Your code used to be a masterpiece, so well crafted it's easy for AI to tweak and modify because you've got everything so logically organised and scoped... and now this is what you're producing? Hard to debug monstrosities that only an LLM can realistically bolt new features or tweaks onto, because it can do the kinds of refactoring necessary each time.
We use to talk about the fact that code should be readable because you spend more time reading it than writing it, but I think that misses the key part that readable code is also typically easier to debug. If you can read and understand the code, you can follow the logic when things are wrong in production, and you can more easily reason about the emergent properties of interactions between the complex systems that are involved.
I jest, while in agreement with this whole comment. We used to care about fostering informed developers and maintaining high standards and good quality software.
I literally compared it to being an expert woodworker. Beautiful ornate decoration. Rich, sturdy mahogany, one of a kind, beveled edges and a fantastic stained hardwood.
Now it’s the 30$ Ikea cardboard stuff.
My biggest question is how many tables does the world need, and how many woodworkers will be required to build + maintain those table factories.
If you buy a house or rent an apartment in most of the US, any furniture will be stripped out, even if the only thing you plan to do with it afterwards is throw it away. Then the new tenant provides their own furniture, which they either moved from elsewhere at great expense or had to purchase on the spot. No part of this makes any sense. We don't strip countertops when selling a house even if they're unfashionable, we don't replace white goods, but somehow it's expected for the furniture.
If you buy a house in Hawaii, it's understood that you're buying the furniture that's already in the house. I assume the reason is that it's more difficult to obtain new furniture in Hawaii.
If you rent an apartment in China, it will come with furniture, because how else are you supposed to live in it? And if you're not happy with the furniture it's shown with, you negotiate with the landlord for the furniture you need.
If Americans sold their furniture when they moved instead of throwing it away, you'd see everyone using much higher-quality furniture. It would have come with their house. And providing it to houses that didn't have it yet would be an investment, just like the countertops.
> If you rent an apartment in China, it will come with furniture, because how else are you supposed to live in it?
I think with AI, most people are getting lazy to do it properly.
The other day, I deleted 65K LOC that were dead code or stupid explanations over very obvious code from a vibe coded repository which had 95K LOC (but should have 10k imo)
Do you even see anything underneath that rose tint ?
I've waded through unfamiliar code at 3am trying to figure out just why the hell things broke this time more times than I can care to remember, particularly trying to tease apart the ways that code has organically grown compared to the original intent. If I'm subjected to one more piece of "spooky at a distance" injected behaviour code I'll probably scream loud enough to be heard half way across the country.
It's still just leaps and bounds more readable than what people are slopping together (I do have some co-workers that have been extremely tightly focused on avoiding "slop" with their AI and doing a lot of tuning, and it's certainly preferable to the ones that haven't)
And this is the pattern I've seen on most (semi)successful projects I've worked on in the past - I'd say correlation between financial success and code quality is 0 (up to a point where the whole thing doesn't fall apart). Once scale (both in load and in code size/features) starts mattering you're stuck building on a foundation of shit. LLMs are very good at identifying and cleaning up said shit layers, as long as you're steering them towards a desireable outcome.
Not saying it doesn’t exist, just saying this sounds dangerously close to a boomer talking about the 1950s
Luckier than me. I've worked at a few places where the code was simultaneously brilliantly written[0] and also unmaintainable nonsense that caused endless problems. One place had its own object model and ORM that absolutely no-one currently at the place understood and literally every bug filed (whilst I was there) could be traced back to that code.
(Probably just a coincidence that most of those places where Perl shops but I've seen it with Go too...)
[0] In terms of "cleverness", not in terms of "maintainability" or "readability".
Only once?
Oh god, we're gonna do the four Yorkshiremen, aren't we?
there are several features over the last few months that were obviously made and deployed and no one even launched the dev server and tried a single thing to verify if it was right. just "pull my ticket, do my ticket, push my ticket. i am a developer."
I’ve seen monthly and quarterly executing results AI generated with plainly wrong factual information.
Time unfortunately that you are simply not given because the whole point is to work faster so expectations of velocity have of course increased.
So you end up having to get a fuzzy idea of a given changeset, look at it a bit and evaluate quickly if it's a good change or a bad one and click it through, and on to the next thing.
At the size of PRs being whole features and doing this 5x faster than before, all you've got left as a senior is your Spidey sense. As a junior.. no idea how they cope.
We'd all love to still spend that 90% thinking time, but it used to be justified by necessity of getting the job done. Now, it's just not a luxury that is afforded.
What can ya do.. I'm slowly learning to be the best bot herder I can be, but it certainly feels like a change in skillsets. I definitely only feel like I'm able to do a good job due to enough experience and building and growing software projects over time to have an idea of what kind of decisions might bite us down the road, as well as to know what maybe can't be known but is just worth a risk. Without that kind of intuition I think I'd feel like I was really shooting blind.
IME a lot of people are now subject to output-rate expectations that preclude doing much else, honestly.