Technology

I joined a project that was forced to use some vibe coded solution that an intern cooked up -- marketed as "solution for data pipelining".

There are no tests, every semantic query calculates embeddings every time, and there is help together with so much bubble gum and "glue code" that nobody feels confident with any of the data were showing our customer.

It's great for rapid prototyping, and then straight to the trash.

Preach.

The AI "revolution" is the thing that finally killed my imposter syndrome as a software engineer. Not because I can write better code than AI (that's a very low bar), but from listening to all these breathless idiots talk about how they're "10x-ing my productivity!" or how "AI has replaced search for me!" or how "In 6 months no one will have to manually write code anymore!"

Honestly yeah its like wearing a huge red AI flag. Can't imagine being stupid enough to fall in love with a not-secure CHATBOT.

AI also gives you the benefits of a middle manager. If everything works as intended you take the credit but if something breaks that's not your fault, AI made the mistake. If they try to put the blame on you just say you have 6 agents working on 6 different domains all cross-reviewing their commits and you can't be expected to review every single line of code yourself. Time to play corporate like a damned fiddle!

Saved me a paragraph there.

Metric or imperial byte?

Computers famously love prime numbers greater than 2 as a foundation for structure and logic.

Knowing this is my competition makes me feel much better about myself

..easy foundational questions like how many bits in a byte..

GTFO.

I mean, yeah.. perhaps it's to be expected. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z - if this is true, it's as the methods of using computers and various devices has been infantilized and made too easy.

Yeah.. let's obscure the inner working of computing and make the process as opaque to the user as possible. It'll be fine.. no negative consequences at all.

Colleges do not matriculate anymore (that's in the British sense of the word, where one has to show actual knowledge in the degree field one is seeking before enrolling, and TBH, they haven't done so for a very long time, actually..) so this is what we get.

Higher ed in the US is just about da moneys..

I feel like I'm being gaslit as I keep reading that there are developers that feel they successfully offloaded the task of coding.

That's because you are being gaslit.

The people making those claims are either a) not developers in the first place, with no awareness of just how shit the "products" they're pushing are, b) paid astroturfers trying to prop up AI, or c) former actual developers who've become addicted to the speed that's possible with AI who are downplaying how crappy their own code quality has become because they have no familiarity with their codebase anymore and have forgotten how to do so much as a for loop.

All these people claiming 10x or 100x gains, and everything they're making is garbage no one should or would touch with a ten-foot pole.

what it seems to be doing, in your case and others i have seen, is pushing the burden onto those who “care” and really fully grok (no pun intended) the concept of a real code review. it’s exhausting.

The atrophy scares the hell out of me.

Years ago, I would often have long conversations with my dad about how manual skill sets in the trades (my training) and in engineering in the field (which was his bailiwick) were being lost to the pivot towards college degrees for every student, including the ones that preferred to work with their hands.

Three decades on, I witnessed the full turn when construction firms had to - and still have to - mass import workers from Central and South America (legally and illegally) just to get things built. NGL, there are some scary good builders that have been brought in, and those people work insanely hard.

Yes, it's slowly pivoting back as more boys and men opt for the trades and become journeymen and apprentices, but to get the skillsets needed to get to a master's level, you're looking at at least 20k hours. Wer're still a decade out - at best - before we get enough kids through the system and into steady work that they can step up and strike out on their own and make crazy bank. Skilled craftsmen and women can earn 100 bucks an hour - easily - in the right markets, and the rich folks will be glad to pay.

Goddamn, it's gonna be scary until that sorts itself out in another decade or so (and that does pin itself on the hope the financially feckless idiot in the White House doesn't torpedo the economy..)

If I was paying for it, hell naw. But if my employer not only is willing to pay for it, but considers it a performance metric? I'm going to use it for fucking everything. These are the incentives they give me, I'm going to follow the incentives. Talking to Claude is what they pay me for, apparently.

But like the article says, if I don't continue practicing on my own code in my unpaid off-work hours, I imagine I'd be regressing in my skills too. I do that because I enjoy it as a hobby, but if I didn't, I could see myself and probably a lot of other people getting rugpulled by this.

The thing that scares me (and why I've stopped using it): my brain automatically reaches for the shortcut whenever I would have to do deep thinking/planning.

I have ADD, so getting my brain to focus and work on a task is not an easy feat to begin with. Now I've found myself multiple times a day unable to will myself to think about a problem but rather deferred to Claude. It's seriously fucked up.

So this is going to invoke a multitude of downvotes, but here goes.

I will give you an example. I can read a bit of python code, not the advanced stuff, but enough to understand to a large degree what the code does. Last week, I had the need to add a button to Netbox that will download a multitude of device configs that are being rendered via config templates. This use case helps a whole department apply configs, without having to create them by hand.

I knew Netbox has a very powerful plugins ecosystem. The way the base code is written grants the capability of adding any type of plugin you might need in your unique environment. I used Claude to create this plugin for me. I wrote a very specific spec file, told it to utilise the already built pynetbox plugin and ensure it uses nothing fancy that is not sustainable. It created the plugin, helped me with pip installing it, and I deployed it on my dev environment where I tested it extensively.

My alternative to using claude: Asking our internal development team to write something like this. I would need to wait 3 weeks to even get a spot on their meeting for the request, just to then be told their backlog is full with customer code and they won't be able to help. This plugin will help our support team with fewer calls, because the configs are accurately built according to the source of truth (Netbox) and will need less human input. So in the greater scheme of the company, that is a net positive.

What I will do when Netbox updates, is update my dev environment, install the plugin, and test it. If something broke, I will troubleshoot it, of course I will be using Claude with error logs etc, then update the plugin code to work on the new netbox. Is this ideal? Probably not. Is it the only way to get this done? Maybe not either. Is it all I can do at this very moment? Yes.

My specialist fields are the lower levels. Hardware, hypervisors and setting up VMs + System Software. I need code from time to time to get something functional done. I don't write whole systems with Claude, that is just ridiculously naive. But small pieces of functional code that solves a single small problem, I honestly don't understand the problem with that.

My 2c.

Based on my experience with LLM and developers I personally know, my only assumption is they don't have the skills in the first place...

In corporate world there are a lot of "developers" that actually act kind of like codegen. They just throw plausible sounding bullshit into an editor and hope for the best. Two examples:

Once asked to help a team speed something that ran slow, even by their low standards. Turned out they had made their own copy file routine instead of using the standard library one, and sucked the file into memory, expanding array 512 bytes at a time, and then wrote it out, 512 bytes at a time. I made the thing nearly instant by just making it a call to the standard library function to copy a file.

While helping with a separate problem, I noticed their solution for transferring some file with an indeterminate version number in the middle of the file name. It was a huge mess, but the most illustrative line was the line in their Java application declaring a string "ls /path/with/file|grep prefix.*.extension".....

Lots of human slop out there that AI can actually compete with.