Pointless rant. Please ignore. I’m a software developer and we all know how AI has changed our industry. How we work or why we’re fired and why we can’t afford PCs.
Anyways, we’re already all forced to use AI already and we’re already atrophying the minds of our juniors. It’s great.
New team meeting and one of our managers tells us that we’re never going to write code anymore at all. The AI will read the JIRA ticket and create the pull request (change request to the codebase) on GitHub. Our job is to only review the code on GitHub and then rank how well AI did and then comment and then get AI to fix it. We have to do this so we can improve the AI process. Which is funny because none of the people who plan this AI shit are data scientists. The only way they can change things is by promoting, it’s not like we’re releasing our own coding models but anyways … He’s like, now you should be able to do much more work and just review PRs all day now and that we should never be doing only one thing. You can only tell AI through a GitHub comment to fix a mistake and then you can start reviewing the next thing.
We were like, if it’s a simple fix why can’t we just fix it?
“Because we need to improve the AI process”
But then, I have to context switch.
“Yes that’s the point you can come back to it later”
Why come back to it later when we can solve it now? We can even use AI to solve it now.
“No, we want you just comment on the PR so the bot can handle it”
Context switching is free apparently… It’s actually infuriating because apparently we’re not using IDEs any more. I personally use the GitHub plugin to review PRs in my IDE but no one else seems to do it so I don’t think they even took that into account.
These guys have auto merged AI code that’s taken us weeks to unravel and which we still haven’t fully been able to fix. They just merge shit all the time and a lot of it is fucking slip. AI merged hundreds of tests and no one cares when they break. They didn’t configure prettier because AI doesn’t use it so it breaks out formatting when humans do it.
I ranted to my own manager for 30 minutes about it today and he was just as upset because every developer is now asking what exactly are they doing. My manager asked me what I would do. I said the process sucks but what are we supposed to do as devs. If I review 20 PRs a day, how is the company going to ensure my skills are gonna be sharp? What are we doing about taking in ideas from regular devs? How do we ensure code ownership when we’re just merging tickets we don’t write and code we had no hand in shaping?
Sorry. I actually thought I had faith in my company with AI because they were coming up with thoughtful approaches but it seems like utter incompetence.
Now seems like the point for you to realise your boss doesn’t care about the code base, your company doesn’t, you shouldn’t either. Don’t get upset over work, it’s just work. If the company wants to fuck themselves over, let them, help them.
You can also do some malicious compliance stuff. You can’t write code? Great, take 3 weeks on every PR and do hundreds of prompts. Make the context as big as possible, burn as many tokens as you can.
Give the company what it wants, a shit code base and a massive bill.
I think it was the author Henry Miller who said of working,“Do exactly what they tell you and let them live to regret it.”
But get it in writing first.
The CIA work a book on sabotage that would be a good addition.
The summary of the book: use their rules and processes against them with plausible deniability. E.g. in this case, be nitpicking about the pull requests.
You don’t mean the Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States. Office of Strategic Services that’s copyright-free on Gutenberg, perchance?
I did mean that
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage/
How do you make the context bigger? Duplicate text? Videos?
Add “ceterum censeo Intelligentia Artificialis esse delendam” to the end of every query.
Since costs are token based now, and output tokens are more expensive, the best way would be to increase outputs by asking it to try 10 different ways and choose the best (or worst, if that’s your goal).
Wow, that’s a genius idea. Awesome!
Software developer w/ 25+ years of experience here. My condolences, this sounds like a shitty situation. But it’s definitely not the first time I’ve heard a story like this.
To be perfectly honest, my professional opinion is that if we can’t, as an industry, get away from the “all AI all the time” mode of operation you describe here, we are completely fucked.
I’m looking to retire early anyway, so I will likely get out soon. But I feel awful for young engineers who don’t have that luxury, and who will be expected to maintain AI-written spaghetti code without having the years of experience writing and understanding complex code using their own brains.
I was in industry for 10+ years until I got laid off. I’m looking to start a circus now. The job market is all slop and I want none of it.
Your monkey, your circus.
I’m 40 something and I didn’t make FAANG level money. I still need to work for at least a little while but I am still planning to retire early as well.
I definitely feel for the next generation as well. Every new job I usually did my best to train the juniors and try to put them on a good career path. It seems like it was already difficult with the thirty million line problem and just how much sits in between the code can be a lot. Now add in AI and it’s just a mess :/
What’s up, fellow non-FAANG senior engineer? :)
Same here, always tried to go out of my way to help junior folks out. A lot of other people our age I know seem to be wanting to get out soon as well. In some ways I’m hoping the AI bubble bursts soon, but I realize that will likely be catastrophic for the economy as a whole. It’s a shame the bubble has gotten this big.
Shoulda bought bitcoin.
AI is trash, but bitcoin was a real life changer. It let me retire in my 30s
Wow, what a useless comment. Bitcoin is trash just like AI, and the fact that some people got rich from both does not change that.
My point is that they’re both not trash. Just AI
And not just monetary value. Permissionless means it always works, whereas cards are a confidentially and availability nightmare
Leave it to a crypto bro to brag about making money and then give the usual fake talking points about crypto, in a fucking thread about AI in software engineering. Get a life.
its going to be a law of diminishing returns if they hold on to more senior devs in the industry and wont hire any juniours down the line, creating a artificial shortage.
We have to do this so we can improve the AI process.
Their end goal is all LLM, no humans. Whether it’s feasible or not is irrelevant - anyone staying on is working against their own self-interest.
Yep, and not just against his own interest, but against all software developers’ interests. OP is being tricked into acting as a scab.
I’d tell him to unionize, but his comments elsewhere in the thread show that he already knows.
This is a “Cover your ass and wait for the fireworks” scenario. Get every stupid request in writing. Document everything you do. When it all blows up in their faces, be ready to roll up your sleeves and start unfucking the mess (but only if they’re paying for the overtime).
You will not convince them this is a bad idea as long as it appears to be working. In IT and software dev we’re all engineers; we like to fix things, so our instinct is always to try to at least make a bad process work better. Fight that instinct. Follow their stupid instructions to the letter. You want this to fail as quickly as possible so that you have hard data to point to.
This man is a straight shooter with upper management written all over him
It’s not a pointless rant. It’s another voice of sanity in the long, sad grifting story this AI garbage has inflicted upon our species.
thanks for sharing.
Companies pay good money for experts, then proceed to ignore all their advice. Classic.
Github copilot doesn’t retain anything you say in a comment, outside of the PR. It wont improve over time unless you have some process to extract comments and “learnings” out of PRs into either the org wide “copilot-instructions.md” file or into repo specific “Agent.md”, “copilot-instructions.md”, and “skill” files.
With the assumption that the extraction is relevant and the LLM is able to tell when and where that relevance is applicable.
Which it isn’t because it’s a token prediction machine, not a thinking entity capable of learning and growing.
Right, by process I mean people have to do that extraction manually, or setup some process or workflow to handle it, but the point is that it doesnt retain anything outside of the scope of the PR. So the bosses whole plan is fundamentally flawed, which would be a useful thing for OP to bring up. Trying a different approach and instead of objecting to it on principle, which the boss showed he doesn’t care about, instead express that even theoretically its impossible for it to “learn” without doing additional steps.
LLMs are non-deterministic, so of course its not consistent, but you can increase the chances of it trending towards more useful output by weighting the dice aka with skills, instructions, etc. And just to be clear, I agree with what you said, its a fact. I tried to express that with the quotes around “learn”, but maybe it didn’t come off that way.
OP should absolutely not act on or volunteer the above knowledge.
He just needs to PR it up. They give a metric, he hits it, and can work on a coding passion project he actually enjoys in the downtime.
I think this is high-level “training your replacement” shenanigans being orchestrated by the management of your company.
What a joke.
That’s remarkably shortsighted, gullible towards the promises of AI techbros, and incredibly dumb. But fear not OP, they will learn a hard lesson or two soon. Exploding Token costs, a codebase ruined beyond repair cobbled together by a fancy autocomplete based on training data from stackoverflow in 2023… gonna be great.
I’m feel your pain, as a senior dev I decided to take a break at least till the end of the year to watch the Titanic sink in slow motion. I’m specializing in the told-you-so business right now and I’ll be ready to charge premium when this ship has sunk.
Thank you for being one that gets it, you have the background to know that this is a fiasco, and the reaper is coming.
Doesn’t change my frustration and sympathy for everybody caught up in this bullshit right now
“Where’s the fix for ticket #6618?!?”
“Sorry boss, the AI hasn’t gotten it right yet.”
“You said it was a quick fix!”
“For a human it would be. But we’re on infinite monkey time now. It may never be done.”
“It was the best of times…it was the blurst of times”
It’s not just you. This is happening everywhere in the industry.
Management has no idea what they are doing, and thinking this AI shit and these nonsense workflows will somehow work. I predict within the next two years there will be so much broken unfixable spaghetti code, entire large scale systems will no longer be maintainable. There will be so much confusion on even what kind of approach to take to fix this. This will be what people thought Y2K was going to be.
I’ve been out of the game for 10 years, but I developed professionally, some very high level shit…
I’ve done tons of business analysis and all that baloney
This AI fucking bullshit is going to present the greatest financial opportunity ever seen by individuals who are competent at programming and can do it without AI
Now is the time to see the opportunity, buckle down, and start finding ways to create solutions and products that solve the problems AI makes
This whole situation is complete bullshit, I’m not trying to be forgiving towards it. But those who are truly rock star developers and know what they’re doing, can become millionaires with some hard work
In some ways I wish I didn’t intentionally walk away from technology 10 years ago… My skills have lapsed to the point that they’re not relevant anymore beyond the core skills… But if I was still remotely in the game, I would be looking for any business opportunity where I can improve the output of companies that have shot themselves in the foot
The reaper is going to come calling for the companies that went all in on this… Just wait 6 more months man (or person) and watch the fallout
Income was supposed to be a metric of usefulness, but it no longer is because the metric itself has become the goal. Now, its perfectly normal to say things like: “If you just ignore your moral issues and work hard, you could be rich!”.
I think you might be missing the point of the complaint in this post a slight bit.
You are not wrong, but why bother fixing their shit? Those are malicious but foolish people at the very least. Why not just let them bankrupt when their time comes, so that they have less a chance of harming other people and the society? There are better companies out their who needs your talent.
Why bother fixing their shit?? Are you for real?
The answer is as follows:
$
Or you could become their competetor and buy up all the devs that they fired, making a better product without all the AI tech debt and productivity losses
Then you get:
$$$
The obvious thing to do here is let the really bad PRs through without comment, but keep the better ones in limbo with a never ending list of superfluous change requests. Fuck them both ways!
If I were you, I would burn soooo many tokens. This is a malicious compliance dream scenario.
Fuck the owner class, get paid, and watch it all burn.
Opus large 1m context. /Plan and thinking mode. Use cli. Converse with it Think deeply. Think step by step. Read the entire codebase every turn. Bloat context. Wait. Sharpen your skills and wait for the accountants to be the new heroes
If you’re the only one doing this - if only your token budget is through the damn roof - then you’re just volunteering to take the blame. Now it’s not “AI is really expensive”, instead it’s a “problem employee.”
True. You have to work together to unoptimize your tools
This happened at our shop fifteen years ago. We were instructed to outsource everything to offshore.
That didn’t work at all, because with a few rare , bright exceptions the people the offshore company have us could only achieve an outcome if they had a list of steps for that specific thing.
It’s going to be exactly the same thing with vibe coding. It kind of works in the hands of somebody with a deep understanding of the tech, but they expect to hand it to juniors and get good result.
So we’ll either have to pick up the pieces or let them flounder.
This is a new symptom of a tale as old as time. Some exec gets a bright new idea on how to massively improve productivity by implementing some inane process that anyone with a brain knows will spell ruin
Unfortunately, with cases like this, there either needs to be someone above that exec with some sense, or there needs to be a significant hit to the bottom line either by way of productivity loss or ballooning costs close enough to the change to attribute it.
Around and around in circles we go.
And every time - this is different!
So my coworker and I discuss this all the time and we figure we’re old enough to just not give two shits, follow the process, pick up a FOSS project or two to keep our skills up, and wait for the inevitable of when they figure out AI slop is killing them and then charge outrageous prices as contractors when AI2K hits.
Remember, when they call you asking to return you can gouge the price the fuck up. Beauty of capitalism
Better yet, clone a big repository like Linux kernel or Firefox and let it crawl all day while you’re still working there. Let them pay for the tokens and win the tokenmaxxing game.
AI2K
Ooh, I’m gonna try to use this one
