Who says I made my webapp with ChatGPT in an afternoon?

I built it iteratively using ChatGPT, much like any other application. I started with the scaffolding and then slowly added more and more features over time, just like I would have done had I not used any AI at all.

Like everybody knows, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Sometimes I get an LLM to review a patch series before I send it as a quick once over. I would estimate about 50% of the suggestions are useful and about 10% are based on "misunderstanding". Last week it was suggesting a spelling fix I'd already made because it didn't understand the - in the diff meant I'd changed the line already.

Not a developer per se (mostly virtualization, architecture, and hardware) but AI can get me to 80-90% of a script in no time. The last 10% takes a while but that was going to take a while regardless. So the time savings on that first 90% is awesome. Although it does send me down a really bad path at times. Being experienced enough to know that is very helpful in that I just start over.

In my opinion AI shouldn’t replace coders but it can definitely enhance them if used properly. It’s a tool like everything. I can put a screw in with a hammer but I probably shouldn’t.

They can be helpful when using a new library or development environment which you are not familiar with. I've noticed a tendency to make up functions that arguably should exist but often don't.

No, but that's the only way you get senior engineers!

LOL sure

I'm not talking about the ones that get hired in your 'leet shop, I'm talking about the whole damn crop that's just graduated.

You're not wrong, and I feel like it was a developing problem even before AI - everybody wanted someone with experience, even if the technology was brand new.

That said, even if you and I will be fine, it's still bad for the industry. And even if we weren't the ones pulling up the ladder behind us, I'd still like to find a way to start throwing ropes back down for the newbies...

I agree, but the goal of CEOs is “line go up,” not make our eng team stronger (usually)

You're not wrong, and I feel like it was a developing problem even before AI - everybody wanted someone with experience, even if the technology was brand new.

True. It was a long-standing problem that entry-level jobs were mostly found in dodgy startups.

Tbh, I think the biggest issue right now isn't even AI, but the economy. In the 2010s we had pretty much no intrest rate at all while having a pretty decent economy, at least for IT. The 2008 financial crisis hardly mattered for IT, and Covid was a massive boost for IT. There was nothing else to really spend money on.

IT always has more projects than manpower, so with enough money to spend, they just hired everyone.

But the sanctions against Russia in response to their invasion of Ukraine really hit the economy and rising intrest rates to combat inflation meant that suddenly nobody wanted to invest anymore.

With no investments, startups dried up and large corporations also want to downsize. It's no coincidence that return-to-work mandates only started after the invasion and not in the two years prior of that where lockdowns were already revoked. Work from home worked totally fine for two years after covid lockdowns, and companies even praised how well it worked.

Same with AI. While it can improve productivity in some edge cases, I think it's mostly a scapegoat to make mass-fireings sound like a great thing to investors.

That said, even if you and I will be fine, it's still bad for the industry. And even if we weren't the ones pulling up the ladder behind us, I'd still like to find a way to start throwing ropes back down for the newbies...

You are totally right with that, and any chance I get I will continue to push for hiring juniors.

But I am also over corporate tears. For decades they have been crying over a lack of skilled workers in the IT and pushing for more and more people to join IT, so that they can dump wages, and as soon as the economy is bad, they instantly u-turn and dump employees.

If corporations want to be short-sighted and make people suffer for it, they won't get compassion from me when it fails.

Edit: Remember, we are not the ones pulling the ladder up.

They wanted someone with experience, who can hit the ground running, but didn't want to pay for it, either with cash or time.

• cheap
• quick
• experience

You can only pick two.

I would say that "replacing with AI assistance" is probably not what is actually happening. Is it economic factors reducing hiring. This isn't the first time it has happened and it won't be the last. The AI boosters are just claiming responsibility for marketing purposes.

That said, this year’s crop of interns at work seem to be thin wrappers on top of LLMs and I worry about the future of critical thinking for society at large.

This is the must frustrating problem I have. With a few exceptions, LLM use seems to be inversely proportional to skill level, and having someone tell me "chatgpt said ___" when asking me for help because clearly chatgpt is not doing it for their problem makes me want to just hang up.

Like I said, I do find it useful at times. But not only shouldn't it replace coders, it fundamentally can't. At least, not without a fundamental rearchitecturing of how they work.

The reason it goes down a "really bad path" is that it's basically glorified autocomplete. It doesn't know anything.

On top of that, spoken and written language are very imprecise, and there's no way for an LLM to derive what you really wanted from context clues such as your tone of voice.

Take the phrase "fruit flies like a banana." Am I saying that a piece of fruit might fly in a manner akin to how another piece of fruit, a banana, flies if thrown? Or am I saying that the insect called the fruit fly might like to consume a banana?

It's a humorous line, but my point is serious: We unintentionally speak in ambiguous ways like that all the time. And while we've got brains that can interpret unspoken signals to parse intended meaning from a word or phrase, LLMs don't.

This line of thought is short sighted. Your senior engineers will eventually retire or leave the company. If everyone replaces junior engineers with ai, then there will be nobody with the experience to fill those empty seats. Then you end up with no junior engineers and no senior engineers, so who is wrangling the ai?

I like the saying that LLMs are good at stuff you don’t know. That’s about it.

The tool I use can rewrite code given basic commands. Other times I might say, "Write a comment above each line" or "Propose better names for these variables" and it does a decent job.

no shit. ai will hallucinate shit I’ll hit tab by accident and spend time undoing that or it’ll hijack tab on new lines inconsistently

Capitalism, shortsighted? Say it ain’t so!

Like search engines, and libraries...

This isn’t black and white. There will always be some junior hires. No one is saying replace ALL of them. But hiring 1 junior engineer instead of 3? Maybe…and that’s already happening to some degree.