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Comment by markhammond68 | Hacker News Reader

After 40 years in development I have never known a time like this. Half of my colleagues seem to be in denial, the other half seem to be slowly cracking up. The future is going to be very different, very soon.

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It's depressing. Those in denial are really difficult to work with now.. they have a hard time adapting to such fundamental changes but their denial leads to sabotaging the adaption efforts of the rest. The other half like you mentioned is only slowly cracking up like still trying to grasp that this ai thing isn't some new tool you will have mastered in a few days. There are right now only very few people who have mastered state of the art ai development and they would like to work with only those also in this camp because it's so depressing to watch the majority of developers wrestling to find their spot in this new world.

You know, the thing I miss most about the old world is how people would have imposter syndrome. Now they have whatever this is.

I think it is some interesting mix of Dunning Kruger and Gambler's Fallacy.

Now the impostors use AI and pretend they are geniuses. That will work, for a while. But I have seen two cases up close now where a relatively stable code base was wrecked inside of 6 months by juniors posing as seniors. In one of these the actual seniors left and now the company has a bit of a problem. I've declined to help fix it, I suggested they re-engage with the people that left, double their salaries and allow them to roll back to when things were still stable but they're not having it, so I don't think it is going to end well for them. You can use AI responsibly, and it will definitely help with some tasks and as long as you are able to contain what gets produced and pace it to the speed at which you can review. But there is a cadre of people that are 'all in' on this, they only see velocity, they don't see the approaching wall. Impact is a given.

It’s like trying to create a new type of imposter syndrome, but instead of referring to complex data structures and architectures, it’s the most effective esoteric inactions to chant at the Jira ticket resolving machine.

What is the current “state of the art” of AI development? Aside from running as many agents as possible, the models seem to have gotten to a place where iterative, straight-forward prompting works pretty well. SDD frameworks and such might have helped at one point but they seem like document bloat noise now.

You do projects using low code, no code platforms like Workato, Boomi,....

Where execution diagrams and integrations are now replaced by agents and prompts.

Tools integrations exist, but even those can be done with prompting.

At least on the world of enterprise consulting with SaaS products, the reality is already quite grimm.

care to elaborate a bit on this? how exactly does being a skeptic "sabotage" a team, are you saying that if teams are not becoming 10000000000X engineers it's entirely the fault of the one skeptic in the room?

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