This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That makes sense. Software engineers have gone from being artists (because yes, software architecture is an art) to becoming AI managers. It's demoralising.
I believe open-source software will continue to provide a refuge for artists.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that code can be art but I was never able to express myself on that level at my corporate jobs. I was always limited to writing code that aligned with the company’s rigid style guide, and never allowed to implement new design patterns that would’ve improved things but deviated from the way things were done in the existing codebase.
Thus, I’m not too miffed about being forced to use coding agents at work because writing corporate-sanitary code already felt like a robotic process before LLMs existed. Personal hobby projects and open source contributions are where we can express ourselves freely and create our art the way we want to. They’ll never be able to take that from us.
As a freelance dev it’s not quite as bad now but it’s insane to see that some of my clients think I got replaced by a machine now only to show me a buggy vibe coded mess of an app that is poorly designed and works half the time at best. I like some of the LLM tools but it’s important to understand their abilities and limitations especially in regards to future capabilities as there are hard limits to how capable they can become.
Way too many people think the tools are smart because they can „talk“ and these same people do not understand any of the underlying tech.
Some of my clients send ChatGPT written instructions now that are missing half the context of what I‘m actually doing.
FUCKING GOOD.
STOP BUILDING EVIL SHIT.
Yeah, lots of them have been living in the lap of luxury building the tools and platforms that have ruined society, without a second thought about it.
Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that's pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
Yeah based on WYEA’s articles recently I would say that is the case. As providers move to token based billing, trying to find a way to break even, the rising costs will lower usage, which will probably then drive up costs further as the (imaginary) capital has already been spent on the DCs.
however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
and the Slop companies are still losing money... the end result still seems to be more expensive, crappier code, yet most companies seem to be so nearsighted they are not jumping into the spike pit face first
with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately
Meanwhile, my company has forgotten how to write bash scripts... More and more things that could just be bash scripts are being added as stupid Claude.md scripts.
Hahahaha. Let's go! grabs popcorn
Why would you want the same result twice?
Wow, that's some brilliant vendor lock in on Anthropic's side.
INB4 "Engineers can't handle stress, let's replace them with AI"
I almost clicked the link until I saw the domain name.
Educate me?
Business Insider articles are generally trash content. They choose provocative headlines and hot-button issues to boost engagement, but once you’re on the site, there’s not actually that much to engage with.
Ahh so much of that nowadays. Probably AI written too, ironically.
Today software engineers and tomorrow software engineers minus one.
software engineers minus one
software engineerr?...I don't get it
My old statistics lecturer would write x-¹ as shorthand meaning everything that is not x, I thought it was in more common usage but perhaps not. I know it more generally means the reciprocal, he just expected you to know which he meant by context.
x-¹
Where I come from, that's read as "x to the [power of] minus one". "x minus one" is, well, x - 1. Not the same thing at all.
(I admit, my chances of deciphering what you meant might not have been all that high even if you'd used the correct phrasing, but without it, the chance was zero.)
It was a shorthand he used, he wrote it as a superscript, it must of been his own, it was useful in terms of statistics analysis. Don't worry too much about your ability to decipher things, from your mathematical explanation I imagine it's something you have had to carry all of your life.
