Coaxed into dead-end architecture is the exact issue I have had when trying agentic coding. I find that I have the greatest success when I plan everything out and document the implementation plan as precisely as possible before handing it off to the agent. At which point, the hard part is already done. Generating the code was not really the bottleneck.
Using LLMs to generate documentation for the code that I write, explaining data sheets to me, and writing boilerplate code does save me a lot of time, though.
> I’m no longer an artisan enjoying the journey of creating
me the first time my boss forced me to unit test my code
...
The best thing you can do is listen to your gut and try to act as rationally as you can.
Talk with trusted mentors if you've got them. Don't listen to me and for the love of god don't listen to people on HN or reddit or Youtube or any other social media.
Nobody knows what they're talking about and they certainly don't know how it'll impact you.
If somebody is making you feel afraid, left behind/out, inferior -- they're trying to sell you shit. Don't listen to the bullies and con artists.
You're entitled to your opinion. If you think AI output is crap, it's crap. Don't be pressured to conform. This is supposed to be hackernews after all. There are plenty of companies using java 8 today. You won't be unhireable.
It's 60-80% as good as Stack Overflow copy-pasting programmers, sure, but those programmers were already providing questionable value.
It's nowhere near as good as someone actually building and maintaining systems. It's barely able to vomit out an MVP and it's almost never capable of making a meaningful change to that MVP.
If your experiences have been different that's fine, but in my day job I am spending more and more time just fixing crappy LLM code produced and merged by STAFF engineers. I really don't see that changing any time soon.
I'm pretty good at what I do, at least according to myself and the people I work with, and I'm comparing its capabilities (the latest version of Claude used as an agent inside Cursor) to myself. It can't fully do things on its own and makes mistakes, but it can do a lot.
But suppose you're right, it's 60% as good as "stackoverflow copy-pasting programmers". Isn't that a pretty insanely impressive milestone to just dismiss?
And why would it just get to this point, and then stop? Like, we can all see AIs continuously beating the benchmarks, and the progress feels very fast in terms of experience of using it as a user.
I'd need to hear a pretty compelling argument to believe that it'll suddenly stop, something more compelling than "well, it's not very good yet, therefore it won't be any better", or "Sam Altman is lying to us because incentives".
Sure, it can slow down somewhat because of the exponentially increasing compute costs, but that's assuming no more algorithmic progress, no more compute progress, and no more increases in the capital that flows into this field (I find that hard to believe).
I appreciate your reply. My tone was a little dismissive; I'm currently deep deep in the trenches trying to unwind a tremendous amount of LLM slop in my team's codebase so I'm a little sensitive.
I use Claude every day. It is definitely impressive, but in my experience only marginally more impressive than ChatGPT was a few years ago. It hallucinates less and compiles more reliably, but still produces really poor designs. It really is an overconfident junior developer.
The real risk, and what I am seeing daily, is colleagues falling for the "if you aren't using Cursor you're going to be left behind" FUD. So they learn Cursor, discover that it's an easy way to close tickets without using your brain, and end up polluting the codebase with very questionable designs.
Oh, sorry to hear that you have to deal with that!
The way I'm getting a sense of the progress is using AI for what AI is currently good at, using my human brain to do the part AI is currently bad at, and comparing it to doing the same work without AI's help.
I feel like AI is pretty close to automating 60-80% of the work I would've had to do manually two years ago (as a full-stack web developer).
It doesn't mean that the remaining 20-40% will be automated very quickly, I'm just saying that I don't see the progress getting any slower.
We use C for embedded products at work. My gut feeling is that Rust or Zig would require way too much time investment to learn and use properly, then you'd still have to deal with interop problems.
No. I use AI as a fast but stupid research assistant. It aggregates information to point me in the right direction but I don't trust it at face value. I tried copilot for the first time last week and found it useful for writing bash boilerplate but not much else.
Wake up to my kid scream whispering at my baby to stop kicking me in the throat, change diapers make coffee and eggs, read a couple headlines about how it's the worst time in history to be alive, make lunches clean up breakfast and leave for work late to attend the daily all company hour long standup.
In all seriousness, sans young baby the most productive time of my life has been fitting exercise/side project time in between 4:30-6am. I made some real gains during that time and plan to get back into that routine once sleep isn't so rare.
Using LLMs to generate documentation for the code that I write, explaining data sheets to me, and writing boilerplate code does save me a lot of time, though.
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