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Comment by thunderbong | Hacker News Reader

14 pointsthunderbong7 comments

Summary: a story of software engineer as fruit ranked in a non descript software company, doing non-descript work. ( probably “software” )

I struggle to see any arguments.

And I agree with the general feeling. But beside cute image of fruits and some funny graphic, nothing is backing that opinion.

Borrowing vocabulary from the cryptocurrency cult should tell you everything there is to know about this post.

Fully agree, the whole thing reads like wishful thinking by someone with a severe lack of skills.

I don't foresee anyone in the bottom quantile magically becoming a 16x developer just by adopting AI editors. True 10x developers write less code, which is why they can be more agile in reacting to changing requirements. A developer who was previously too verbose and lacked experience isn't going to get more concise with AI, more like the opposite. And they'll deprive themselves of the opportunity to grow their experience by letting AI handle all the nitty gritty details.

In my opinion, AI turns a -1x developer into a -16x developer... The sign matters.

"they stumble upon new techniques that enable them to do 16x the work output of everyone else - LLMs and AI powered Code Editors."

This is completely wrong.

If you are doing 16x output, with this new tech you are a liability.

If the company is full of people doing this it will either sink or it will realise it's sinking and bring in people to fix it.

And if those people they bring in who knows what they’re doing aren’t using AI after a certain point, that company isn’t going to make it either.

OP is talking about learning, we all did it at some point, and yes you were a liability too. Learning done through an LLM is the closest you can get to 1:1 training without having it.

The article though also largely talks about more experienced engineers not using it as a tool to increase their leverage. In which case it’s not all that different than throwing a task off to a JR engineer and reviewing this work. Even a JR Engineer who is well read on the latest research.

But most people don’t do research. Considering 70% of software engineers mainly write crud or mobile apps these days… this liability argument is really looking shaky.

Liability from what? taking out staging or even making a bug out to prod? Should you be learning space flight control systems as you code them? No. Should a jr engineer us it to learn how to do a left join that’s getting code reviewed anyway? Yeah that’s probably going to be faster than them polling team resources. Just the same as hitting google.

Startups for instance are usually more incentivized to move fast than deliver a bug free product. Large companies usually are too. That’s why software always needs updates.

I am sure we can all enumerate fields and projects where it’s problematic and dangerous to human life to accept ai output. But the vast majority of people on this site don’t work in those fields, and companies in those fields should already have (and likely do already have) control processes in place.

If you’re a company with no control processes, and you’re terrified by the prospect of ai code because of legitimate danger to your users… and you think it’s you… the engineer… holding back the gates… your company also is not going to make it.

Previously posted by the article author himself 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42970842

Since we're on the topic, is it just me or does GitHub Copilot seem worse than it was on release? Posts like these lead me to believe that some developers are out there halving the amount of code they write, but Copilot often fails for me even with very explicit instructions about how I want something implemented. In fact, ChatGPT seems to fare better, even though it's both OpenAI's 4o (switching to Antropic's model does not help).

What should I use to replace me?

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