Strange that the world worked before 2024 and software gets worse now. Your debit card transactions for example worked.
This sounds like a typical testimonial whose mind has become captive to Claude. It is like Scientology.
This sounds like a typical testimonial whose mind has become captive to Claude. It is like Scientology.
Let's be honest, most software always sucked. They are chock full of bugs, and we just often look back in time with rose tinted glasses.
How can you not see the progress?!
LLMs are a great thing for bug fixing. However they are not a miracle. You still need to do all the other things about finding, testing and fixing bugs.
You also need to care about bugs - vibe coding rarely cares about bugs.
if you're an MBA-brained exec who doesn't actively use LLMs to code and you just believe whatever slop it outputs at first without checking it, you're not going to realize how recklessly it can be used, how you need to be critical and skeptical of its outputs, that you need to explore it's reasoning and logic (which is still really easy compared to understanding legacy code and barely takes any time!)
say you also believe all this marketing hype about 'how dangerous (ie capable) AI agents are.' LLMs can do anything you think so you just say 'ship it' without building out the tooling and capabilities to enable faster code review and better tests. and to keep the shareholders happy, you start cutting jobs that you can't directly connect to a KPI (ie the platform/SRE team who would be the ones who can trial, onboard, and maintain those capabilities for your teams)
and from this, suddenly a lot of debit card stops working and the only one getting the blame are individual SWEs trying to hit their sprint velocity. the fact that you fucked up the whole SDLC real bad with your incompetence gets you a golden parachute and you job hop to a better paycheck. rinse and repeat
plus, it might just be me and my love of RPGs, strategy roguelikes, and 4X games but figuring out meta-process improvements for bespoke plugins and tooling feels very rewarding. being able to consistently have agents, for example, update a changelog in a straightforward and concise way whenever they're done with a slice of work without having to micro-manage it feels great and then allows you to iterate and improve on the outputs as you continue using it. it's something like a gamified loop, almost but the end result is you're better and faster at your job
Coding can have become cheaper and better. A lot of people who would not have been able to write software before now are. Add the ones that already have been able to write software, who will now use AI to do it better, and you might net "software is getting worse".
You should seek professional help about your emotional issues.
/s
It must have been a huge shock when you were suddenly transported from a working parallel universe into ours back in 2024.
I've built payment rails. Six nines SLA, high capacity, resilient distributed systems.
I haven't written a single line of code since February, and I don't think I ever will again. These systems are incredibly good at replacing much of our work. They're only going to get better.
Rather than debating if these models are good (they are), we should be trying to figure out if most of us will still be around in three years. You don't need a two pizza team anymore.
"Look to the person to your left and to your right. Only one of you will remain by graduation" kind of energy. I'm not sure all of us is going to be in this career much longer. We'll have to see what the demand side looks like.
On the other, my local pool company is hiring a software engineer and hardware engineer because with AI, they can replace a 2 pizza team as you so succinctly put it. So no two pizza teams but that doesn't mean all the pizzas are gone, they're maybe going to be spread out and not concentrated in CA, between orgs you might not have thought as "tech" before.
on-call still exists. have fun round robin'ing that with 3 engineers.
Ah, so you're still a few months out from the "yeah, maybe I don't really love this and maybe it won't ever actually work as well as I thought" turning point.
Note that AI hasn't yet solved making pizzas.