I have to be honest and say it's not very useful for me to hear you say this because you make your living from AI consulting and in a previous thread [1] you said that you don't review the code and then that you do. I'm not saying you have psychosis but your take on AI is inconsistent and confusing to me.
Yeah, that's why I said "I'm not sure how useful it is to say this", because I know a lot of people will be a) offended by the message or b) offended that I was the one to say it.
The issue of "do you review every line of code or not" is the single most complex in all of the conversations about the practice of applying coding agents. If my messaging on that is inconsistent it's because of that complexity, and because my understanding of that issue is evolving over time.
That's just the media noise. Yea there were purges. But its a big leap to go from "some" to "all" the best people. Government is the largest employer in the country. The nonsense you see constantly by politicians and other leaders is a tiny fraction of what the government workforce is. This is why despite the chaos you see in the media, life hasn't changed much for the great majority of people all things considered. The government remains functional where it needs to be.
The purges haven’t reached too deep into the rank and file yet, which is why the walls are still standing. But they’ve hit the top of the pyramid hard, which is why nothing makes sense.
> it will be sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool
If, as an engineer, you rely completely on AI then you will be selected out of the work pool. Some engineers will still be needed. If I was interviewing them (I used to do a lot of this) then I will want the ones who understand the code. If they only use AI then it will quickly become clear that they don't understand it. Why would I hire them when another person can understand it?
Because you will have an understanding of the complete system. Your domain and the code. This means that you can be more creative with it and also get yourself out of a mess if it occurs (which it will).
From what I have seen AI doesn't understand the code. But even if you argue that it does understand the code it definitely doesn't understand the domain because it's only input channel is a stream of text and you didn't even type in a "full" text representation of the domain.
So you remain the only thing that can understand the whole system. If your competitor has no one (or no team) who can put together a full understanding of the system then you will have an advantage.
From my experience building different systems, there is no moat anymore ( beside your commercial connections for B2B). If one lack understanding of a domain, he will get it by testing the system.
So basically nothing has changed from before AI.
You will have a good understanding of a system which is 20 times smaller in size/features.
For a todo app that is fine. But for most projects your competitor will leave you in the dust with the speed at which they add features.
Same story, 25 years ago:
> But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too.
What happens when the biggest feature that can be touted is concrete objective metrics about bugs/uptime/quality-stuff? Can't slop your way to having the "crafted with love and care, no bugs in production in the last 2 years" feature.
The argument against "they can do something else with their lives" is not a strawman though.
In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.
> In a hypothetical end state where the people who own fully-automated production of everything, and need maybe few millions employed to support and guard that production, the "freed" people are not going to do something better with their lives.
AI will bring about a post-scarcity society, just not for you, worker.
> there is no replacement for humans immersed in their world yet, so we need developers with with good understanding of the domain
It's not enough. The software model that you produce ends up becoming part of the domain. You need to understand the system. You are the only one who has the potential do that if you have the ability and are willing to work at it.
> I think a lot of shops are going to have to go through a couple years of Github-style "why the fuck is our service always down?" before they put 2 and 2 together.
I think it will be like the outsourcing wave in the early 2000s. A lot of places ended up pulling development back in house when it became unsustainable.
> I've never seen a company that was a., successful and b., prioritizing tech debt/upkeep at the same time.
Maybe you have only worked in start ups? I have certainly seen products fail or partially fail because of tech debt. One product was extremely unproductive to work on because of a patched together architecture. To the extent that bugs were introduced easily but took so long to turn around that customers left the product and told us that was the reason.
I have to be honest and say it's not very useful for me to hear you say this because you make your living from AI consulting and in a previous thread [1] you said that you don't review the code and then that you do. I'm not saying you have psychosis but your take on AI is inconsistent and confusing to me.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179477
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