Humans are obsolete dead meats
The sad reality is that most apps are regurgitated CRUD with new design language. The llms are really good are regurgitating this stuff, so the only interesting part left is the 10% that was already interesting before. I just take 2h lunches and spend time with my family while the llms puke out the CRUD, then thoughtfully work through the 10%
12 hour shifts?
Fucking snow flake anti ai nerds, like you weren’t just pressing keys all day anyway, who cares if now it’s just one key??
/s
I’d have more sympathy if he got off fucking twitter tbh
Sex joke about getting off from fucking twitter
My company made my job soul-sucking to the point I was doing the bare minimum a long time ago. They didn’t even need AI for that. Just some really shitty managers.
Same!
The engineer added that employees are now pressured to ship products as fast as possible, leaving them with little time to review Claude’s output or understand the code being created.
Companies have always pressured software teams to ship products as fast as possible.
What’s new is the part where all of the worst coders can shit out code a lot faster and pretend like they’re doing a good job. It used to take them a while to write garbage that they didn’t understand or review themselves, but now they can do it so quickly that it makes the actual good coders look like they’re taking a long time.
This is why you absolutely have to have documented coding and review standards. The idea that you’d ship any code that has never been reviewed by a human is horrifying.
The idea that you’d work 12 hour days is so stupid to start with. I’ve seen people consistently work that long and… surprise, they don’t actually work that long. They work about the same as anybody else and goof off the rest of the time. I doubt you can even just press enter for that long. People just don’t work that way.
This is exactly it. I’ve worked with 2 different teams in this new era. One has all strong engineers and good review and testing standards. The other has 20% bad engineers that should have been fired years ago and’s weaker testing culture. The result is the strong team is delivering higher quantity software faster than ever, and the other team is going fast with much worse results. The quality is very bad, and the good engineers still there are quitting.
The good engineers spend their whole days just trying to keep the ship afloat and minimizing the harm from the bad engineers. They hate it and are burning out fast.
AI in engineering is an accelerator. If you are producing slop software, which most teams are, then it’s just going to accelerate the rate at which you can produce shitty software and bad code.
If teams are producing high-quality software, then it accelerates those teams’ ability to deliver that quality.
AI in engineering is an accelerator.
Yes, and most engineers effect on the product can be graded on [-1, 1] scale. And I find that the -1s accelerates faster.
If teams are producing high-quality software
I had one of those. My seniors are getting dumber though, and we have twice as many prod bugs as a year ago. I had an outage because someone didn’t properly trim an input for fucks sake recently.
If you’re just hitting enter you’re doing it so wrong.
I‘d love if I could just hit enter but the garbage it shits out unsupervised is just soo bad.
I’ve heard the same from developers at work “doing this using AI makes it boring, but at the same time I feel silly if I write everything from scratch”.
Makes the day really easy ngl and I make cool stuff for my team 🤷
I’ve heard similar things from the people I know forced to us AI for work. That at the output requirements are now novel and highly accelerated under the assumption AI will make it possible.
I’m not a developer but I do make little tools for myself at work. I used an LLM to assist with adding some features recently, nothing I couldn’t easily do myself. It did a fine job and made minimal changes, all totally readable and for the most part the same way I would have done it.
I have a new tool I want to make, and it’s hard not to just turn to the LLM, since it’ll save me many hours on a script that nobody else will ever see. It’s really taken the fun out of it. I’m proud of what I made, even though nobody else will care, but doing this my usual way will feel like I’m using the wrong tool out of perversity.
I dunno. I hate everything.
I just started using it as well under a push at work. I’ve so far only used it to write out a script that I knew what I needed and how to do it but it ended up saving me a couple hours. I suppose there wasn’t an interesting problem to solve there so it makes sense to use it but I worry about relying on it since it seems just capable enough to start trusting before the rug gets pulled from under you.
I have that worry too, but luckily the worst case for me would be one of my simple tools becoming unmaintainable.
I felt that way until I just stopped using it entirely
I’ve only tried it the once but it did a great job and caused me the consternation from my previous comment.
It is disappointing knowing it actually works some of the time. I guess I just don’t care. I have my lines and I don’t cross them.
I’m sure there are some great uses of Microsoft software or Nvidia hardware, but I’m not going to use them unless forced to by work.
It basically added three small functions and their command line args to a sub-500 line Python script. I’m sure if helped that my function and variable name are verbose, like dictionary_of_fruits_with_dictionary_of_attributes.
My work provided the tool and asked me to try it.
Hey thanks for sharing I’m in basically the exact same boat. There are also pressures in the work place to use it because of the time savings. Personally I try to keep a balance and work on things myself most of the time and if the LLM is used it’s more like a buddy coder then a magic code generation tool, but sometimes it’s just too easy to use it that way. I think it’s important to take pride in your work, so keep doing things your way when you want!
I look at it this way: if you prompted an LLM to generate it, then you didn’t “do” it, you basically installed an outside piece of software that just happened to be generated on-the-fly.
That maybe true if youre single shotting. At some point, but that’s rarely the end. It takes iteration and experience to get LLMs to do useful work in most cases.
Reminder here that the culprit is capitalism, not LLMs.
Voxium said he wouldn’t mind the situation if workers were given more time to check the code.
“Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude,” he added. “There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore.”
Some people might look at this and wonder what the problem is – who wouldn’t want to be paid to do very little? But most people struggle when their work has no meaning. Voxium told Business Insider that if engineers lose the opportunity to understand the code and solve difficult problems, “there is nothing left … Not even our soul. There will be no purpose.”
He added that the real problem is corporate leaders’ obsession with pushing out more features. He said management often judges success by sprint cycles, pull requests, and the sheer number of features shipped, even when those additions do little to improve the product for users.
who wouldn’t want to be paid to do very little?
Oh that’ll change soon enough as well in the downwards direction.
I like this take.
Capitalism was the jet fuel that got us here, but now we need to shed our boosters and switch engines to something made to run longer.
That’s how every ecosystem eventually grows. First come the weeds aimed at colonizing new areas as fast as possible. Then come the small plants, then the shrubs, the trees until it’s a self sustaining forest of different species.
Yeah, still a sweatshop with air conditioning and free coffee and junk food.
Capitalism created LLMs.
People are clever; we invent things.
LLMs are just a tool. Tools can be used by people; the problem is when people are used by tools, which is what is happening in this case.
See Corey Doctorow’s latest tour of YouTube promoting his idea of reverse centaurs (which, for the life of me, I can´t figure out why he didn´t call minotaurs).
Corey Doctorow didn’t invent that term, but I’m glad people are talking about it.
It comes from “centaur chess” which is chess where both players are assisted by a computer. The humans are “riding” the computer in the centaur analogy — benefitting from the computer’s ability to process the best tactical move, while the human handles the strategy. They found out that computers win chess against humans every time; but humans with computers win against the computer every time.
I can´t figure out why he didn´t call minotaurs
Minotaurs still convey the idea of super human strength, he was trying to convey the idea of limited power output of a human with the limited mental capacity of a horse.
Ah, thank you. The problem has been bedevilling me for weeks and I think this is the solution.
I initially thought it could be because the Minotaur isn’t exactly half-man/half-animal as the centaur is, but a hybrid of the two; often represented with hoofs for feet, etc., which is another expression of what you’re saying.
I guess calling them reverse centaurs visualizes the change that is happening in the relationship between human and machine. We used to be the head but we’re the butt now. It makes you reconstruct the image in your head.
In truth there already was a downward trend before LLM’s exploded where tools were continuously used against people. “Enshitification” most people call it but it’s really just free range capitalism. Generations of economy majors have been doing exactly what they were taught. Increase short term shareholder value at any cost. It’s unsustainable and LLM’s are just another accelerant.
I guess calling them reverse centaurs visualizes the change that is happening in the relationship between human and machine. We used to be the head but we’re the butt now. It makes you reconstruct the image in your head.
Yes, but the minotaur is frequently just a person with the head of a bull, instead having to invert a centaur, which is already not a familiar image. In talks, Doctorow defaults to “Bojack Horseman”, an acknowledgment that reverse centaur is perhaps too much imaginative labor for his audience.
Agree on the MBAs–capitalism eating itself.
Yeah, my shovel sometimes convinces me to commit suicide while evaporating water to keep it running.
Sweat is an evaporatve cooling system used to regulate the temperature of the mechanism that keeps a shovel moving. And if you’ve never considered killing yourself over the prospect of spending all day with a shovel, I can at least be confident you’d make an -excellent- archeologist.
(But mild humor aside, I do understand your point.)
Sure. You can talk about the LLM gestalt, if you’d like, that’s worth examining, as with any other tool; especially stuff like progressive brain rot.
But listening to the complaints people have about LLMs, it’s mostly that it’s being improperly used to replace human labor. Improperly in the sense that it can’t actually do the job it is replacing humans in, which is a separate discussion of what kind of world it will be when there are no jobs for humans to do.
LLMs are used responsibly by people doing their own work. For instance, Linus Torvalds used Claude to find errors in the Linux kernel (I think), that he then fixed himself.
The problem is that capitalism, especially oligoplic capitalism, will create worse products at lower prices (or higher profits), and it will do so on the shortest timeline, ignoring things like future lawsuits over security flaws and future lack of programming talent.
Also it’s a really shitty tool that doesn’t actually fix a problem. Unless you are rich and that problem is ‘I have to pay my employees’
There are several valid use cases for LLMs. It does solve problems, quite literally.
By definition not. The majority of the code in GitHub is some volunteer project on a permissive licence .
And that’s not even talking about code review.
Just let AI do it! What could go wrong???
I wish that were purely a joke, but co-workers are unironically suggesting we deal with the avalanche of AI code by sending an AI to review it.
Oh my place too. It is starting to slow down as it turns out parsing AI reviews is a massive pain. Especially since they flag the dumbest things.
No time for that, we’ve got to hit the sprint end date!
workers spend 12-hour days pressing enter
If only that could be automated somehow.
I feel like you are being sarcastic, but this actually is a solved problem :
An elegant solution. I wonder if it is more efficient than a 1TW data centre.
Seriously, though, we use AI in the worst way possible. I like writing code, I hate checking someone else’s code. Why aren’t AIs doing the checking and engineers doing the coding?
Forget “human in the loop” - let’s shoot for “reviewed by AI”. Deep down, we know the humans are barely paying attention when they check Claude’s homework.
The drinking bird only works if it’s dipping it’s velvert covered head into water, the lower water temp creates a temo difference moving the liquid in the glass tube within the bird
I can attest this does work well. Having LLMs review your plans for how to do something and point out what you missed works well too. I also have my local LLM review creative writing without writing anything, give feedback about my Blender renders and other artistic things, and be a sounding board for ideas in general. Be warned that Qwen has no mercy and will shit all over your passion projects.
Forget “human in the loop” - let’s shoot for “reviewed by AI”
yeah uh, nah, thanks. I would not trust it any more than I trust the current shit show.
You absolutely can do that tbh.
The guy is working at a shitty sweat shop and blame AI for his misery instead of moving his ass to another job.
Let’s ask Claude to write an article about it.
One… use --dangerously… they asked for speed, thats how you get it. Two… if you have great tests, you don’t really need to know every detail of the code. The risk just shifts from a dev designing bad code, to a dev designing bad tests.
I dunno I’ve seen too many times where Claude Code will just rewrite a test it doesn’t like and say it’s good. Combining that with —dangerously or —yolo is a recipe for disaster.
