drrob

There's plenty of places that still don't use any AI for coding - I work at one of them. There's far too many lies and nonsense out there, with "research" stating that 90% of software companies are using AI for most of their programming. This is clearly bollocks.

Well if he's not AI he needs to rewrite his blurb, because it sounds awful.

It's so awful it might not be written by AI, as AI normally writes stuff that's sterile and soulless but precise, whereas his description is just all over the place.

You're really not missing anything I'm afraid; if you're a shit coder it'll seem like voodoo magic, if you're a good coder it's good in certain circumstances (parsing logs, interpreting debug messages, that sort of thing) but won't replace you.

Faster? Maybe. Better? Ha. If you honestly think the code quality and perf of AI's code is better than a half-decent human engineer then you're in the wrong line of work. Or you're just an AI bot...yep, that one.

They've been trained on thousands of productivity/influencer/passive-income grift blogs that surfaced in the post '4 Hour Work Week' era, when hustle culture was born.

I consumed A LOT of those blogs back then, and let me tell you they're clearly the basis that AI has learnt from, if you dig some up and read them it's very obvious.

And 6' is basically 6'2"...

You've not been a member here that long, so showing off stuff you've built will appear disingenuous and like you're just here to self-promote and grift. HN isn't really about that.

Spend a couple of years engaging with the site, adding to the discourse, and then look into showcasing your own stuff after that.

Indeed, I have tried this route, but for anything more than a really simple app it's just not effective enough.

I'm have a game on both app stores, built in .net Maui. It earns enough to keep a roof over my head.

AI is useless when developing with Maui, as it's too new of a development framework for any AI's knowledgebase to have a clue what to do with it.

Fair enough.

The original Colonization.

It's a good job I wasn't being interviewed for this job, as I have not one iota of a smidge of a clue what PEFT and LORA are. And I have no idea what varieties of prompting technique there are.

Not bothering with any kind of git setup any more, I've reverted back to some good old fashioned folder snapshot backups every time I finish a new version of what I'm working on.

Nope. I removed my personal code from GitHub a few weeks ago.

Indeed, there's quite the echo-chamber of agentic encouragement going on, but the overwhelming feeling is that everyone's shilling and no one's buying.

We strictly don't use agentic development, so it's not so much a problem for us. Copying and pasting from LLMs is about the height of our AI use, aside from the AI auto-complete in Visual Studio, and any new starters are made aware during the interview process that agentic dev isn't permitted, so we cut it off at the source.

I got back into board games in about 2013, then when the pandemic came around and in-person wasn't viable we hit Board Game Arena big time for about 18 months.

Online isn't as nice as in-person, but it sufficed.

As what is regarded as an 'old programmer', I wouldn't worry. AI may well be 60% faster at coding, but the quality is more like 90% worse. Like everything new, give it time: the hype will settle down, some AI companies will go bust, and everything will be fine.

I don't really program with AI, as I find the code quality pretty poor.

I use Retool for all our internal tools. I like the fact that somebody else is looking after the hosting of the dozen little one-purpose applications I've built, and it all just works.

Ultimately I'm just after a quiet life.

Fortunately it does not. I'm in Nottinghamshire, and the only way I used to be able to do £100k round here was contracting, but the times they are a changing it seems.

The ones I see coming up repeatedly on LinkedIn are real jobs, but for places with high staff churn - Bet365 in Stoke for instance have a voracious appetite for recruiting System Development Managers, mainly because they can't get anyone to stay in the role more than a month.

In the UK tech hiring is fairly buoyant at the moment, and the salaries being offered have got some long-needed growth (over this last year we've begun seeing 6 figure senior developer jobs in the east midlands, whereas a couple of years ago getting a £60k salary for a senior in the east midlands was quite the achievement).

I think I'm doing just fine, thanks for your concern.

The most recent logic I tried getting it to code for me was to make me some recursive C# functions to reverse navigate a node map (a Microsoft Project plan with various feeding chains) to calculate all possible paths, and return them as a list of objects.

It kept producing code that looked to eye that it might work, but each time I ran it it would just throw schoolboy exceptions. I got tired of telling it to correct the things it kept forgetting to check for (nulls, path starts, empty lists), and just coded it from scratch myself.

I find ChatGpt is like pair-programming with a junior, except I'm not getting paid to coach them like I would if it were an actual graduate hire.

They're still pretty dreadful. They're better than I was at 21, so I'd say they're good for graduate level, but nothing beyond that.

Thanks ChatGpt.

I find it writes them like a boring neighbour who hasn't talked to anyone for a few days; it just seems to reiterate the same thing three times, worded slightly differently, but not adding anything extra with each sentence, like there's a word count it's aiming for.

My least favourite part of the auto complete is how wordy the comments it wants to create are. I never use the comments it suggests.

I've only recently begun using copilot auto-complete in Visual Studio using Claude (doing C# development/maintenance of three SaaS products). I've been a coder since 1999.

The suggestions are correct about 40% of the time, so I'm actually surprised when they're right, rather than becoming reliant on them. It saves me maybe 10 minutes a day.

Micro Men. British film about the beginnings of Spectrum and Acorn.