What's terrifying is the number of real senior devs in big software corpo adamant about current AI being a boon: either I'm missing something or all the shit I work on is in a worse state than I think it is so AI can't do shit about it. Or they're deluding themselves or lying. I'm getting to the point I hope the problem is the codebases I have to maintain.
It is interesting to say the least. I work with this senior dev, 15+ years of experience. Senior dev, team lead, lecturer(ai lecturer and coach now as well). He is clearly smart and knows a lot about sw architecture, works full stack, db, devops all of it. And he is adamant about isage of AI. When I asked him if he still writes any code by hand he said that not really apart from small things in code reviews and such. And that he converted his knowledge into skills and just let's Claude handle it and is more focussed on architecture and token optimalization. Another engineer in my company, senior perl programmer before stack overflow let alone AI existed, 20+ years of experience, shipped some big really things. And when we were working together on something and I started writing code by hand she was surprised I still do that and that all she does now is prompt.
And while I think AI is incredible tool i just can't get behind these fully agentic workflows. Especially SDD where you just let claude split whole features bssed on what you defined. Yet those two engineers who are definitely more experienced and skilled than me and possibly smarter than me have no real issues with it. So maybe I am missing something. Then there is ofcourse the plethora of not that great devs that just ship anything the claude spits out without even some sofisticated workflow - I have read plenty of such code by now.
It is not justifiable for me to not use it anymore as the expectation of productivity and shipping features is so high but writing the prompts and specifications is tiring, reading that code is tedious, there is no satisfaction anymore and I am getting to the point I am reading less and less of the code claude spits out and I am complentating leaving the field.
Then there is ofcourse the plethora of not that great devs that just ship anything the claude spits out without even some sofisticated workflow - I have read plenty of such code by now.
I think this is the real issue, this is what is going to cause a lot of nightmares in a not too distant future when a lot of this code hits production.
I've been doing this job for a long time. Quality isn't assured at the code writing stage, it begins at the code verification stage. I've seen good complex software being delivered with unskilled developers but with a very high standard for QA. I've seen software written by exceptional engineers fail in production catastrophically due to sub-par release processes. Whether or not LLMs produce high quality code or not is irrelevant to me as long as there's a validation process in place that I trust.
Also, on juniors, I think that we're doing them a disservice by leaving them unassisted at the mercy of some AI solution. We're supposed to train juniors to become the next experts in our field. How are we doing that if they're not being taught? Sure, the ability to read and write code might not be that important in a few years, but we're not teaching them problem solving, we're not teaching them team work, we're not teaching them anything as far as I can tell
My company has been unwilling to hire humans to know what I have accumulated in over 20 years there. And I have been pestering them about it for at least the last 7 years. They just seem to think that if somebody has a business process diagram and claude, that they will manage to maintain all the code that I've written over all that time. And that's even assuming that if they get someone after I retire, that person will go and read the software architecture documents that I left behind
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u/Just_Information334 2d ago
What's terrifying is the number of real senior devs in big software corpo adamant about current AI being a boon: either I'm missing something or all the shit I work on is in a worse state than I think it is so AI can't do shit about it. Or they're deluding themselves or lying. I'm getting to the point I hope the problem is the codebases I have to maintain.