alt Hacker NewsWhat I've found is that AI allows lazy and incompetent developers to be more lazy and more incompetent. This then has the effect that product quality suffers more, faster. As a result of the sheer amount of code now being pushed out, code reviews, a thing that previously somewhat prevented lazy and incompetent developers from pushing out horrible code, is effectively dead in the water since no human can actually review such amounts of code realistically anymore. Some companies have adopted AI to review code, which, well ... you have AI make code, AI review code ... I hope you can see the stupidity here if you expect to see any deterministic results at all.
I guess time will tell if the consumer will adapt to the lower quality of products, allowing companies to justify the existence of lazy and incompetent developers, or if the consumer will push back, forcing companies to increase the quality of their developers.
Note: I use AI every day and it is entirely possible to create high quality software with it, so long as you are not lazy and incompetent.
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Even if you are competent I cannot review your 5,000 lines of code you produce per day vs the 100 you were producing before the LLM apocalypse.
I'm seeing this too. I've worked with devs that would previously push PRs that wouldn't work or run correctly. Those PRs wouldn't get merged in. Now they're putting up PRs which seem to work at first glance, but have hidden problems. For example, one guy introduced a huge PR for a visualization and it seemed to work fine, though another dev mentioned to me that we already use recharts and it does 90% of what this guy's PR does (his code does all the drawing logic itself). Maybe AI will get good enough to clean up these kinds of messes, but in the near term I imagine there will be a lot of code bases that will be filling up with dragons.
I'm with you on this. At my employer, I feel like we are looked down upon if we don't take the lazy approach and let the ai attempt to one shot whatever it is we're working on.
One reason I'm reluctant to hand over all of my work to the ai is I don't want to forget how to program or let my skills deteriorate. Another reason is I don't want to become dependent on ai and find myself in a situation where I'm not able to fly/navigate/land the airplane if my auto-pilot or ai malfunctions or fails.
Then the last reason I don't want to take the lazy approach: When I've done "one shot tests" a lot of times the ai will try and take some lazy half-ass shortcut that we would not accept if it were a human doing the work. A lot of times it just doesn't do what you ask it to do.
Where I've found ai extremely helpful though is asking questions about our codebase, or asking it to build me a function that takes in a, b, c arguments and spits out x, y, z.
AI really is one of the greatest things mankind has ever produced, but I don't think it's so good yet that it can replace humans completely. Using it as a form of leverage though I think is what people should be doing. I suppose we'll see what happens to developers who let the ai take over completely. Some people are arguing that if you don't let the ai takeover completely your career is doomed, but personally I think you might be doomed if you forget how to fly the airplane by hand.
At a startup I worked, there was an engineer whose code was incoherent and buggy. So, we were literally better off if that engineer did nothing because their net output was negative. Engineers like that become weaponized with LLMs, and negative numbers become larger negative numbers when scaled up.
Limitations of AI are a thing; but one rhetorical point keeps coming up (I don't think it's just you) and confusing me:
> I hope you can see the stupidity here if you expect to see any deterministic results at all.
Are you expecting humans to be deterministic in the code they produce?
> forcing companies to increase the quality of their developers
Just don't. Fire them! AI is better than a thousand devs. What you need is testers that know what to test that AI can't, not code or UX/UI (not talking about playwright here) but business intelligence if that is testable, the things that produce results (profits) and the reason it was asked for in the first place, to solve a problem
If the problem was asked wrongly, the result will be wrong too. Fire devs, then PMs, then IT Managers if they really don't know how to outperform AI, and that's exactly the point, they won't be able to do it in code or tests or reviews, only in intelligence, for now...
> What I've found is that AI allows lazy and incompetent developers to be more lazy and more incompetent. This then has the effect that product quality suffers more, faster.
Yeah. To me it seems very much like the "use dynamic typing for everything" fad. You had a bunch of junior and/or incompetent developers who went around insisting that type declarations are bad, static typing slows down development, you just code so much faster if everything is dynamically typed. And in the context of a new project, they were totally right. It took a few years for the debt to finally catch up, and people realized that these massive, untyped monoliths they had were unmaintainable. Now the two biggest dynamic languages (Python/JavaScript) are effectively typed languages, because nobody uses their untyped variants for serious work.
Dynamic typing still has great uses -- interactive data exploration, putting together quick scripts (though less relevant with AI...), or even just simple prototypes -- but what we tried to do with it at the start, as an industry, was clearly dumb as hell. I suspect we'll look back in 5-10 years and realize that with some of the stuff we're doing with AI, too. It's already happened with things like Gastown.
> AI allows lazy and incompetent developers to be more lazy and more incompetent.
I like to put this as "LLMS give lazy and incompetent developers more runway."
> Note: I use AI every day and it is entirely possible to create high quality software with it, so long as you are not lazy and incompetent.
What I in general try to teach the other people about AI: It can be a great tool, but check the results! Especially in the case of engineering: Check and then double check.
> you have AI make code, AI review code ... I hope you can see the stupidity here...
You will be surprised how many times, catches errores made by the AI coding agent. However,as you point, isn't deterministic. And you can guarantee the end results is 100% fine code
Honestly, I would still rather commit claude written code from lazy and incompetent developers than code that they wrote.
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> a thing that previously somewhat prevented lazy and incompetent developers from pushing out horrible code
Brings to mind this classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...
"""I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage"""