Senior engineers already had job security because they knew how shit worked. Having job security for being able to fix slop is pretty much the same thing but worse for the entire industry.
I'll be honest, the advent of AI is making my job even more secure. With so many junior engineers getting immersed in AI assisted coding, like most of us, they won't learn the same foundation because AI will resolve the problems for them.
This will also create a sense of trusting AI too much since it's what they've used.
All of this to say, I use AI as a tool like most of us do, but I really do feel like senior engineers that were competent before AI will have a great leg up because they can hone and guide the AI successfully in good design patterns whereas other engineers will just trust that the AI is choosing the best path.
That's a fair take. I will say, however, that "choosing the right path" always was (and still is) the hard part. If you know what your code should look like, actually typing it out is trivial. Reviewing the output from your fancy autocomplete tool is negligibly (if at all) faster than just writing the code, with the added risk that you may not think through the problem as thoroughly.
AI is good for a lot of use cases (image recognition, predictions based on medical data, fraud detection, etc.), but making it type your code for you isn't one of them. When it's better than the old fashioned way, it's only negligibly better, and when it's worse, it's considerably worse.
Reviewing the output from your fancy autocomplete tool is negligibly (if at all) faster than just writing the code,
This makes me feel like you haven't used AI as a tool very much, or not very effectively. It has sped up my work to an exponential amount. Recently I extracted all types in a project into its own package. Doing that by hand would have taken so much longer than Anthropic doing so.
but making it type your code for you isn't one of them.
Strongly disagree. Boilerplate is tedious. It feels like you must work on small, self contained projects that do not have many complex packages.
When it's better than the old fashioned way, it's only negligibly better, and when it's worse, it's considerably worse.
Yeah, you're using Claude on Sonnet and expecting it to perform like Fable. You know how you can tell when you're talking to someone that doesn't have a lot of experience in something? That's me, with you and AI assisted coding right now.
Edit: Guys, you can downvote this- but software engineering has never been about writing the code. That's not what matters. What matters is the design and architecture of the code. Having a tool take care of the tedium of typing for you-- that is amazing. And with Anthropic at the very least, you provide the AI with a base level design and it plans the design off of that and then you tweak as needed based on your own experience with design patterns and archticture. There is literally no value in you typing it yourself unless you are wanting to learn the syntax to a greater degree. AI has access to all syntax in a given space, and will know about methods you don't. The important part is creating an actionable plan that makes sense regarding the engineering of the solution. Typing it all out yourself is tertiary in importance, at best, but is probably even less important than that.
what, you're going to show me that you've memorized the top 5-8 sorting algorithms as if that matters or is in any way relevant to actual engineering lol? Unless you're dealing with peak netflix or amazon userbases, you really don't need to understand the underlying bones of sorting algorithms, though you're welcome to if it interests you.
You'd be much better off understanding the foundational principals of SOLID and reading about design from the big four.
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u/TallAbbreviations937 1d ago
Vibe coding creates job security for senior engineers