That's because AI allows poor programmers to appear as good programmers, which is actually a good thing as otherwise they'd be writing crap you'd have to code-review, but their understanding of what is good code is poor, so you're back to having to vet it all anyway. At least you can us AI for that. Except you can't, without vetting it.
I literally just today watched my entire team descend into "Release Hell" where an obscure bug in business logic already delivered to thousands of customers broke right as we were about to ship a release. Obscure bug, huge impact on the customer, as they actually ended up charging people more than they should have. The team-members, and yes, not leads, used AI to write that bug and then tried to prompt their way out of the bug. It turned into a giant game of whack-a-mole as other business logic had errors introduced that thankfully got caught by tests. Then it was discovered that they never understood the code, they could only maintain it with prompts.
Let that sink in. They don't understand what they're doing, they just massage the spec into prompts and when it appears to work and pass tests they call it good.
We looked at the prompts. They were insane. They actually just kept adding more specification to the end, but if you read through it all it had contradictory logic, which I would have hoped the AI would have pointed out, but nope. It was actually just easier for me and another senior to rewrite the logic as pseudo-code, cut the size down by literally 3/4, and eventually got it all working as expected.
So that's the future, girls and boys. People putting together code they don't understand with AI, and can only maintain with AI, and then not being able to fix with AI because they cannot prompt accurately enough because English sucks at being precise.
I have literally been doing we development since their was a web, and the companies I developed for are openly hostile to the idea of putting their valuable, or perceived valuable, information online in a format that could be easily scraped. Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be paid for. Unless the information shared pulls visitors to the site it doesn't need to be public.
> Information doesn't want to be free, it wants to be paid for. Unless the information shared pulls visitors to the site it doesn't need to be public.
That's a cultural and societal problem, not a technology problem. The motivations (profit) are wrong, and don't lead to true innovations, only to financialization.
So long as people need to pay to eat, then information will also want to continue to be paid for, and our motivations will continue to be misaligned with true innovations, especially if said innovations would make life easier but wouldn't result in profit.
I'd argue that resource availability is already high enough to alleviate scarcity for most people, and that most scarcity today is artificially generated, because of profit.
We won't achieve post scarcity, even with widespread automation (if AI ever brings that to fruition), because we haven't yet fixed the benefits that wealth brings, so the motivation to work toward a post-scarcity society just doesn't exist.
I've encountered a similar issue in academia - PI's don't want to make their data available to be scraped (or, at least not easily) because the amount of grant funding is limited, and a rival who has scraped one's data could get the grant money instead by using that scraped data to bolster their application.
I'd be willing to bet that the problem is the work isn't getting done. I've seen this many times now. No one is going to care how much you time you spend walking your dog if you're getting your work done - you only draw attention to yourself when you're lacking, and then your manager starts looking for reasons, sees you work 20% less than expected, and then what would you say? You'd call them on the carpet, too. I'd give them a part time job since that's what they seem to be capable of.
I've religiously filled out time-sheets, in various forms) for 30 years, and I don't think they have been looked at more than a few times by my managers since my work gets done, and more. But I know for damn sure the laggards get scrutinized.
I see this too, and not just post-COVID. 10+ years ago we used to have "Let's Learn This Now!" where the developers would agree on particular subject and then learn and discuss it on our own time, and occasionally it would lead to improvements in our development. We went through Ruby (on Rails), Angular (nope, not even) to React (meh), queuing (ZeroMQ mostly), Asp.NET MVC, Redis, Docker, Octo, NoSQL dbs - the list goes on (even custom mechanical keyboard building). It was a lot of fun, and it was nice to have all the perspectives and interesting ideas shared.
Now there is only a few of us that still attempt this, as the rest are not interested in anything beyond their job description. Honestly in the last 10 years the phrase "That's not my job" has entered the company's phraseology when previously it was perceived as an opportunity for growth or even just cross training. Hell, that's 90% of how I advanced up the ranks - taking on new responsibilities.
A dev manager we had a while back, who has been managing developers for 20 years, told me that a lot of the problem is passion vs money. Many recent developers are in the industry because they heard that software development is good money, so they got a CS degree. But they're not as interested in the continuing education that is a necessity for the career, and only those with a passion for it thrive. He sees them dev'ing a few years, realizing it's not for them, and then trying management, and then dropping out of industry because they're not interested in the effort to excel.
But if you have a passion for software development, love tech, and the whole 9 yards, work is just doing what you like, and you enjoy it (well, when your company isn't screwing it up - that's a different problem).
As a kid, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said programmer. So that’s what I did.
The money vs. passion thing rings true, but at the same time, I’ve found that channeling passion to my employer doesn’t really reward me in the way I want. When I go “above and beyond” my job description, the reward is actually a punishment: more of the shit I don’t want to be doing.
Instead, I set aside some time to work on open source stuff. I actually feel a sense of ownership then. I’m not working to make somebody else rich, and I can do things my way and in my own time.
I hate to say it, but I think we (as in, developers) did this to ourselves, or we were at least complicit. People like to think that these massive piles of abstractions we’ve built are for the benefit of future developers, but I’m starting to look at the software landscape more like a landfill with layer upon layer of waste output.
Tomte, thanks, not particularly for the original reference to the article about smell, but for directing us to the person in question and all the great stuff she has written. I got lost for an hour an 45 minutes.
Kind of makes me wonder - why let up? Can it be mitigated at all? Wouldn't they have done so by now. Be interesting if they just kept piling it on until they've got the whole internet on it's knees.
In Vancouver, $500k is more plausible. The minimum downpayment for >$1M properties is 20%, and the average selling price for a detached house in Metro Vancouver last month was $1.8M; in the City of Vancouver proper, it was well over $2M.
Hang on, I thought we were discussing whether the area is "closed off from those without at least quarter of a million dollars saved up". Isn't that the topic of this thread?
First of all, someone buys the below-average homes, right? So it's hardly "closed off" just because someone can't afford the mean (or median?) detached home value. What's the twentieth-percentile home value?
Second of all, what do detached home prices have to do with this? Live in a condo, like reasonable people do.
The minimum down payment for a 2 bedroom 2 bath condo in my East Van building would be around $40k.
I literally just today watched my entire team descend into "Release Hell" where an obscure bug in business logic already delivered to thousands of customers broke right as we were about to ship a release. Obscure bug, huge impact on the customer, as they actually ended up charging people more than they should have. The team-members, and yes, not leads, used AI to write that bug and then tried to prompt their way out of the bug. It turned into a giant game of whack-a-mole as other business logic had errors introduced that thankfully got caught by tests. Then it was discovered that they never understood the code, they could only maintain it with prompts.
Let that sink in. They don't understand what they're doing, they just massage the spec into prompts and when it appears to work and pass tests they call it good.
We looked at the prompts. They were insane. They actually just kept adding more specification to the end, but if you read through it all it had contradictory logic, which I would have hoped the AI would have pointed out, but nope. It was actually just easier for me and another senior to rewrite the logic as pseudo-code, cut the size down by literally 3/4, and eventually got it all working as expected.
So that's the future, girls and boys. People putting together code they don't understand with AI, and can only maintain with AI, and then not being able to fix with AI because they cannot prompt accurately enough because English sucks at being precise.