This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
AI is really great for small apps. I've saved so many hours over weekends that would otherwise be spent coding a small thing I need a few times whereas now I can get an AI to spit it out for me.
But anything big and it's fucking stupid, it cannot track large projects at all.
I don't really agree, I think that's kind of a problem with approaching it. I've built some pretty large projects with AI, but the thing is, you have to approach it the same way you should be approaching larger projects to begin with - you need to break it down into smaller steps/parts.
You don't tell it "build me an entire project that does X, Y, Z, and A, B, C", you have to tackle it one part at a time.
Same thing would happen if they were a non-coder project manager or designer for a team of actual human programmers.
Stuff done, shipped and working.
“But I can’t understand the code 😭”, yes. You were the project manager why should you?
Great article, brave and correct. Good luck getting the same leaders who blindly believe in a magical trend for this or next quarters numbers; they don't care about things a year away let alone 10.
I work in HR and was stuck by the parallel between management jobs being gutted by major corps starting in the 80s and 90s during "downsizing" who either never replaced them or offshore them. They had the Big 4 telling them it was the future of business. Know who is now providing consultation to them on why they have poor ops, processes, high turnover, etc? Take $ on the way in, and the way out. AI is just the next in long line of smart people pretending they know your business while you abdicate knowing your business or employees.
Hope leaders can be a bit braver and wiser this go 'round so we don't get to a cliffs edge in software.
We’re about to face a crisis nobody’s talking about. In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on. The leaders who’ve abdicated to algorithms won’t have the wisdom to share.
Except we are talking about that, and the tech bro response is "in 10 years we'll have AGI and it will do all these things all the time permanently." In their roadmap, there won't be a next generation of software developers, product managers, or mid-level leaders, because AGI will do all those things faster and better than humans. There will just be CEOs, the capital they control, and AI.
What's most absurd is that, if that were all true, that would lead to a crisis much larger than just a generational knowledge problem in a specific industry. It would cut regular workers entirely out of the economy, and regular workers form the foundation of the economy, so the entire economy would collapse.
"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
That's why they're all-in on authoritarianism.
So there's actual developers who could tell you from the start that LLMs are useless for coding, and then there's this moron & similar people who first have to fuck up an ecosystem before believing the obvious. Thanks fuckhead for driving RAM prices through the ceiling... And for wasting energy and water.
Fractional CTO: Some small companies benefit from the senior experience of these kinds of executives but don't have the money or the need to hire one full time. A fraction of the time they are C suite for various companies.
The developers can’t debug code they didn’t write.
This is a bit of a stretch.
agreed. 50% of my job is debugging code I didn't write.
I think this kinda points to why AI is pretty decent for short videos, photos, and texts. It produces outputs that one applies meaning to, and humans are meaning making animals. A computer can't overlook or rationalize a coding error the same way.
so the obvious solution is to just have humans execute our code manually. Grab a pen and some crayons, go through it step by step and write variable values on the paper and draw the interface with the crayons and show it on a webcam or something. And they can fill in the gaps with what they think the code in question is supposed to do. easy!
Something any (real, trained, educated) developer who has even touched AI in their career could have told you. Without a 3 month study.
What's funny is this guy has 25 years of experience as a software developer. But three months was all it took to make it worthless. He also said it was harder than if he'd just wrote the code himself. Claude would make a mistake, he would correct it. Claude would make the same mistake again, having learned nothing, and he'd fix it again. Constant firefighting, he called it.
FYI this article is written with a LLM.
Don't believe a story just because it confirms your view!
