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Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

I do not look forward to the amount of incompetence and noise that increasing adoption of these tools will usher in. I've already had to deal with a codebase in which it was clear that the author fundamentally misunderstood what a trie data structure was. I was also having an difficult time trying to talk to them about the implementation and their misconceptions. lo and behold I eventually find out the reason they chose this data structure was because they asked ChatGPT what to do and they never actually understood, conceptually, what they were doing or using. This made the whole engagement with the code and process of fixing things way harder. Not only did I now have to fix the bunk code, I also had to spend significant time disabusing the author of their own misunderstandings...

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So, AI created a job opportunity for you?

I suppose that's one way to look at it. But it's a sort of "bs" unproductive job, fixing up poor outcomes, and overall a less efficient scenario that experts doing it right in the first place. Worse, there was already a readily available implementation that could have been used here rather than a hand-rolled, half-baked AI output. In that respect, the code itself was pure noise and the whole activity was predominantly a waste of my time.

Sounds like outsourcing/offshoring!

> But it's a sort of "bs" unproductive job, fixing up poor outcomes, and overall a less efficient scenario that experts doing it right in the first place.

I expect this theme to repeat all the time from now on.

And also I expect it to crimp the growth of several people, because the AI solves the simplest problems and then they face an insurmountable wall trying to learn every concept at the same time when they need a small increment in code realism.

Software development will probably become extremely profitable for the people that can do it properly on the next couple of decades.

The problem is the asinine interviews we are going to have to tolerate in order to screen against AI-kiddies. You think HackerRank is bad? Just you wait...

Here's me hoping that hiring managers / HR will finally start actually calling references and/or checking open source contributions. I have plenty of both, and in my 14 year career have had only 2 companies call my references, 1 check my open source work. So far they all just give me some bs test job to prove that I can do basic CRUD programming despite being a senior engineer, over and over and over again, which could all be avoided with just a phone call and a basic conversation about tech stuff with their technical team ... but they are either lazy, incompetent, or a combination of both, so I get a bs test job - sometimes even before I manage to actually get the first interview. I decline all of these, of course, but there's so many and it has made job searching quite difficult.

You had someone check your work?

That's awesome!

Never happened so far in my 26 year career. It' almost as if they're hiring for something else than solving problems and writing code. Following orders, most likely.

To be fair I figure it was only because I applied for a Clojure job, which is a pretty niche thing, and so perhaps that attracts people who are actually interested in you as a human being and not just a number in a spreadsheet. Since then I've gone back to mainstream and it has not happened again.

>Not only did I now have to fix the bunk code, I also had to spend significant time disabusing the author of their own misunderstandings...

People with your attitude will be the first to be replaced.

Not because you code isn't as good as an AI; maybe it's even better. But because your personality makes you a bad teammate.

I'm venting about it here, to strangers. Don't assume I treat my coworkers the same way. I was very pleasant and patient during this process, even though it was tedious. I'm well aware being pleasant is a major part of working well with others.

That’s called consultancy and you can bill chunky rates by the hour. You should be rubbing your hands with glee!

And then work out how to do code review and fixing using AI, lightly supervised by you so that you can do it all whilst walking the dog or playing croquet or something.

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