Management may eventually purge engineers that won’t adopt AI.
I sold out and use ai at work. I fucking hate it. Takes all the joy out of the job and makes me dumb(er)
Not really. I’m not really using LLMs (yet), but I’m not too concerned. If they purge me, they would’ve done it regardless of my LLM use.
For me, what’s important is that I can stand for the code I write, which I can only do if I have been an active part of the journey. When I’m in a meeting and anyone have a question about the software, I should be able to answer on the spot. Is this new feature easily feasible, or is a risky rewrite required? Can’t do that if my brain haven’t participated in the code.
I’m still one of the more productive members of the team as well.
do you fear your reluctance to use this technology will impact your career when other software engineers will use it in their work?
no. because eventually what goes up, must come down.
I’m currently working on a team that is trying to unfuck some dumbasses slopware. so far been at it for about a year. it’s going to be at least another year before it’s unfucked.
while all this is happening management is pushing for AI to be used in daily operations, so the sty continues to grow and grow. at this rate I’ll have a job cleaning up slopware for the rest of my life.
LLMs analyze ok, but are absolute shit at development. this is because LLMs cannot “think”. there’s zero cognitive abilities from an LLM. they just do what they’ve been told, full stop.
My career is already impacted by others using it, whether I use it or not. Those who rely heavily on LLMs produce worse and larger code, and those relying on it heavily are not the best in the first place. It’s turning -1x developers into -10x developers on account of them causing additional cognitive load on everyone else.
As for me? I don’t have FOMO. If I’m right and it’s a bubble that will collapse, then I’ll be better suited to weather it. If I’m wrong and LLMs are all they’re cracked up to be, then I will be able to get up to speed quickly.
I think it’s sadly both. Open Ai and Claude will probably die and bring the US economy with it, but the tech is here to stay until the next thing eclipses it.
If I’m wrong and LLMs are all they’re cracked up to be, then I will be able to get up to speed quickly.
That’s the way I see it too. And is this path occurs hopefully open LLMs will be widely available and at least close in performance to the expensive, privacy invading cloud LLMs.
Although it’s the non-programming related impacts of AI I’m more concerned about.
I’ve been experimenting with qwen2.5-coder:7b and it’s the perfect middle ground. Easily runs on 6 GB VRAM while automating boring stuff and letting me focus on new things.
I’ve been running qwen3 coder 30B and I’ve got to say, I’m unimpressed.
I sent it some lines of python for analysis to tell me what’s wrong with it. it miscounted the index number and said it was fine to run even though it was totally broken.
It constantly trips over itself in mid-sentence stating what it just said was wrong, and then finds a totally different way to be wrong.
it’s about as dumb as a brand new college dropout developer.
I actually really enjoy berating it and calling it stupid when it confidently gets things wrong, so that’s about all I keep it around for.
I’m planning on changing jobs this year, and every single job employer wants to talk about LLM usage. As much as I want to refuse, Id rather say i tried it and found it to be mostly useless than say i havent even tried it at all.
Watching the terrible devs on my team just get worse faster was all i needed to see to know that avoiding it would be good for my career. With the true cost of these AI companies finally revealing itself, this summer will be very interesting
Engineers avoiding its use and solving problems personally are playing the long game. They know that the current LLM tech will collapse - probably due to rising fees and the need to keep growing - and people will be ill-equipped to dig out from under the technical debt – a very real problem.
Not even slightly. Any engineering business going all in on AI is heading down the shitter fast so it’s a useful canary for the competent people on the payroll.
I’m lucky to be in a sector that’s generally too well regulated for slop to filter through, but we’re already seeing fixer upper jobs come in from firms who picked a cheap contract from some AI-first start up and now needs someone to make their new equipment actually work and up to code.
In most cases it’d be faster and cheaper to start over but sunk cost is a bitch.
In most cases it’d be faster and cheaper to start over but sunk cost is a bitch.
- We will need 6 months and $X to rebuild everything from scratch
- But we already have a semi-working thing, can’t you fix that instead?
- Oh right, then it would be 8 months and $2X to fix that.
That’s a generous estimate. When these jobs were a matter of correcting incompetent or lazy human work, you could depend on the problem being a lack of it - lack of compliant methods, lack of error handling, lack of required documentation.
With AI, the volume of work we’d need to comb through has exploded. There’ll be three different subroutines handling the same error, each tripping up the others using it’s own subtly wrong method, and all of it couched in thousands of lines of code handling errors that could not possibly happen.
There’ll be fifty instances referencing an ISO standard and if the standard does exist it’ll have the index wrong or just invent a plausible sounding line to support whatever method was used. Once any error like this is found, ALL of it needs to be verified.
Turning someone’s slop job into something I can sign off on is several times more work than just starting over, for a worse end result. If a client can’t be made to see thats I usually advise to not take the contract.
Management really wants to push me into using AI, but I genuinely haven’t found a use for it. It can’t handle complex things, trivial or repetitive things don’t need it, and I have two decades of content that no AI could ever reproduce.
The industry has become toxic because of it, I’m out
No, I have a value driven mindset. If it doesn’t provide value for my work I don’t use it.
My work will speak for itself over the hype. And if it doesn’t? Well someone will
I’m lucky enough that management doesn’t seem interested in forcing devs to use AI (they’re pretty hands-off in general) and that I’m a greybeard who made and maintains some pretty fundamental systems in a company that’s not very large. So I’m actually more worried about the double whammy of the AI bubble popping and the energy crisis caused by the Iran war. The company managed to survive the Great Recession and COVID, but still.
First, in my branch of programming there is only insufficient training data available to make an impact. Second, by now it is confirmed scientific knowledge that using LLMs heavily impacts a humans brain to think. Third, there are so many cases of LLMs producing shitty code that nobody will be able to maintain, this will be a serious technical debt to be dealt with in the future.
If it happens, I will pick a new career. Maybe something in waste disposal. I have a lot of experience with trash from interacting with management.
Management is paying for my AI use. After a month or so they noticed I hadn’t activated my account yet, so I did it. Haven’t ever used it. Management is happy.
I see some coworkers doing a ton of work within a day for some PoCs and that sort of stuff that I would never be able to do in the same time, but when it comes to actually fixing issues and completing tasks on average I’m still faster than everyone else.
I honestly can’t believe there are software engineers who think they can just completely ignore this technology and stay relevant.
I’m not an AI bro, I’m not happy with the direction the industry is heading. But saying this technology is useless and refusing to touch it has got to be some kind of coping mechanism. I, for one, intend to adapt and learn how to use the new tools to my advantage.
A very wise man once told me that you will adopt things naturally. Technology that will stick does not need to convince you.
- Smartphones
- Web …
When you need to be “convinced” it is not adequately thought through.
