- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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He also said the AI-generated code is often full of bugs. He cited one issue that occurred before his arrival that meant there was no session handling in his employer’s application, so anybody could see the data of any organization using his company’s software.
It’s only financial software, NBD.
Well to be fair, financial data should be public, it would stop so many crimes, so much corruption.
Maybe AI saw the problems that hidden financial data causes and just decided to do the world a favor!
Lead and senior dev/architect here - not forced to use AI, but I spend my PD (personal development) days and hackathons trying out all new things, as every good dev, and anyone not trying out all the new AI tools is doing themselves a disservice. You will find out which ones are “AI slop”, which are just fancy stored procs or web apps, and which are actually useful for you and/or your job.
I agree that workplaces shouldn’t be mandating the use of AI, but that’s very rarely the case.
My team and I have implemented Agentic AI into the business in ways that will save literally thousands of man-hours a year, as well as drastically reduce support tickets, and give non-devs extremely powerful insights into real time analytics that they’ve never been able to have even with PowerBi/Kibana/AppInsights/etc.
The software engineer acknowledged that AI tools can help improve productivity if used properly, but for programmers with relatively limited experience, he feels the harm is greater than the benefit.
So it’s just like every other tool out there for developers and most other professions.
Honestly it’s getting to be like people blaming stackexchange for their code being shit and not working when all they did was copy/paste a solution from there.
“A poor tradesman blames his tools” as they say.
Did people stand up and clap?
As per usual, those pushing for AI the most are the ones who don’t fucking use it.
Is AI good for printing out the syntax, or an example of a library you haven’t used before?
Sure, sometimes yes. Sometimes no.
Should it be a requirement to be a regular part of software development?
No. AI hallucinates very often and is imitative in nature, not innovative.
And as per usual, those hating AI the most are the ones who don’t use it, don’t understand it, and/or hate it out of some misguided ideology.
Imitative is fine, great even in software development. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Programming languages/class libraries/etc all exist to give standard and functioning ways to do things the way they’re supposed to be done.
It’s funny that developers the world over absolutely loved and embraced tools like resharper, which was basically AI 0.5 for devs, yet now when AI is the evolution of that, everyone’s losing their mind.
Knowledge of AI tools absolutely will and should be a part of developer competencies that are evaluated during interviews in the near future, and that includes being able to explain why and when you would/would not use specific AI tools.
And as per usual, those hating AI the most are the ones who don’t use it, don’t understand it, and/or hate it out of some misguided ideology.
I’m a software engineer and I use AI on a regular basis.
This shit isn’t fit to take on the vast majority of jobs dipshit CEOs or the pseudointellectuals who fondle their balls claim they can.
Imitative is fine, great even in software development.
Fine as a tool for software engineers to figure out complications with understanding code syntax or generating an example of some not so complicated code.
It is fucking unreliable for full software development, which is what these tech oligarchs are trying to put it in charge of.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Programming languages/class libraries/etc all exist to give standard and functioning ways to do things the way they’re supposed to be done.
And AI is shit at making full implementations of that, let alone objectively or even rationally testing itself. If it doesn’t recognize an error in its own coding, why the hell would we trust it to recognize that error in testing?
It’s funny that developers the world over absolutely loved and embraced tools like resharper, which was basically AI 0.5 for devs, yet now when AI is the evolution of that, everyone’s losing their mind.
Because dumb fucks in power think AI is this magical tool that can do no wrong and do everything humans can do and better.
We are FAR AWAY from that being a reality for the reasons I already covered, and more.
Also, absolutely no company worth a damn has ever pushed anything from Resharper or AI to its millions of customers without human verification first. CEOS WANT TO ELIMINATE THAT HUMAN VERIFICATION! THATS A PROBLEM!
Knowledge of AI tools absolutely will and should be a part of developer competencies that are evaluated during interviews in the near future, and that includes being able to explain why and when you would/would not use specific AI tools.
Except, and I want you to pay close attention to this,
CEOS WANT TO TOTALLY ELIMINATE THE HUMAN FACTOR FROM SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENTIRELY
Not partially
Not kinda sorta
ENTIRELY
Because they simply fundamentally do not understand what AI is, nor it’s restrictions.
And it’s very clear, you don’t either.
I’ve been refusing to use any AI tools at all and luckily my manager respects that, even if he uses AI for basically everything he does. If the company ever decides to mandate it I’ll just have the AI write all my code and commit it with no checks. With the worker’s rights here, it’ll take several months to fire me anyways.
I’ve been refusing to use and AI tools at all
Why? Do you refuse to use autocomplete in IDEs too? Do you refuse to use build and release tools? Why stop there - do you refuse to use computers at all? Just use pen and paper.
Because it’s not fun. Coming up with algorithms and elegant code is the most fun part about programming for me, and debugging pages of sloppy code is the least fun. AI makes the parts I like less fun and increases the amount of sloppy bullshit code I have to debug.
Do you think it is possible for someone to have different reactions to different things?
Don’t use auto complete, do use lsp, build and release tools are not at all in the same vein.
My team have been trying it. So far, at best, it costs money but makes no difference in outcomes. Any productivity gains are wiped out by the time needed to diagnose and correct the errors it introduces.
I’d use Clippy before I use any of that time-wasting, unreliable, energy-guzzling crap.
Managers are often idiots in over their heads. AI is really aggravating that problem.
“We were still required to find some ways to use AI. The one corporate AI integration that was available to us was the Copilot plugin to Microsoft Teams. So everyone was required to use that at least once a week. The director of engineering checked our usage and nagged about it frequently in team meetings.”
The managerial idiocy is astounding.
It’s pretty easy to set up a cron job to fire off some sort of bullshit LLM request a handful of times a day during working hours. Just set it and forget it.
Not when you have to do SAML authentication to get a token for your AD account first.
Unless you know that guy working on both API management and the identity provider.
If, hypothetically, someone came to that person with a problem like that, they might do it just for fun. Allegedly.
You can even schedule it within copilot
you could probably even get copilot to write it!
“Prompt yourself with some bullshit so that it looks like you’re doing something productive.”
Who knows, maybe that’s how you attain AGI? What is a more human kind of intelligence than looking for ways to be a lazy fuck?
Prompt an LLM to contemplate its own existence every 30 minutes, give it access to a database of its previous outputs on the topic, boom you’ve got a strange loop. IDK why everyone thinks AGI is so hard.
The software engineer acknowledged that AI tools can help improve productivity if used properly, but for programmers with relatively limited experience, he feels the harm is greater than the benefit. Most of the junior developers at the company, he explained, don’t remember the syntax of the language they’re using due to their overreliance on Cursor.
Good luck for the future developers I guess.
companies that’ve spent money on AI enterprise licenses need to show some sort of ROI to the bean-counters. Hence, mandates.
Can’t wait for AI bubble to pop. If this continues, expect more incidents/outages due to AI generated slop code in the future.
Future developers will still have to learn the basics. Calculators existing doesn’t mean people aren’t taught basic maths, does it?
From what I see, the current is beginning to turn a little toward valuing senior devs more than ever, because they can deal with the downsides of AI. Junior devs, on the other hand, cannot, and their simpler coding work is also more easily replaced by AI. So we’ll see fewer junior dev jobs, but seniors might do fine. I’m not sure that’s good news for the profession as a whole, but its been an extremely long gold rush into software and online services so some correction probably won’t be the end of the trade.
Oh and yes senior devs are still hounded to use AI, because it will get them further, faster. And there are no more junior devs to help. In the hands of a skilled dev, AI tools can be powerful, and they can spare some toil, and help them find their feet in less familiar frameworks and in foreign codebases.
💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯
A good developer learns the tools that are available and uses them appropriately. A bad developer refuses to learn new tools and will be replaced by someone who already did.
The problems in software still remain the same though:
(1) Bureaucracy
(2) Needless process
(3) Pointy headed managers
(4) Siloed teams
(5) Product people who have no idea what they want to build
(6) Shitty, poorly performing legacy code nobody wants to touch
Honestly, AI is just the latest thing that can boost your productivity at starting up some random app. But that was never the difficult part anyway.
We are pushing our product managers to communicate their requirements with live prototypes rather than PRDs and mockups. It forces them to actually think their ideas through, and even allows them to get some hallway feedback before even bothering an eng. This might help with #5. But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses. If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.
But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses.
Not all process is pointless, but needless process by definition is. There are also a shit ton of things that stop engineers from “striking out on their own”.
If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.
The whole talk of “go[ing] it alone” kinda strikes me as “bootstrapping”, libertarian non-sense.
I don’t want to do marketing, sales, finance, legal, and product bullshit myself. That’s why I’m an employee.
Two things can be true at the same time, for instance, a company can have a lot of bloated, needless process that stifles people and still pull in enough money to be able to pay for their employees to live a life.
With the amount of market concentration there is in every sector as far as the eye can see, nearly every software-producing company has a cash cow of some sort, and then has a bunch of complete money losers that are subsidized by that cash cow.
So, it’s completely possible that the company overall fully sucks and hasn’t developed anything new of value to someone in decades, but the legacy business keeps the miserable employees from the bread line.
To return to the point, AI doesn’t solve any of this or even help with it.
This, so much this.
When I think about what limited my performance in the last year it was mostly:
- Having to get 5 signatures before I am allowed the budget to install some FOSS software on my work PC that the corporation has already approved for use on work PCs
- Spending 8 months working on a huge feature that was scrapped after 8 months of development
- Being told that no, we cannot work on another large feature request (of which there are many in the pipeline) because our team said we can only fit that scrapped feature into this year and we are not allowed to replan based on the fact that the feature we were supposed to work on got scrapped by business
And then they tell us to return to office and use AI for increasing efficiency.
It’s all an elaborate play performed by upper management to feign being in control and being busy with something. Nobody is actually interested in producing a product, they all just want to further their own position.
The problem is the N+2 is in on it too. And so on. “It just works!”
Nothing tells that AI is a clever use of your ressources like enforcing a mandatory AI query quota for your employees, and having them struggle to find anything it’s good at and failing.
So, it’s a DAI requirement
For the FAANG companies, they do it in part so they can then turn around and make those flashy claims you see in headlines like “95% of ours devs use [insert AI product they are trying to sell] daily” or “60% of our code base is now ‘written’ by our fancy AI”.
I’ll admit, some tools and automation are hugely improved with new ML smarts, but nothing feels dumber than hunting for problems to fit the boss’s pet solution.
Like what?
claude performs acceptably at repetitive tasks when I have an existing pattern for it to follow. “Replicate PR 123, but to add support for object Bar instead of Foo”. If I get some of this busy work in my queue I typically just have claude do it while I’m in a meeting.
I’d never let it do refactors or design work, but as a code generation tool that can use existing code as a template, it’s useful. I wouldn’t pay an arm and a leg for it, but burning $2 while I’m in a meeting to kill chore tasks is worth it to me.
Agree, I’ve been using claude extensively for about a month, before that for little stuff for about 3 months. It is great at little stuff. It can whip out a program to do X in 5 minutes flat, as long as X doesn’t amount to more than about 1000 lines of code. Need a parser to sift through some crazy combination of logic in thousands of log files: Claude is your man for that job. Want to scan audio files to identify silence gaps and report how many are found? Again, Claude can write the program and generate the report for you in 5 minutes flat (plus whatever time the program takes to decode the audio…)
Need something more complex, nuanced, multi-faceted? Yeah, it is still easier to do most of the upper level design stuff yourself, but if you can build a system out of a bunch of little modules, AI is getting pretty good at writing the little modules.
For example the tools for the really tedious stuff, like large codebase refactoring for style keeping, naming convention adherence, all kinds of code smells, whatever. Lots of those tools have gotten ML upgrades and are a lot smarter and more powerful than what I remember from a decade ago (intellisense, jetbrains helper functions, various opinionated linter toolchains, and so forth).
While I’ve only experimented a little with some the more explicitly generative LLM-based coding assistant plugins, I’ve been impressed (and a little spooked) at how good they often were at guessing what I’m doing way before I finished doing it.
I haven’t used the prompt-based LLMs at all, because I’m just not used to it, but I’ve watched nearby devs use them for stuff like manipulating a bunch of files in a repeated pattern, breaking up a spaghetti method into reusable functions, or giving a descriptive overview of some gnarly undocumented legacy code. They seem pretty damn useful.
I’ll integrate the prompt-based tools once I can host them locally.
In the work I have done with Claude over the past months, I have not learned to trust it for big things - if anything the opposite. It’s a great tool, but - to anthropomorphize - it’s “hallucination rate” is down there with my less trustworthy colleagues. Ask it to find all instances of X in this code base of 100 files of 1000 lines each… yeah, it seems to get bored or off-track quite a bit, misses obvious instances, finds a lot but misses too much to say it’s really done a thorough review. If you can get it to develop a “deterministic process” for you (shell script or program) and test that program, then that you can trust more, but when the LLM is in the loop it just isn’t all there all the time, and worse: it’ll do some really cool and powerful things 19/20 times, then when you think you can trust it it will screw up an identical sounding task horribly.
I was just messing around with it and I had it doing a files organization and commit process for me, was working pretty good for a couple of weeks, then one day it just screwed up and irretrievably deleted a bunch of new work. Luckily it was just 5 minutes of its own work, but still… that’s not a great result.
These scummy fucks even put it as a requirement in job descriptions these days
This is a red flag for corpo culture shenanigans. Dodge the bullet.
What even is the requirement? “Must be able to ask a chatbot to do stuff”?
Then unionize! Nothing else will stop this.
A bit of patience, the burst of that bubble is coming… (https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2025/10/15/ai-bubble-may-pop---wiping-out-40-trillion-learn-what-could-happen-and-what-to-do/)
And it won’t be the rich that get hurt when the AI bubble bursts. It will be us.
I’d like the bubble to be true so that we can move past this nonsense phase, and it may well be true, but I could also see it being extended for years potentially, since there’s so much money being pumped into it, and governments are also buying into the hype.
Unions is not really a concept that is available to devs. At least around here.
I just attended an organizer training, and 70% of the people there were devs. Don’t believe the corporate bullshit, unions are for everyone.
No need to unionise when you have the power to make a startup.
But then first you need the power and ability to make a startup.
