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Comment by Verdex | Hacker News Reader

That's my take as well. I've had my unPRed branches grabbed up and blindly merged by an agent twice now. The guy doing it was shocked both times that his PR had my change sets in it.

Also one engineer is treating the code as assembly. I've asked some pointed questions about code in his PR and the response was "yeah, I don't know that's what the agent did".

Edit:

To everyone freaking out about the second guy. Yeah, I think being unable to answer questions about the code you're PRing is ill advised. But requirement gathering, codebase untangling, and acceptance testing are all nontrivial tasks that surround code gen. I'm a bit surprised that having random change sets slurped up into someone else's rubber stamped PR isnt the thing that people are put off by.

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My friend is a CTO at a non-tech company and he's now dealing with code from non-SWEs trying to self serve with LLMs.

But it's like a kid running a lemonade stand. Total DIY weekend project quality stuff that they are demanding go live. Hardcoded credentials, no concept of dev/qa/prod environments, no logging, no tests, no source control.

I'm not really sure teaching basic SWE practices / SDLC / system design to people whose day job is like.. accounting makes sense compared to just accelerating developer productivity.

It’s the same dilemma as old: it’s easier to teach a doctor UML than a coder Doctoring. But, critically, that’s about making doctor-facing IT systems not performing their skilled jobs.

Bringing code does not help, but a validated user story with flow diagrams, a UI suggestion, and a valid ticket could. That’s the bridge to gap.

Were I that CTO I’d explain that code carries liability, SWEs can end up in jail for malfeasance, fines, penalties, and lawsuits are what awaits us for eff-ups. “Coders” get fired if their code doesn’t work. Same speech to the devs, do exactly as much unsolicited Accounting as you wanna get fired for. Talk fences, good neighbours.

The ROI on teaching UML to a doctor is pretty low though right?

Non-technical people are not writing tickets, they are just slinging slop.

Another anecdote of things I've seen - a non technical person setting up some web scraping monstrosity with 200k lines of code. They beat their chest about how they didn't need the IT org. 1 month goes by and of course it breaks as soon as anything on the website changes and now they have a gun to ITs head to "fix it" and take it over.

This outcome for a DIY brittle web scraper is obvious to anyone that's ever written code, but shocking to someone who thinks LLMs are magic.

No, you should have forward deployed engineers sitting and working right beside these traditional non SW roles if you need to fully integrate AI into their mix.

Right, unfortunately a lot of orgs are quickly letting loose some combination of non-tech self-serve AI coding and tech org staffing reductions rather than ADDING forward deployed engineers.

So he's being paid and is sitting there letting an AI tool do his work for him? Insanity.

We didn’t mind when typesetting was automated. Or when compilers were invented. Why is this different?

Do typesetters or compilers write the code for you? Or are you perhaps using a disingenuous analogy?

A compiler writes the ASM code for you, and the typesetter does the layout for you, yes absolutely.

The high level language code is a prompt for the compiler. Consider that there is parsable C code whose behavior is not even defined. There are still bugs in compilers today, where the code produced is not what you intended. And further, modern compilers do lots of work to optimize performance. You usually don’t even look at the resulting code, you just gratefully accept the rewrite for the extra oomph.

Because he's paid to deliver code that works. Letting an AI agent do everything would be fine if it didn't make any mistakes, but that's far from reality.

Compilers and typesetters make mistakes. Fewer as time goes on, but that’s not a categorical difference.

Resistance to technological change has been a thing since farming was invented. Socrates thought that writing will ruin everyone's memory, and that people who just rely on written word will appear knowledgeable while actually knowing nothing.

The only difference is that this is happening to us.

Do typesetters inexplicably change the meaning of the book or document being typeset? Do compilers alter the behavior intended by the programmer, sometimes in ways that are not immediately obvious? Did the invention of typesetters lead to investments so massive, that the investors had to herald the end of handwriting (no equivalent analogy for compilers)?

It reminds me of the guy who replaced his static blog deployment scripts with asking chatgpt to generate the html from his text based on a template, and said that he isn't sure that the llm isn't changing his writing but hopes it isn't

On compilers, you know they do! Compilers have bugs and some languages have undefined behavior.

On typesetters and investment: the WYSIWYG word processor is on almost every home and office desk in the world.

So I take we can soon replace coders entirely. Just fire all of them. And let some intern under VP prompt the whole thing?

To that last guy, as the manager I would say "What is it that you do here??"

That's just a straight-shooter with "upper management" written all over him.

“I’m the prompter.”

I take the prompts to the AI so the manager doesn't have to! I have prompting skills!!

I just can't make the joke work. There really are people that think they can get paid to press the agent's on button. How long before their checks stop clearing and it "just works itself out naturally"?

That's literally how some Meta AI jobs looked a few years back - set up a few parameters, push a button, wait until training and evals are finished; repeat if. needed. $500k+/year.

What color is your stapler?

> I take the prompts to the AI so the manager doesn't have to! I have prompting skills!!

This is honestly the mindset of the people on here who proudly proclaim that they haven't written a line of code in six months and are excited about what programming is "evolving" into. Naturally, _their_ AI skills aren't something that an "idea guy" can use to build a product without looping in a developer, so _his_ job is safe and will never go away -- "I understand system design, an LLM will never be able to do that!" Sure thing buddy.

do you... honestly not believe that system design is real???

That's not what I said. I said system design is not the exclusive domain of humans, so anyone thinking they possess some special knowledge of system design that an LLM isn't capable of obtaining are fooling themselves.