of people acting like AI is just being used to "write the code" while they are bringing the secret sauce of system level design and high level thinking. Thats not whats happening. AI already can do system level thinking much better and faster than you. And im willing to bet you already defer to AI for most, if not all, of ur system level questions and design. Those of us who loved the low level details didnt enjoy "typing." We enjoyed thinking at the level a computer worked. Because it was satisfying. If anything, "typing" is becoming MORE of the identity of software engineers now than ever before. Typing shitty prompts over and over and over. Tapping enter to allow this, allow that. Not thinking through any of the problems. Feeding error messages to AI and asking it what happened over and over and over. So, u can sit on ur high horse and larp that your a "system level architect" now. But the reality is you are a typist. You type prompts. Ur product manager asks for a feature. U run to AI to feed it requirements and type prompts. Cool.
Btw, this isnt a personal attack on u. I have no idea what u really do. But i do see whats happening in the industry. And its not people becoming "system level architects." Its people outsourcing their thinking. At ALL levels. And if you feel like ur still gonna bring some secret sauce 2 to 3 years from now... lol. No. Its gonna get to point where human cognition, in any form, will become a bottleneck in software development. So those of us who are mourning the end of programming arent sitting here thinking, damn i miss "typing" code. We're thinking damn, the thing i spent decades learning because i genuinely loved it is no longer economically viable. And it sucks. And at least im willing to admit it.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 1d ago
you are literally describing the opposite of systems thinking.
AI is pretty bad at architecting complex tasks. I would describe it as tenacious --- it does whatever it can to achieve a goal, including cheating or doing dumb things. But that doesn't scale for complex tasks
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u/Jeff1N 1d ago
Yeah, my current job has a very specific stack, so delegating to AI simple CRUDs is a no brainer, but the moment I need an async workflow with a lot of states and specific rules it needed A LOT of handholding to not move on with the most atrocious data modeling I've seen, I wouldn't have written something that bad even as an intern.
And that's in a token-maxing company that would actually punish you for NOT using as many tokens as possible, likely costing more to the company than my compensation in the process, so I was absolutely using the most expensive models with as much reasoning as possible.
If you only ever work with very simplistic tasks then sure, AI can do a good job with system design, but go a little beyond that and you better be ready to be VERY specific about how AI should solve the problem. Unless your priority is speed at any cost, quality be damned
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u/unconceivables 1d ago
You're missing the point of the original post. A couple of months ago I would have said the same thing. But now I think a couple of years from now things will look very, very different based on the acceleration I've seen lately. Only time will tell, but I don't think they'll need human oversight the way they do now. Does it suck? I'm not sure. I'm not sure how society will adapt. Is not even about CS anymore, it's way bigger than that. A lot of what people do day to day now makes no sense anymore, and software development is just a tiny fraction of that.
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u/Enzinino 22h ago
Yeah. I'm a little scared honestly...
I am going to get my Bachelor in CS this year and since I began going to uni I have been thinking of pivoting to another market/job, but where can we go?
Economics/Finance? They are as fucked as we are, many of them simply don't know it yet.
Content Creation? I ain't good looking enough and AI automates that too.
Sales? And sell what? Also I don't see this job lasting another decade honestly...
Management? Are we all seriously going to become managers?
HR? Companies are going to cut down personel, they won't need more HR...
Only options available seem to be manual labour or public sector, but if all these job markets I listed above shrink even by a fifth of their size... we are going to flood the remaining ones, salaries will drop and we will all be working as slaves for the people that were born rich...
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u/IronRocketCpp 20h ago
Most CS majors and typical STEM bros are pivoting to nursing.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 15h ago
that market was too saturated IMO
in the 2010s it was like a gold rush and even if AI didn't come around it was not sustainable
"When everyone is a CS major, no one is a CS major"
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u/some_clickhead Backend Developer 4h ago
When it comes to content creation, there is a huge percentage of people who absolutely loathe LLMs and will refuse to watch anything that has been touched by AI. Not saying it's completely future proof or even a viable source of income for most people, but unlike most fields where the thing you're producing is purely functional (e.g. a company only cares if the code works), content creation has to make people emotionally connect to it on some level.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 15h ago
ya'll make fun of tech bros but i've never seen someone drink the koolaid so hard.
You have to realize 90% of what dario and the other guy say are just flat out lies designed to sell their product.
You need to then look for yourself at the actual infrastructure we need for better AI. Spoiler: we're not getting that infrastructure for a while, if at all because of political pushback --- no one wants datacenters. That means the future is good-enough local/cloud AI and those massive data centers that power the generation will be uber expensive to run.
Or if that's too abstract --- ask yourself, who can afford $900/hr AI? (There are geniunely orgs that can but it's a niche)
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u/GBAGamer33 15h ago
This has been my contention from the beginning. It just doesn’t work financially and if we ever have to pay the actual price I don’t think it will scale economically versus human workers.
It’s definitely interesting / scary to see corporate America try this hard to break the back of labor. We should’ve unionized long ago. I still don’t understand how the economics will work out though.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 14h ago
companies will come around faster than you realize.
I work in a very large company with thousands of employees and they quickly realized a) the ROI isn't there for fable-class models b) cheaper models are good enough for most tasks
maybe smaller companies can afford to spend a million in tokens on a pet project but public ones with stakeholders can not
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u/ipushkeys 14h ago
because of political pushback
I would also add that energy infrastructure is not easy to build, let alone quickly. These companies can try to throw trillions of dollars at the problem, but it doesn't change the time frame.
A classic example is: 1 woman can birth a baby given 9 months. How many can 9 women birth in 1 month? Zero.
Whether AI will improve (at the rate people claim) doesn't matter, if the tech doesn't have the infrastructure to run.
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u/cobalt8 13h ago
AI is likely to overtake many jobs entirely and reduce the workforce significantly in many others. This is going to result in a major shortage of jobs for people and I don't trust the government (at least here in the US) to do anything to fix that. I expect that more and more wealth will move to fewer hands while the rest of us suffer.
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u/unconceivables 13h ago
It seems very likely, the question will be how quickly companies will adapt to the new tech that's basically already at the point where it can easily do all these jobs.
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u/hibikir_40k Software Engineer 1d ago
Yes, absolutely superhuman at things that mostly require tenacity. Update an old project that has ancient node dependencies? Crushing. Trace logs for a week looking at a corner case, where the actual bug is created 7 microservices away from where it manifests? Absolutely: I am tired just thinking about it. But if it's not something that comes from the long term training, and the problem is complicated, it drops requirements like they were hot, so any effort requires dedicating a lot of time, and a lot of agents, to build the guardrails so that the tenacity machine will actually do what you want, and not mess it up. And the bill for the fleet of agents that keep it honest is not pretty if it gets into ugly argument loops. Oops, $5K in tokens figuring something out I could solve in 5 minutes.
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u/_3psilon_ 23h ago
...that mostly require tenacity.
I.e. where task ambiguity is low and results could be easily verified, as you also mentioned. That's why juniors are cooked because these were the same tasks that allowed them to learn the job, and we'd have to consciously not use AIs and delegate to juniors instead.
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u/854490 17h ago
as someone who was trying to make being the Tenacious Deep Drill Down Guy my "thing" (in various kinds of support jobs, the last of which involved escalations for obnoxiously complex enterprise firewall stuff, where I would be scheduled to not take calls for half the day or more so that I could work on my collection of 1-to-3-month-old active tickets) I am considerably buttmad about this development
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u/oupablo 15h ago
While I agree that AI is not great at complex tasks. The issue is that AI doesn't have to get it right the first time. Whereas you will spend a lot of time thinking through the complexities. It can just go implement something it THINKS is right (the same as you) but it will implement it in a fraction of the time and if it's wrong, it will happily go implement it 100 more times until it gets something even remotely close to what it needs.
The only thing that doesn't "scale" for complex needs right now is the cost. Right now it is still cheaper to pay you to help guide it in the right direction. Once it becomes cheaper to have it create 100 different approaches and try them all to optimize for the best, we're all pretty much screwed.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 15h ago
again, i said above to the OP "I don't think you're an engineer". Same applies here. What you're saying doesn't scale. When a human lands whatever architecture design sticks, they quickly paint themselves into a corner. AI does exactly the same --- I've seen it do this over and over. So my question again, please do not take offense --- are you actually an engineer?
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u/TracePoland 11h ago
That’s literally not true. When you give AI the ability to verify its own results, it very rarely will reconsider the architecture. Usually just adds more stuff on top of what it has already done to get the immediate result it needs passing.
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u/ohhi23021 6h ago
agree, it needs a nudge. it lacks foresight for some trivial things but i can see it getting better at it, so this is just temporary. OP is right either way. give it another 2-3 years and it will do these things better with a shit ton more knowledge than a single person could have.
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u/RoyalSpecialist1777 14h ago
What is the last model you have experience with? Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 seem to have gotten better with architecture if prompted correctly unlike models from earlier this year.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 12h ago
Opus 5.5 still struggles with complex tasks. I'm using it right now to create a binary decision tree and it's failing hard.
Fable costs $900/hr - most companies can't afford that
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u/RoyalSpecialist1777 12h ago
I am curious now and want to see how hard it fails and if there is any sort of scaffolding that can help guide it better. Mind sharing the task (or a variant of) it is failing at?
Opus is so good at some things, and getting better at architectural design, but I still struggle to guide it through some tasks. They lack a certain 'design taste' when it requires anything novel.
Anyways got an example task you feel it fails at?
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u/bestjaegerpilot 9h ago
creating a binary decision tree so smaller models can classify a large data set. This is totally novel and Opus is failing hard.
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u/hibikir_40k Software Engineer 1d ago
Sure, some people do that. But every time I've tried to hand it decisions that aren't purely tactical, even handing it hours of budget, it ends up missing things. This might not be true in 6 months, but this very week, it was making big architectural mistakes when trying to propose architectural solutions. It's tenacious. It can read a lot of code and summarize it relatively well, but it doesn't know what it doesn't know, and doesn't try to figure it out. Assumes way too much, fails to come up with overall requirements, and thus makes expensive mistakes.
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u/Burger_Queeph 1d ago
Bro the bot can't make a system bigger than a loaf of bread. If you think ppl are just asking the bot and moving on then you're only working with fucking idiots.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 1d ago
no offense but are you actually an engineer? Fxing minor bugs is usually easy (for an AI) and if that's all our job was i'd tend to agree with you. But AI gets wrong even simple bugs on complex apps---it doesn't have the cultural knowledge that catches major regressions. (So you have to build the guardrails and that's part of the systems thinking you're not understanding)
secondly, if you think AI is just gonna get better and better, good enough AI is here --- models like Sol/Luna (and the chinese ones). And unfortunately these models are like junior engineers. And more importantly, these are the models that companies can actually afford to run at any scale.
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u/bad_detectiv3 1d ago
Don’t know bro. I don’t what job you guys do, I can see myself doing that in toy projects. But when you work in large scale project, ever commit u do, you hold full responsibility
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u/marine_surfer 1d ago
Exactly, not everything is a chatbot or notepad taking app. Literally people would die if we write bad code in some instances… so yea, fuck dem clankers
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u/_3psilon_ 23h ago edited 10h ago
I think most software developers & engineers are simply not working in industries where regulated or mission-critical software is needed and therefore you can't vibe code shit of unknown quality.
e.g. finance, healthcare, defense, aviation & transport, embedded hardware, energy, telco, (cyber)security, industrial automation & robotics, security, enterprise-grade stuff like ERPs, science & research... compare these to, say, consumer B2C web/mobile apps or rushed startup prototypes etc.
My prediction is that the way software is developed will somewhat bifurcate based on these sectorial quality requirements, and I can also imagine that due to vibe coding's influence, sofware quality regulations will even become stricter.
If as a software engineer you don't like AI psychosis and vibe coding (like me) IMO more or less the best bet is to head to work at a regulated or mission-critical industry where development may be stricter, slower and more painful, but based on actual human reasoning instead of the dumbness of "Claude did it".
On the other hand, traditional web dev, B2C apps etc. are pretty much cooked, taken over by slop factories. B2B is somewhat better, but not by much, since as long as you keep your DB intact and your SLAs in check, you can still slop the frontend and parts of the business logic.
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u/marine_surfer 23h ago
Web dev has been cooked since Wordpress and wix came along. CMS systems, CRMs, solved. AI will eat into their bottom line but as far as I’m concerned those industries were already hyper competitive and didn’t require knowing how to code to move some widgets on a screen before AI came along.
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u/_3psilon_ 10h ago
Agreed, but still, after WordPress & templating came along, the industry still needed a lot of SPAs, full-stack apps, PWAs.
At the peak of the product-led growth era, there were a lot of reactivity, performance requirements, keeping up with the latest JS fads & improvements, artisan UX stuff etc.
Basically, frontend engineering. Many traditional web devs picked up some extra skills and marketed themselves successfully as frontend folks. Now that's mostly gone or at least taken over by slop factories again, just as you say WP & WIX took over (more or less) static website development as a trade.
The big picture is terrifying as we're just trying to stay at the hazy edges of AI's knowledge, attempting to find relevant gaps that haven't been filled in yet.
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u/smabarnsfar 23h ago
ever commit u do, you hold full responsibility
Very much so. This should be the norm.
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u/No_Medium205 23h ago
I work on a large enterprise microservices project and you're half correct because currently theres no AI strategy on most enterprises so Ideally you would have the company to build context files, inject custom prompts and all the setup that everyone ignores.
And this is crucial for enterprise AI adoption to work but still very slowly and very early stages.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 1d ago
AI already can do system level thinking much better and faster than you. And im willing to bet you already defer to AI for most, if not all, of ur system level questions and design
Simple example, for shits and giggles I asked Claude to write a simple website that allowed someone to upload a CSV file and then load the contents column by column to matching staging table in MySQL. The server software is hosted on lambda behind API Gateway.
There are two failure cases for people who don’t know AWS
- They do the standard method of accepting a file upload with Node. APIGW has a 10Mb limit for the payload size. The correct way of doing it is to generate a pre-signed S3 url. The client uploads directly to S3 and bypasses the server software
- Once you upload to S3 download the file to the temp storage and do a bulk S3 insert. Again that’s the naive way. You can use an AWS extension to SQL that can insert a CSV file directly from S3 into a table
Claude did both the naive way. Thats just a simple case.
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u/FlyingPasta 1d ago
I think this is specifically the difference. I think the people who are best positioned to use AI are engineers that actually know how the tech works so they can properly direct the work. A junior can try to write an app from scratch and bash their head for weeks layering on more and more prompts, because they follow the AI’s ideas instead of leading them. An experienced engineer can build it in almost a one-shot planning prompt
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u/warren_stupidity 15h ago
In a few years the people with knowledge will be gone and everyone attending to the machines will be 'juniors'.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 23h ago
My example is a real world one. Read my other replies to see all of the other things I specified when actually implementing this “simple” feature
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u/Ancient-Range3442 1d ago
I asked opus 5.5- “If I wanted a well architected solution to uploading a csv to a lambda on aws, how would you do it”
It said - Don't send the file to the Lambda at all: upload it straight to S3 and let the upload event trigger the Lambda. Lambda's synchronous payload cap is 6 MB and API Gateway's is 10 MB, so pushing the file through them is fragile.
**1. Get a presigned URL:** the client calls a small API (API Gateway + Lambda, behind your auth) that returns a presigned S3 PUT URL with a short expiry, a key you generate, and a constrained content type and
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u/BraveResearcher3037 1d ago edited 1d ago
Okay
- it didn’t tell you how to do the auth
- once you do the auth, how do you attached it to their SSO? The IT department is going to be really mad that they have to manually remember to disable the user when the person isn’t employed their any longer Did you even think about that
- where do you host your static assets? There are tradeoffs between simplicity - just put all of your static assets in the lambda package and serve it through APIGW which I’ve done for simple internal admin sites and putting your assets in S3
- you have the file in s3, now what? The endpoint that you used to create the pre signed url has no way of knowing that the file got uploaded. What do you do now?
- many organizations have a security policy about ever exposing an S3 bucket to the internet (block public access), What is the correct pattern to do it? Why shouldn’t you just serve your static assets directly from the S3 bucket and make it publicly accessible. I made that mistake when I was doing a proof of concept demo when I worked at AWS in an internal AWS account. I got a page late at night when the monitoring system alerted me.
- Back to the lambda package, should you package it as a zip file or a docker container. What is the tradeoff of each?
- so I hinted at you should load the data to a “staging table”, why did I suggest that?
- how are you going to deploy the entire implementation?
- what’s going to happen if you let lambda create the CloudWatch log group automatically and why shouldn’t you do that? How do you get around it?
Yes Claude or Codex can do all that for you correctly if you tell it exactly what to do
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u/Silent_Turn6182 1d ago
Nobody is saying it's as good as the best engineer. But it can do as good a job as 95%, and probably 99% who don't work in that field specifically.
It's more around the rapid acceleration. 1 year ago people would complain it makes errors in basic code, now we accept it's very good at writing code, and say it has errors in high level tasks.
Where will it be in 1 year? 5 years?
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u/BraveResearcher3037 23h ago
Using my above example that 5% you missed will cause
- Exposing an S3 bucket with public access - bad things happen.
- A dismissed employee still having access to a system after leaving because the IT department thought disabling SSO access would cut off access to everything
- Not creating the CloudWatch group explicitly and letting Lambda create it means there is no retention policy and the logs grow forever costing money
- Using the AWS Aurora extension that can upload to S3 is very fast even for large files. The naive approach is slow and if the file is larger enough will cause lambda timeouts.
- If you didn’t know the pattern of why you should always upload data to a staging table from a user and put it directly in the production table now you have corrupted data.
- When the file is uploaded to S3, you need to register an S3 event to trigger a lambda. The naive way is to trigger an S3 event and subscribe to SNS and subscribe the Lambda to the SNS. But then if the lambda fails you’ve lost the event. You should use S3 -> SNS -> SQS -> Lambda
- Okay you did #6 correctly, what do you do after all of the retries fail? Did you remember to set up an alert on the DLQ? Did you even set up a DLQ?
- A lot of time once the file has been processed, people move it to a “Processed/“ folder (prefix) in the same bucket, guess what happens if you have your S3 event filter incorrect? Hint, you’ll know when one processed file causes your AWS bill to explode.
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u/NeedTheSpeed 21h ago
and you really think that this is something that couldnt be done in a few iteration loops or taken care of by /skill or CLAUDE.md? Stop kidding ourselves, get real
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u/IronRocketCpp 20h ago
you don't fundamentally understand what he is talking about. There will always be a 5%. CLAUDE.md is a band aid to the root cause.
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u/NeedTheSpeed 19h ago
no, you dont understand. Even if there is always a 5% of something for most of the typical corporate job you can prepare specific systems that will take care of the most common cases and patterns. What he's described is a typical common, well described pattern in AWS, this is something that can be take care of with well skill as metaprompting.
Even if LLM does not one shot the proper solution first time you are only a few iterations away from the correct solution.
Corporate dont want perfect solution either. As long as it works and it's secure (even the secure part is debatable in some cases) then they dont really care unless it's so high volume that optimization matter.
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u/RelativeObligation88 14h ago
But there is still a need for someone to prompt it, no? Software Engineering might stop being rewarding but the jobs are not going away.
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u/NeedTheSpeed 14h ago
Teams are going to be smaller to increase velocity so I am not sure if the jobs are not going away unless we increase the software that is needed which is not that clear yet.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 18h ago
Yes, after I tell it all of the requirements above, and how I want my IAC structured Claude can very much do that.
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u/polohatty 22h ago edited 10h ago
you're the type of engineer i love to work with
Edit: and im being completely sarcastic
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u/it_happened_lol 16h ago
This whole post is disingenuous. Every frontier model will know how to do these things because this isn’t expert level knowledge, it’s mostly dev ops 101 (we are talking about a csv upload here) so it comes down to a skill issue at prompting. S3 buckets are no longer public by default fwiw, so there is 0 chance any LLM will purposefully enable it for a CSV upload.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 16h ago
I mean it’s not hard to prove me wrong. Use the prompt that the person proposed assuming no knowledge of AWS and see how far it gets you.
And even my solution just gets to the staging table. I didn’t mention what happens after the staging table. Also even after all of the hints I just gave, the solution even getting to the staging table is good for Aurora MySQL/Postgres. But depending on the file size, is suboptimal for Redshift without an additional step.
And yes if you tell Claude that you want to serve static web assets directly from S3, it will do whatever is necessary to make it public.
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u/Fabulous-Detective45 1d ago
How did you learn all of this
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u/BraveResearcher3037 23h ago
I got hired by a new to the company CTO as an early hire and I volunteered to lead all of the cloud native initiatives, made every mistake imaginable, got a lot of AWS certs within the first 8 months just so I would know what I didn’t know and as guided learning path and a lot of late nights at work just learning stuff.
Also I took full advantage of AWS business support when I couldn’t figure something out.
Two years later I got a job at AWS working in their internal consulting department (ProServe) where I worked directly with AWS customers and now I am a staff consultant leading cloud + app dev projects at a third party partner.
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u/FearlessPark4588 12h ago
Crappy software meets the requirements 90% of the time though. A 10MB upload limit might not be encountered at all.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 12h ago
And that 10% is why even in this shitty market I got multiple offers within two weeks of looking in 2023 and again had an offer within two weeks of looking in 2024…
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u/FearlessPark4588 11h ago
AI-assisted programming in 23 and 24 was nothing compared to late 26 (where we are now)
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u/BraveResearcher3037 11h ago
I didn’t get a job in 2023 or 2024 because I could turn well defined requirements into for loops.
I got jobs both times because I had been leading hairy, ambiguous implementations where I had to work with “the business” and CxOs. First in product companies then working directly at AWS in their consulting department (ProServe - yes full time blue badge RSU earning employee).
You don’t think I got any of my jobs since 2012 by reversing a binary tree on the whiteboard during an interview do you?
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u/FearlessPark4588 11h ago
I have no idea how you did or didn't get jobs, I don't know you.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 11h ago
I’m saying AI getting better at coding is irrelevant. Now instead of delegating much of the grunt work of turning business requirements to code to mid level ticket takers, I delegate it to Claude.
Ai didn’t replace me. It replaces people who can only code
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u/TracePoland 11h ago
For CSV upload 10MB limit is extremely likely to be encountered.
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u/FearlessPark4588 11h ago
Depends on what you're doing, you can tell users to split their files; this all feeds into the crappy software narrative where you make it the user's problem in 2026
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u/trytoinfect74 22h ago edited 21h ago
> 1 month old account
> Plural_NounNumbers nickname
> hidden post history
> top 1% Commenter
> "I'm 365 YoE principal IC tech-lead distributed systems highload solutions architect and this AI thing is totally crazy bro, you're all just coping, we're so fucking doomed"
> Google reveals that every other post is just AI fear-mongering and spreading the FUD on just two subreddits and literally nothing else
ok, now fuck off, bot
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u/TheGoldenRoad 22h ago
Who pays for a bot like this and what is the goal? Is it a marketing strategy from AI companies ?
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u/PeachScary413 20h ago
It's the same strategy as the "zomg our AI is so dangerous it just hacked NSA and created a deadly virus, guys please regulate us our AI is just too good (also sign up for our monthly subscription 🙏)"
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u/trytoinfect74 21h ago edited 21h ago
We're in pre-IPO phase of Anthropic and OpenAI, it's in their interest to spread the FUD and present their models as much more capable than they're actually are, also it's never been easier to train model on Redditspeak and setup the OpenClaw/Hermes bot swarms to spread the message of your liking and shape the narrative - basically as another method to balloon their value by affecting public perception (the other is obviously "our agent hacked everything in proximity, we're sooo dangerous"). Also, part of their efforts is to encourage for people and companies to buy the tokens, i.e. "tokenmaxxing", to present their product as in very high demand. They work closely with social media content creators - for example, this is why there was a bunch of "gamedev slop" content when Astra was released, non-technical people were encouraged to buy an expensive subscription and make their own videogames, quietly omitting the fact that LLMs are nowhere near to creating a functional, engaging game.
Also, FUD is pretty much viral and a VERY effective marketing strategy, as soon as bot message is everywhere, genuine people start questioning their beliefs and basically spreading it too, by making posts like this so that people would validate their anxious thoughts or, conversely, dispel them and say that everything would be fine. So, OP either could be a bot or this "anxious guy" - honestly, I stopped giving a fuck about difference between two, it's all the same. AI corps marketing strategy is somewhat clever, but it's getting old for sure. As for all rational people, I suggest relaxing and watching how the situation unfolds.
Given that language models are essentially statistical pattern-matching machines and lacking even a shred of the intelligence required for true full automation I think we're really far from automating every computer and manual job in vicinity, and humanity still have no idea how to create an actual intelligence. IMO the "real AI" solution lies in the IT-bioinformatics field - "Petri dish-grown cells playing Doom" proved that it's actually possible to train nerve cells to interface with computer.
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u/invisible_shrek 20h ago
Dev subreddits have been astroturfed by AI shills/bots since the release of Opus 4.5.
Remember every single comment mentioning it verbatim. That’s hardly subtle.
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u/jmnugent 15h ago
To be fair,. I don't work in CS directly. So my opinion may not be worth much.
But I have to disagree with this guy. AI is great for very specific and clearly defined tasks.
In my job as an IT Sysadmin,.. AI is helpful at doing very narrow specific things ("Write me a Powershell script that does X" ) But higher level system and workplace policy questions (like, someone loses an iPhone, how many days should we allow for it to be found before we remove it from the 7 different systems it's in ? .. is a more "squishy" question that AI is not really great at handling.
In the environment I work in (as I mentioned above).. our cellular assets are kept in 7 different databases (many of which are old software that has 0 integration points). Managing 1000's of cellular end points across 7 different systems and none of those systems anchor on the same attribute or value.. is not a problem AI can solve. I can't just ask Claude "Hey, spend the next 48 hours integrating these 7 systems". Not gonna happen.
Those larger scale infrastructure design and management type problems.. are pretty much always going to be done by humans,. because humans (end users) are the ones we're providing the final service to.. and those end user humans are the ones deciding whether we are providing that service in the right way.
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u/Hawkes75 1d ago
People who talk like this are watching AI spin up a brand-new to-do list app, not maintaining a gargantuan legacy system.
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u/tipu_sultan__ 1d ago edited 16h ago
“maintaining a gargantuan legacy system” actually where it‘s best.
I‘m not reading the shitty code and spend hours making sense what they were thinking. Have Claude read and give me an overview of what’s it doing, tell it what I want instead.
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u/oupablo 15h ago
I was gonna say, I use it for legacy code maintenance constantly. In fact, that's were we started to use it at work. It's great for asking questions about how 14 year old modules worked. Especially ones that haven't been touched in years and everyone that worked on them had left the company.
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u/Ok_Composer_1761 1d ago
lol. you're so out of touch.
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u/Hawkes75 23h ago
Out of touch in the sense that I use frontier AI models daily while maintaining a gargantuan and very complex legacy system, or out of touch in some other way?
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u/teddyone 1d ago
lol no it cant. Unless your “massive” is on a totally different scale than what I work on. Are major Fortune 500 level companies achieving legacy transformation at the snap of a finger with AI? Of course not. Because there are actual hard problems to solve. Some people can’t adapt to using AI, they will be left behind. Some claim AI can do everything, they will not produce results. But it’s not as easy as you say. Someone has to make this happen, and that is the job of an engineer in 2026.
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u/marine_surfer 1d ago
No it doesn’t, the level of over engineering required of the AI system just to be compatible with a brown field projection (im talking 1 million plus lines of code) is absolutely absurd. Not to mention the memory limitations when trying to feed it documentation that’s legit 1,000 pages long and implementing features that have cascading effects across the whole system. It’s terrible, even with all the verification and shit these AI propagandists would like you to believe.
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u/sirtimes 1d ago
Exactly. Our project is about 3-4 million loc, 35 years old and very complex. The most “in need of help” parts of that code are the ones we’d love to unleash AI on, but unfortunately those are of course the parts that have massive cascading effects across the code base. The context window is simply too small for an AI model not to fuck everything up by not understanding the consequences of certain changes. For new features that are relatively siloed it’s good, but for the stuff that is actually hard, no.
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u/trytoinfect74 22h ago
>1 month old account
>Plural_NounNumbers nickname
>hidden post history
>top 1% Commenter
>"this AI thing is totally crazy bro, you're all just coping"
fuck off, bot
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u/marine_surfer 22h ago
Holy shit I didn’t even notice. These AI companies are literally doing anything they can do to manipulate the media to prevent this bubble from popping.
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u/trytoinfect74 21h ago
Just google this guy nickname and read the summary - this "genuine 300 YoE SWE" "guy" basically does nothing but FUD fear-mongering on experienced devs sub and this subreddit.
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u/Hawkes75 22h ago
How many massive brownfields have you revitalized to date? Maybe you should come work on my team since your prompt-fu is so majestic.
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u/fauxblck 22h ago
Tech lead here, no it really can’t. Not in a one shot method way anyway. AI use in those sort of large, sprawled out, legacy codebases does require steering and knowing the architecture/ensuring it maintains good patterns. Although I will say that people have overblown the skill set required to do this now… you can provide it examples of patterns you use in the codebase already and tell it to maintain those going forward and it generally works pretty well. Given more time it will have this nailed too.
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u/BitPsychological2767 1d ago
I have no idea what u really do
This is all you really needed to say, honestly.
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u/Squeeeeeeeeeeeips 1d ago edited 1d ago
Honestly I think this is just the "gell-mann amnesia effect" in action.
AI actually still produces "average" code quality - it just tends to work because its now RL-ed extensively on a process of testing and validating its code - so it reliably gets something that works. As another commenter put it - its "sloppy but tenacious" when it comes to producing working code.
For System Design - Its still outputting an average of its training data. But its worse at correcting itself - because its really hard to set up RL training data for System Design in a universal way. So its just outputting the average of its training data
So - if your Systems awareness and design thinking are more junior, then of course what AI is outputting seems levels ahead. And if you already know of really good designs for the problem you are trying to solve - then the the AI producing something much worse than that will make you go "WTF?"
I'm still definitely having some "WTF" moments when I ask the agent to take a first crack at an initial system design all the time, and thats with Astra/Fable on max.
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u/Real_Square1323 1d ago
> Look inside
> Username ends in 4 numbers
> Every time
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u/CoroteDeMelancia 1d ago
As someone currently building harnesses, it's scary how confidently ignorant you are. You either have no idea what good software looks like, or you simply don't analyze what the AI produces.
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u/Byte_Xplorer 1d ago
I recently had to design a PDF to present some long text in a pretty way. Since I'm a developer and know nothing about graphics design, I of course resorted to AI. And I realized what vibe coding is probably like for those who know little about coding. Since I didn't know what I was doing with my PDF or what steps it involved, I of course gave AI to much to do at the same time, asked it for results with no guidance and expected it to solve everything magically because I had no clue of how to present my text in a pretty way. I spent about a week to achieve a 38-page design that would have probably taken a professional designer a couple hours. So while I can't say this post is completely wrong, I feel it describes what some engineers do, but probably it's more accurate for inexperienced engineers. Those who know what they are doing are probably spending a lot of their time guiding the AI to do the right thing.
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u/Badnik22 22h ago
In my experience, AI (Opus 5.5 is what I use most of the time) is really good at following directions but takes extremely dumb decisions. It will tell you “it must be done this way because of X” and when you push back on X, say “you’re right, I wasn’t entirely clear, it’s because of Y” then you reject Y too and get “you’re right, your option is viable and better than mine”. Wtf? Either argue with me about my option being worse, or don’t propose to do stupid things on the first place.
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u/makonde 23h ago
Talk of system thinking, taste and other such highfalutin is just another form of cope, only the cope is on the other side of AI, there are those who cope that AI sucks and will magically fail and go away and they are those who cope that they will continue to offer something valuable in the face of rapidly advancing AI. We are all copping.
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u/psioniclizard 21h ago
There are also those who's cope is some how AI will magically sort out everything...
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u/Material_Policy6327 8h ago
Like most of the NFT bros who pivoted to AI and pretend to know what AI is when all they really know is promoting and calling an API ChatGPT told them to call
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u/Tired__Dev 17h ago
So I just built a very big big system on my own. It’s still not done, but it’s getting there. Yes, AI came out and has impacts, so I personally wanted to see how big of a company I could be if I dedicated my nights and weekends to a project. I started doing this because my CEO started going nuts. Now for context I’ve built systems a bit smaller before ai using, and I was able to prove to myself that I could big things on my own before AI, but when I was jobless. I was able to do UI/UX, devops, backend development, product management and project management before AI. Simply because I went the way of building my own startups and an agency.
Now, AI can help me do a lot. I’ve tested everything from vibe coding to agentic engineering. When I’d try to one shot verticals of a system at the same time. The worst result I had was in May when I set AI to create a custom feature that had to built off of an abstract syntax tree, and it could not, and still cannot do it, because there’s too many edge cases.
DHH, while actually do like the guy, is going off the deep end. When he speaks about what he builds he usually talks about one shotting things. From my experience of someone trying to authentically build a real enterprise system on my own (my competitor is a team of 20) I just haven’t seen it, and again this has taken me since January. It’s not a slop app put together with Next.js and firebase or node. It’s full ready to be worked on by a team application. What AI can do is one shot apps when it already has an example of a codebase, but even by DHHs admission, it produces absolute shit code that he says he no longer cares about. Problem being? Your code is a prompt and an LLM is good at recognizing language. There’s a high amount of context degradation and it happens fast. You need to put the AI on rails.
DHH is a random guy off the internet, and so am I. Take that for what it is. But my literal goal has been to see how much I personally can produce and if I could take on companies that I only would’ve been able to dream about taking on in the 2010s. You’ll just see bigger systems OR the lower level because we’ll run out of compute. That requires more engineers. There’s just not the funding in capital and everyone keeps looking at future apps as 2010s CRUD apps.
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u/hectorchu 20h ago
You are all coming to terms with your own obsolescence. Imagine how the horses felt after seeing motor cars.
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u/Feeling_Photograph_5 23h ago
Nope, not deferring to AI on system design at all. Also not deferring to it with product thinking.
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u/Available_Safe1818 1d ago
> Btw, this isnt a personal attack on u. I have no idea what u really do
Using 'u' and 'ur' that much doesn't really lend credibility to the post.
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u/TheAxodoxian 23h ago edited 23h ago
The thing is I still get a ton of AI PRs with like thousand line architecture tearing changes, which can easily replaced by like 30 lines or less change. Ducktaped fixes for bugs, which hide rather than fix the issue. Changes to fix non-existent bugs, and at least 7 cases of AI arguing something confidently which is not true, mostly either logical errors or false assumptions about code which it did not fully read. Architecture is mixed bag sometimes it works for 70% of the change it follows patterns, looks nice, then breaks apart into ducktaping. In any case it always gets an average quality solution for the problem area, but never gives super clean, well structured code like some people reliably do.
But it is still great, it can solve simple issues, find where a bug comes from, debug deadlocks from memory dumps, write almost all code with proper guiding very well. Provide valuable design inputs, do research etc.
But also I work in defense, where for many projects AI is not even allowed. For framework level code people are expected to know all the code they submit, but full on vibing is accepted for prototypes. In the vibing effort there is still a lot of thinking, but it is about the product, the user workflow, the software ergonomics, the business value.
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u/GSkylineR34 22h ago
Just avoid delegating everything to agentic tools and actually talk to the AI. I personally just use the chat like it's a StackOverflow on steroids. I might be slower than just prompting to Claude code, but at least I know what's going on and I also enjoy the thinking and the actual development of things, going step by step.
I don't care if Claude can write 50 files in a minute that I can't even describe in a git commit
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u/robby_arctor 1d ago
And im willing to bet you already defer to AI for most, if not all, of ur system level questions and design.
🙄 One of the silver linings of all these grifter douchebags getting undue airtime is that they usually lack the emotional self-awareness to realize when they are psychologically projecting.
It's pretty transparent what their habits and weaknesses are because they are constantly accusing others of secretly sharing them. 🤣
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u/canthony12 15h ago
AI really is not good when things get complex and is not getting better at it though. I use it everyday for work and the limitations of it are real.
If it has a way to verify what is doing you can let it go by itself but unbound and creative tasks it doesn't hold up.
Sorry AI isn't going to put us out of work like you want it to
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u/cleversmoke 1d ago
I need whatever AI the quote is using (I use DeepSeek). Current AI is really darn good at pattern matching, but coming up with systems design on a complex project, it gives a good start, but hardly passable in one go. It typically over engineers, but after a dial down in the systems, the agent becomes really good at following that design.
Though I agree folks are submitting their thinking to AI a little too much. I have some friends ask Claude to help answer a simple text to a mutual friend, it was sad to see.
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u/Ancient-Range3442 1d ago
I agree. I think people are confuse what they currently choose to do manually vs what the AI can actually do.
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u/metalgtr84 Software Engineer 23h ago
Halfway through that post they changed from “you” to “u” and it’s distracting me.
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u/raydditor . 15h ago
Your house in on fire and you are more worried about your cookies getting overcooked.
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u/hectorchu 20h ago
And how are you guys preparing your futures? Being the secretary between management and AI doesn't sound like it's sustainable.
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u/oshochi 20h ago
Do you guys just get a ready list of requirements to implement? Here in my company we get the features with varying degrees of readiness for implementation and they require conceptuall work from us. Like, we have to decide if something is in or out of scope, the exact way of introducing some behavior that is only described generically, we can add new requirements or change the old ones - at least the lower level ones. I haven't written a line of code in over a month, but I've been planning solutions, writing design docs, talking to other devs, specification guys, architects. Now, designing with ai really sucks and I think every line of these docs is ai generated, but it required a lot of work to explain the details to agents and have them written down in coherent form. AI can't make these for you, it'll fixate on a random sentence in a poorly written spec entry or invent a problem where there is none. You need to hammer down every detail into the slop machine. Also, the features at my company seem to have larger scope than most. The one I'm working on now is planned for like 2 personyears of work.
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u/tinmanjk 18h ago
hopefully it's all bots in the comment section, cause otherwise AI is really least of our concerns
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u/ProducePrudent5089 16h ago
This is not even remotely true or accurate. The guy who wrote this comment clearly has no idea what he is talking about and is just yapping like the next person who claims SW is dead and just "prompting".
The fact people genuinely think a token predictor model is "better at design and thinking", which was trained on our data (and therefore thinking, so it mimics it), shows the lack of awareness or understanding.
Good luck running a company with someone who just "prompts", completely neglecting their years of experience, skillset, and knowledge that lets them drive the tool that we are talking about that actually makes it effective.
I can bet the bank that even the latest models cannot do better with system design, UI/UX, etc. because they cannot truly think or reason and only give off that impression because they are mimicking our own data. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves or giving a half-truth.
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u/RandomRedditor44 1d ago
I really hate how software engineering is now boiled down to just “who can type the best prompt into Claude”. I miss the days when we actually thought about code and how to write it well.
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u/Individual_Laugh1335 1d ago
AIs system design is 100% worse than junior level most of the time unless all you’re doing is simple a CRUD app. This is coming from someone with 20k usd token spend a week at work across codex and claude.
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u/SquigglyBlue 1d ago
20k a week?? Start with a lower model first and escalate to a higher one only if necessary. Luna is 99% cheaper than Astra.
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u/arnaudsm CTO 21h ago
The frontier is moving constantly, last year we were architects, but this year we're all product managers.
If in 5 years they automate that step too, investors will just raise a $1M token budget and prompt a new startup without any employees.
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u/Outrageous-Novel-739 19h ago
the only question is - startup for who exactly... if the next guy and their aunt can do the same
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u/CapableHerring 22h ago
cool story bro.
Why are you preaching on this subreddit? If you believe what you're saying, just go adjust your own career based on that. Don't be "that guy" that brings their own beliefs onto other subreddits searching for validation.
In no fucking world would I ever be talking about the doom of the CS industry on reddit if I truly believed that was going to happen. Take a long hard look at yourself and think about why you made this post. You might learn something. Or keep coping about your own mental health. Whatever.
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u/Isogash 19h ago
The level of self-outing on Reddit is insane.
YOU are deferring your systems level thinking to AI. Not everyone else. You think you are sick of everyone else pretending because YOU are sick of pretending.
Meanwhile the rest of us recognize that systems level thinking and design are AI weak points and so our skills are actually just as valuable as ever.
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u/AwareMachine9971 1d ago
I feel like this all happened because companies want everything to move faster and employees are afraid of falling behind their companies' expectation. Also they are expected to adapt to new technologies and trend that can help their company gain competitive advantage. And so when AI came no one knew it would be this bad both for companies and employees in technical debt and cognitive performance (managing agents, cleaning code, outsourcing thinking).
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u/spoopypoptartz 1d ago
do you have to press enter to approve anything if you just put yourself on auto mode?
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u/dagger378 23h ago
Frontier models are capable of system design but they're still shitty at it. If you want a shitty system design and you don't like thinking then you can outsource your system design to AI and get a crippled product that mostly works but is full of quirks and bugs and usability issues. If that low quality bar gets you revenue then go for it I guess.
Not for me though, no thanks.
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u/No_Direction_5276 23h ago
OP, the pace at which other team members change solutions, it's impossible to do it the old school way. You're in Ai or you're Out
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u/summertimeclothez 17h ago
You could always deconstruct it like that though. Oh software dev is just talking to people and clicking buttons on a keyboard. Ez pz. Oh you just google and stackoverflow everything and copy paste. Ez pz.
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u/DoingItForEli 16h ago edited 16h ago
The biggest advice I have for anyone who's stressed about this is simply that the nature of software development has drastically shifted, and you need to keep up. It won't replace you. What will get you thrown to the curb is not knowing how to use these systems.
And when the dust settles, people like this will look ridiculous. We'll get to a point where the AI can do a lot, but human oversight will be needed at all points. It will be that way for the foreseeable future. Human oversight will be critical because no matter how advanced these systems get, they still can't get basic things right. They are a collection of human knowledge, but the inference simply is not there. If you allow it, AI will sell you on system design sometimes that's extremely grand and complex, then you have to explain to it why it's overshooting and overthinking this simple thing.
Oh and how many times have people posted stories of going back to the AI to explain some ENORMOUS bug it caused, or issue it introduced, and it just apologizes like oopsie doopsie AI made a coding whoopsie.
As the years go on, and companies continue to throw gobs of money at these systems, the human component will always remain stubbornly in demand.
Keep in mind, NONE of these AI companies are even profitable at the moment, and as coding agents become more open source and local, all the money being dumped in by the big guys right now kind of seems like it will end up being a waste.
This isn't cope. I work with cutting edge systems every day. I am constantly hand holding these things. If you're the type to give your entire repository to claude and then bitch when it didn't do some complicated task perfectly, you were NEVER a software developer to begin with.
edit: I should add, I work with a guy who very obviously churns out Claude written stuff, and the bugs I end up fixing in his code are the finer details it obviously missed because it didn't know to think certain things through. It's frustrating, but the fact is I have PR after PR after PR where I can show how the system failed in a major way. Not only do I end up fixing the bug, but I have to come up with a plan of attack a lot of times to fix the data in our systems as a result.
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u/Calm_Clam_Bake 14h ago
I can never take people seriously who type (ha ha get it) u for you, ur for your and don't capitalize I.
But that's just me.
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u/Time_Standard3361 14h ago edited 14h ago
Opposite of my experience.
Not a SW dev, but rather from leadership in these tech companies (mid to larger size), used to do systems architecture, before networks, and of course you deliver code in between - my job was never swe, despite contracting and/or having them reporting to me.
LLM can do bunch of architectural/systems decisions, but it is coin toss. In sense that when you have no idea, it will just pick some available "shape". But that is not system design per se.
On the other hand, if you know what you doing, what shape you want - so to speak, the LLM is acceleration tool.
Now practical use is exactly as op says, people outsource decisions. But then, you should have made it and now you are responsible for it.
That will inevitably bring drama. There will be a lot of "cognitive burnouts" - people who offload "thinking" for long enough to stop being able to do it independently. There will be catastrophes alongside the way. And then we remember that when you have new tool, it does not mean you do not need the skill. To set up CNC well, you need run router/lave. It develops that skill.
Currently, we do not have sw optimization and hw for true form of this discovered maths. That is us building our models, like we are making our notes, tools, reading lists, cookbooks right now, it taking moments and us iterating.
So, we will get there, through catastrophe in the middle. AI it is not. But it is good enough mimicry and new enough that it can perfectly trick us. We - humans - need to update our systems and study harder.
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u/x_mk6 13h ago
It still sucks at making good decisions though. It still chooses the dumbest possible route. If you're just accepting what it comes up with good luck lol
Also, people have been spouting "X amount of time from now models will be so smart that no human thought will be required at all" for ages at this point. It's always "software is solved 6 months from now". Once 6 months pass it's just another 6 more left
The models just aren't that clever. They're trained on internet text bro. Have you seen what people say on the internet? It's mostly stupid shit. The models will always have a limit to how clever they can get
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u/NEEDHALPPLZZZZZZZ 12h ago
Somewhat accurate, I do find myself using it to design parts of the system, especially when I'm particularly lazy, only to later realize it wasn't actually the best nor what I envisioned, but it worked for the specific case I described. Even though I know the better, more scalable design, but just didn't felt like crafting out the details myself.
It can help with rewriting to get closer to the end state I want. But just having an agents.md with design for scalability and modularity won't actually translate to good system design.
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u/Nervous-Assistant659 7h ago
Great point, and honestly? You're absolutely right to raise it. Let's unpack this.
It's not about typing. It's about meaning.
At its core, your comment isn't just a critique. It's a testament to something deeper: the grief of watching a craft you love quietly lose its economic footing. And that grief is real, valid, and worth sitting with.
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u/skilliard7 6h ago
AI already can do system level thinking much better and faster than you. And im willing to bet you already defer to AI for most, if not all, of ur system level questions and design.
I don't think this is true. I've tried to let AI do system level design and high level thinking(Fable, Opus, Astra), and it is does a very poor job.
The system design of vibe coded apps I've seen from non-tech people proves this.
With that said, I suspect AI will get better at this.
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u/wwscrispin 6h ago
I am sitting here 12+ hours a day working with an LLM on existing code where I know what the code does. When you do not know what the code does it appears the LLM is magically doing the right thing. I spend a great deal of effort updating workflows and taking other steps to improve outcomes but the reality is that it does not know when it is missing key information and it plows on regardless if I do not correct it. Everything looks rosy as long as you are working on a MVP for a greenfield project.
That is not the reality of software development. Most software engineering is done on existing code that is potentially multiple decades old. Your greenfield project has about 1 in 100 shot at actually making money, and that is if it is a fully funded startup and not just you with a good idea (where the chances are about 1 in 10000). I think LLMs are the coolest thing ever, even if I end up losing my job, but they do not currently do decent review unless you already know what questions to ask
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u/qK0FT3 4h ago
I define current ai capability as layers.
First layer is ability to work on a single feature. Second layer is ability to work on a whole project Third layer is ability to work on 3 projects Fourth layer is having underlying intuition of the domain to vonnect mutliple projects in a way people will like.
We have only reached the layer 3. Layer 4 is still 2-3 years away. Even with that we will adapt.
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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 4h ago
My brother in Christ, we already would have been Google searching error messages
Software is too large now, too many ecosystems, platforms, and languages.
AI enables us finally to not have to know everything to get something done. That is a God Damn blessing.
You are massively overestimating the "thinking" that "used" to go on before AI. A lot of it was wasted brain power trying to learn some shitty documentation for an API or, as you mentioned, those errors. Wasted mental effort. There wasn't anything new being done.
Now? AI lets the developer focus actually on what matters and not the constant complexity the mires down progress
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u/dzendian Software Engineer 3h ago
"AI already can do system level thinking much better and faster than you. "
lol
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u/ktdotnova 1h ago
Why would you freely outsource your thinking to an AI? Anyone can do that. It's a race to the bottom. I don't need a fancy guy making $300k to prompt an AI.
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u/__sacredcapy__ 1d ago
In 2023 everyone laughed at the World Economic Forum for coining the term "prompt engineer", just like everyone laughed when they coined the phrase "You will own nothing and be happy"
Not much ahead in time, "software engineers" are the most perfected example of prompt engineers, and AI is paving way where everybody will own nothing and we will be happy (with the help of antidepressants, it seems)
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u/OrcaFlux 19h ago
AI already can do system level thinking much better and faster than you.
I don't doubt this is true for you specifically.
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u/NICEMENTALHEALTHPAL Software Engineer 18h ago edited 18h ago
Only a profession as bubbled and privileged as SWE is this idea of 'genuinely loving' work expected or grieved over
You're free to shovel dirt, clean fecal matter, help criminals, deal with aggros, listen to people whine, put your life at risk, watch people or animals die, all you want
No? Back to poor me, I have to offload my critical thinking to a tool that does my job for me? Damn your life must be hard
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u/bitcoin_moon_wsb 4h ago
I asked AI to design several systems and after asked it to defend it’s decision in choice of technologies and admitted it had no reason to pick several of them and that there were better choices
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u/RyanCargan 21h ago
If anything, "typing" is becoming MORE of the identity of software engineers now than ever before. Typing shitty prompts over and over and over. Tapping enter to allow this, allow that. Not thinking through any of the problems. Feeding error messages to AI and asking it what happened over and over and over.
Is the original video commenter stuck re-prompting "over and over and over" because both him and the bot (mainly because of its human bottleneck, him) screwed up the system design he claims the bot is good at? The bot's "innate capacity" won't matter if the human can bottleneck it this easily while trying to get it to obey.
Bad architecture usually doesn't hurt until later. So, "the bot is better at system-design/arch" is empty unless we define what good arch looks like (and verify it). Compared to what?
How do we know what good arch for the task looks like? Our own track record? Other people's attempts we're aware of? The bot saying so? The app not crashing right away? What are the metrics?
Current state of SWE is conflating too much crap as one thing:
- AI can do task X (coding, system design, etc.) better than you.
- Human contrib. is more marginal, so any gap in operator skills is more negligible for more tasks.
- Therefore, that skill gap is not worth paying the same price for.
- Therefore: "Thing I loved, that also gave me a sense of worth, commands a lower premium as a service".
Each can be true separately, and people do a Motte & Bailey thing by collapsing "marginal contribution" and "lower price" to "zero contrib./price".
But the weirdest part is probably people collapsing "you" into "every single human on the planet". Meaning, any rando using the bot will beat any expert at anything (by any metric), no matter how little effort goes into the initial spec & successive corrections/interventions in the bot loop, which is absurd.
Better off abandoning theorycrafting and doing something like a better METR study at different workplaces to gauge actual AI impact on tasks.
Suits had similar problems with engineers before bots were common.
Suit can always say "I'm the main reason my engineers perform above the norm" and anyone else can go "lol cope". There's no way to assign true (or at least confident) credit without shuffling teams under a similar enough test.
Lot of this feels like people coping with the tasks they love going away, by claiming that new replacement tasks have less inherent worth (instead of just not being to their taste).
That, and everyone else will share their suffering since: "Just you wait, AI will come for you too! And then we'll all finally be equally useless!"
Side note: I dunno why people complain about typing prompts this much (if he meant literal typing). If it's mostly natural language as they claim... just dictate to an ASR model? Pipe text into any harness from your phone or whatever, and take a walk when dictating? Touching grass more always helps. Unironically.
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u/Fire_Lake 20h ago
I feed error messages to the Ai and ask it what happened over and over because I feed one, it tells me what happened and fixes it, then I feed it another unrelated one and it tells me what happened and fixes it, etc etc etc... It's not cleaning up it's own mess, it's cleaning up human developer mess.
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u/RyanCargan 17h ago
Sure, but the context of my original comment was OP's original commenter.
If he's truly being driven mad by this loop, that'd imply that he's hitting way more of a human mess than usual, or his tolerance and taste for the feedback loop is unusually low I guess?
It's hard to tell with stories of heavy trial & error dev whether the work is unusually tough, or the arch is unusually troublesome in ways it doesn't have to be.
Anecdotally, I see a lot of overengineering leading to heavy time/token burn (and frustration) from other folks in their work. More up front planning, with or sometimes even without the bot, can frontload a bit of pain to reduce a lot more friction downstream is all I'm saying. Sometimes we (and the bot) can miss the forest for the trees, which is what leads to the man-made mess in the first place.
Take it with a grain of salt. I'm just observing a pattern where devs say things like "the first 90% is even easier now but the last 10% feels even harder than it used to be" or consumers complaining that a product that looks polished is lacking critical functionality, despite tests being green, because QA wasn't properly vetted and likely auto-generated end to end.
Those patterns were there before bots too, but seem to be worse now somehow. Comprehension debt might be the best term for it.
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u/Fire_Lake 16h ago
I mean I think the point is that we're essentially overpaid data entry agents now. Bug? Paste the error, enter some relevant context that may or may not be related to any understanding of the applicable code. New feature? Paste the jira. It does everything and then it'll ask you clarifying questions which you enter like the dutiful data entry agent, then it makes the fix, then you press the button to run the cicd pipeline. Sure in theory there's a code review step in there, but it's becoming less and less relevant.
I honestly can't recall the last time I really wrote any meaningful code.
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u/RyanCargan 16h ago
Hmm. I wonder if anonymized "day in the life" style coverage that avoids the usual privacy issues in corpo places might be interesting.
To get a feel for how typical tasks differs from place to place on the same job titles over time.
On the "theoretical review step", I think it's partly there so that corporate has more "liability diffusion" sinks in the chain lol
Example of what I mean from another field:
Analysis of responsibility attributions in complex, partly automated socio-technical systems has identified the risk that the nearest human operator may bear the brunt of responsibility for overall system malfunctions.
As we move towards integrating AI into healthcare systems, it is important to ensure that this does not translate into clinicians unfairly absorbing legal liability for errors and adverse outcomes over which they have limited control.1
u/Isogash 19h ago
Suit can always say "I'm the main reason my engineers perform above the norm"
The funny thing is that it's always been true, because underperforming engineering is virtually always a management issue: wrong incentives, lack of leadership and toxic workplace culture.
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u/RyanCargan 17h ago
Indeed... but I think it's more informative to consider different possibilities instead of leaving it at "yes/no":
- Engies do well in spite of boss -> Even a new greenhorn boss may get better results if swapped in.
- Engies do well because boss is smart enough to be hands off... which may mean that the potential ideal boss pool can be quite large if it's mostly temperament/trust.
- Engies do well because boss is actively micromanaging (to pick up their slack, and doesn't want to escalate to firing or similar) -> Probably rare in practice, but can be the case. In which case... boss may be the more valuable part of the equation on paper, but could also be part of the problem themselves if they didn't escalate and deal with problems at the root.
It's sort of a question of "who's the most replaceable/valuable" if you wanna be cynical about it. Or less cynically: "What % of credit goes to each actor involved for a given outcome?"
Credit can be complex, so "I'm the reason for X" could be true or false but have a big fat asterisk.
You also wanna to be very careful with things like "relatively graded" individual credit, as that gives everyone involved an incentive to sabotage or steal credit from others if it's cheaper than hitting a higher legit target yourself. Enron style...
My point was that assigning credit in any kind of "multi-agent" setup is tricky. But we seem to do that all the time with bot tooling and the like.
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u/Isogash 17h ago
None of these situations are going to be high performing though they just might not be obviously underperforming.
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u/RyanCargan 16h ago
Depends on the org/sample and metrics/KPIs yeah?
We're talking "high performing" relative to other teams within a given org/sample ("above the norm" and all that).
A team can be a circus, but above the norm if everyone else being measured is even worse 👀
Perils of relative grading I guess...
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u/RadiantHovercraft6 1d ago
Uhhhh not trynna cope here because I do agree that people are outsourcing a lot of their thinking to AI, but if there’s anything it still struggles with it’s high level decision making and architectural details
Whenever I have it try to oneshot a feature in a brownfield project where it requires new components, it without fail does some dumb shit. I usually have to go back and revise the design and it makes more of a headache.