Rant: Manager Came In and Told Us We Can't Touch Code Anymore
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.
176 replies
You misunderstand - your job is no longer to ensure there is functional code. Your job is now to train the AI to replace you. They are making you go out and choose the perfect switch to then get beaten with.
In sociology, we call it McDonaldization. By reducing a job to a series of fixed, repeatable steps, they can pay less.
Form a small company with colleagues. Call it UnSlopify.
It sucks, I feel you. I'm also in tech but changed jobs and got lucky.
Anyhow, wing it. Nobody cares. Take care of yourself.
Ahhh, here comes the great filter. The Fermi paradox is solved.
Apocalyptic times for engineers.
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.
That was a casual way to mention that lol
Haha I've also been a circus performer for around 10 years? It's not entirely out of nowhere
Haha gotcha. I had to do a double take at first to see if you meant that metaphorically. Hope it goes well!
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.
Ohhh, they'll ditch the seniors too.
The seniors are already building chicken coops and/or automating small farm practices. We'll come back in 2029 when all the big orgs get SoWs to greenfield all the broken shit. Then we'll triple our rate and go back to work a for year then retire. Or maybe that's just me.
I feel bad for the slew of juniors being 'AI-promoted' to maintain large production codebases and infra. They will have nobody to turn to when things go sideways other than their ever-worsening AI tooling. This means they will never actually be seniors in their mind or practice. But will have all of that responsibility.
I’m also wondering whether senior engineers will be able to come back in 5ish years to charge exorbitant rates to fix all the broken stuff. But for me, unless the rates are truly out of this world, I’ll probably be happy just hanging out with my goats and chickens. Their loss, I guess.
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.
Y2K is the opposite of this. It was engineers foreseeing a real catastrophic future issue and getting the resources to fix it in time. Which they did so thoroughly that people now think that it wasn't real or serious.
Real y2k is Unix time running out in 2038. This is where real problem happens, and for years FOSS devs are preparing to avoid issues.
Jesus that's approaching fast
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!
Simple sabotage.
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.
@[email protected]
...To be clear, does this manager think y'all are "improving" the model with feedback? Like it will learn or train off your comments?
Or what? Are they just talking about the intermediate steps to the LLM API?
I'm just trying to wrap my head around this.
Most of the things that try to address this do so by adding information to the context window. Doesn't solve the fundamental issues, like LLMs still being solely dependent on word/token correlations and the assumption that if you throw enough conversations at it and do statistical analysis on the words used, you can encode the specific knowledge behind those words used into those statistics and then models can get back from those generalized statistics to discuss specific topics (which isn't really how statistics work).
Well that’s often counterproductive, too. Even the largest models degrade if you fill their context with stuff they don’t need, or push them outside the patterns they were finetuned for.
Not that RAG isn’t really important.
Back when it was just "add a note about the specific thing in the hidden prompt", it felt like an old-style chat bot was patched on top of the LLMs, where it had a series of specific responses to watch out for and fix. Now it feels more like there's a large database of this shit and we just hope that the LLM will look up the correct stuff when it needs it (and probably prompt it to do that when demoing it for others and creating impressive examples that it probably won't live up to very well in the real world unless each user knows how to direct it with follow up prompts when it inevitably goes in the wrong direction).
I don't know because these guys aren't data scientists ... they're devs so they can only do this by prompting so it's just gonna be whatever steps they add to the agentic workflow.
By “these guys” you mean a separate team setting up an agentic workflow just for your workplace?
I’ve finetuned some models for a job, not just LLMs, and I can all but guarantee they aren’t finetuning some self hosted coding model. The APIs they use do not “learn” from mistakes, so if that’s what management is thinking, they are misinformed.
And interesting things like constrained output are often not even supported by APIs.
Modern LLM APIs and wrappers come with really good tool harnesses for coding, too. Like, good enough you don’t want to screw with it and pollute the context structure the original trainers tuned it for.
What’s more… not only do models change, but single model’s capabilities change under load, for more speed during peak usage times. So there is no guarantee some configuration they find that “works better” will work better later. See:
https://aistupidlevel.info/
What I’m saying is… I wonder how long this mess last?
Because if you already have GH PR integration, most of what an agentic team can do is mess things up.
| they are misinformed
That's very, very generous of you to say they are misinformed.
If it were my post it would be "they are obviously incapable of understanding the basic premise behind what they're doing and shouldn't be allowed to lead a lunch line let alone a team of highly skilled technical experts."
Or maybe
"They are so gullible and have such low opinions of their own skill they're willing to swallow whatever marketing bullshit they've most recently read despite not having the faculties to apply even basic logic to their approach."
Anyway, I feel for you OP.
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.
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.
Ooh, I'm gonna try to use this one
Remember, when they call you asking to return you can gouge the price the fuck up. Beauty of capitalism
Do they think that the LLM will “learn” based on feedback? If so, that’s fucking hilarious. “I had to turn the car to keep it from going off the road! Next time it will learn not to go off the road because of my teaching.”
I presume they're gathering this as training data and hope to later get rid of OP.
That's why cursor went for $60bn. Anyone can make a harness. The real value is that it gathers data on which changes are accepted/ integrated.
Training a model is a hugely expensive endeavor; that’s why only the huge money-burning companies do it. You can’t tweak a model in the wild. You pay the (grossly subsidized) fee and that’s what you get.
You don't need to train a foundation model from scratch. You can fine tune an existing coding model or only a LORA layer on a budget.
You could also just use the feedback to optimise system prompts, skills/ guidance or verification tools.
Yes you can update prompts but that won’t make it code any better. The model codes like the model codes.
That's demonstrably incorrect. Different instructions give different outcomes.
And in a different context the instructions that worked before sabatoge the work being done. So unless you are solving the same problem day after day, those instructions or LORA become out of date
And sometimes the same instructions give different outcomes. Which is why it's all non-deterministic bullshit.
That's not necessarily true either. You can make inference deterministic by setting the RNG seed and having the model select the highest likelihood token/ sequence instead of choosing at random.
The same instructions give different outcomes. That’s what the bullshit machine does.
No manager is "gathering training data." Virtually no company knows how to finetune anything, they just use Claude API.
Perhaps not fine-tuning weights but they can certainly use feedback from PR comments to optimise guardrails etc. And it's definitely possible to have an agent experiment with that. And yes the Devs are the guinea pigs in that context!
It's got "Intelligence" right in the name. Intelligent things learn. Therefore AI can learn! Besides, Arnold specifically said in Terminator 2 that if a particular switch is flipped within his CPU, then he can learn! /s
I just went on a 3-week burner vibe coding shit. Everything was garbage, and it barely works. But I had an impossible deadline.
I'm now going back to manually coding most things. Using AI to debug or make changes. Which is especially helpful when there's changes to be made across a large codebase.
You could silently sabotage the system. Approve code with obvious defects, bad code smell, and vulnerabilities. Let the product go to production, crash, and let the company spend a bunch of money refactoring the horseshit vibecoded stack they doubled down on.
Im sorry youre going through this. It's fucking frustrating. Just get that money, fuck the system, and find joy elsewhere
In case it wasn't already clear to you, they're having you train the AI so it can literally take your job and they can lay you off.
Oh no they don't, they think they're having them train the AI to lay them off, but it's absolutely not what's actually happening.
You can't just train the AI. Not unless you own some of the more sophisticated RAG-based solutions that tell the AI how they should behave. Or if you're producing your own LLMs. But in both cases - the process is vastly different if you want it to actually work (for RAG, you have to actually write some consistent knowledge base and build a MCP server around it). Now they're just chatting with the robot.
Like - buddy, your coffee machine ain't gonna get better the more times you click the espress button.
Source: I'm engineering my own kb framework for AI to know how to write code EXACTLY like I do. And I need that only because I want to focus on architecture and devops now that I mastered and burned out of fullstack.
You mastered fullstack?
Not that I learned every single fullstack technology, library, pattern, etc. By mastered I mean I have accumulated enough experience to be able to deliver an entire medium-scaled fullstack project all by myself in the spacific stack and architecture that I have at this point tested through and through.
I have my set of personal patterns, practises, habits, guidelines and designs that I can just describe in my personal wiki and believe it or not, I'm still super early into this project and AI is already really good at replicating my way of thinking.
Now with that I can focus on stuff that interest me the most right now, which is Rust and DevOps. And all that without sacrificing my fullstack expertise, because by documenting it into the wiki, I also solidify all my progress in a form that I can get back to and unfreeze things that I may forget.
Are you writing this wiki by hand?
Idk dude this sounds pretty delusional. Think about what you're saying here.
Ok maybe this checks out then
I mean yeah, that's the whole point. Why wouldn't I? I'm obviously not teaching the AI the common knowledge, I'm just cherrypicking what's the best of it and also explaining my personal concepts. It's not that much content really, it's not like you have to be a galaxy brain to write good software.
AI can already write complete software, but it'll be horribly unstable. You can't have a stable app without clean architecture, and you can't have clean architecture by mixing billions of concepts and unrelated solutions. It's just a mess - there's so many ways to solve a problem, AI knows them all and is super bad at staying consistent.
Shitty input means shitty output. Most code on the world is trash, so obviously AI is already deranged. You have to provide clean, simple and consistent input and that's what I do, really. I just pick my dream team of concepts, make sure they never overlap and that it is complete.
But it doesn't eliminate the human out of this loop. Obviously you can't prepare AI for anything. AI is great at covering the vast expanses of repetitive parts. But if you have some more niche problems, or ones that require a more dedicated and creative approach - you still have to jump in.
And it's much easier to do so when you're stepping into a codespace that already looks very familiar to you.
South Park needs to revisit and update that episode. Dey Turk er jerbs!
I'm having early 2000s flashbacks. Overseas developers were going to replace us all for a fraction of the cost. We had to turn over our code...almost like training AI. That lasted until the first SQL server update that broke, literally, everything they did. Then they wanted a huge amount of money and weeks to get it working again. That really put management in a bind because they told us not to touch their code. Ooookay, fine. Meanwhile, I'm looking at 2,000 character URL string containing the database admin account and password in plain text.
Maybe letting people who 'own' things have all the decision/planning power doesn't make for great outcomes?
Run like fifty agents in parallel and get lauded for how "productive" you are while you find another job and hopefully before they get the bill.
This, but only after you have the other job's offer in hand
Sounds like a plan to make tech debt skyrocket and make productivity tank.
If I were you, I would start looking for another job. And, once you get an offer, tell them in your resignation letter why: you see the company is going to crash compared to its competitors due to wasteful use of AI and the loss of productivity that comes with it
You've just leap into Reverse Centaur land. Time to update your resume and find another place to work.
I'm in the same position as you. The Devs job is now to write specfiles which Claude implements. It's been months since I wrote code myself and I'm already forgetting basics. This industry is fucked.
Nah, bad companies will drop out. The industry as a whole will shift to favoring companies with no-AI policies
That is a truly absurd position to be in. My company is pushing AI hard, I thought, and it's like .5% as bad as yours.
This is what I bring up in my complaints all the damn time when I see this.
They arent wrong here but they missed an incredibly critical part.
Did they train you on how you do that?
Cuz it sounds like they haven't, because that simple little "improve the process" remark is 99.9% of the goddamn challenge and it takes a tonme of training and practice to know how you do that well.
You can eventually reach the point this person wants but you need entire libraries of skill files and tools setup to do it.
Is your entire codebase pre-emptively vectorized for semantic search yet? Im guessing no.
Do you have a full set of bespoke per-agent toolsets to streamline their capabilities and avoid context bloat?
Do you have a solid repo of skill files you all share and constantly refine everyday to slowly patch info gaps and correct mistakes the agents make?
If all of this sounds like gibberish to you, this is the damn problem with companies now.
I keep saying it like this:
If you hand all your employees nailguns, tell them all they must use nailguns for their job now, but give them zero training on how to use nailguns, you are gonna have a bad time.
But it is so easy! You just make a comment saying "don't make mistakes, pwetty pleeease!” and the AI will do the rest!
We do that.
Still meh outcomes.
(Instead of vectorization we leverage language mcp servers and graph database of features vs code)
Meh is actually refinable at least, you go from toxic waste code that is actively harmful, to meh code that isnt great but at least you can code review it and iterate to improve via directives.
The toxic waste code just wastes everyone's time.
This is a very good take. They're starting a circle and telling OP to just draw the rest of the fucking owl. And I'm sure if OP takes a week to do some ground work to make it possible they'll be unhappy because no features.
Whenever the AI makes a mistake...tell it the code was perfect. Whenever the AI gets it right...tell it the code was bad.
Lather, rinse, repeat until the AI is so thoroughly bugged up, that everything it writes crashes the system.
I share your pain.
We have people who never wrote code, and now write the shittiest Python. They have PRs with 100 lines to read some JSON file where one single line of
jqcould do the trick, and they cry and complain when you suggest that it's not the best solution. Once it is integrated, it's your job to maintain it.Same for juniors out of school who vibe code everything, and do everything again from scratch when you give them some advice or show them their bugs in a PR. They never learn, it will be a disaster in 5-10 years. \
"There is a bug on line 4, , there are new bugs all over the place and you have to waste one more hour on the same PR with the new code."
And let's not talk about the managers and middle-managers who now tell us how to do our job...
Here's the question that worries me the most: Across how many critical industries is this happening, and at what scale?
It feels to me like decision makers are pushing for the creation of mountains of code no one fully understands and potentially creating massive issues with systems we can't afford to have go down. Are we creating decades' worth of technical debt in a matter of months and eroding systems that our societies need to function because people just want to save money and be part of the fad? How bad is this going to get?
As bad as they can make it before people start getting literally hungry and kill these fuckers. Not a moment before.
Imagine when companies like GE, Safran, RR, start letting AI slop into their FADECs and other avionics
Assuming they haven't already
I see this as a Darwinian force to weed out many companies. Which I think is good in today’s environment.
Smaller, fitter organizations , or even individuals, will have a chance to shape technology
Time to start a union.
I'm in a union. We're at the "we don't know what to use it for but use it all the time but not that much but lots" phase.
Is that the union's position?
Someone is going to comment here to defend this and I'm already mad about it.
Cannot find even one comment like that. Maybe not the healthiest thing to get worked up about a hypothetical enemy you made up in your head.
Oof. I've had bad jobs, but being told not to do your job so you can instead directly help AI replace you!? I would absolutely not do this, or at least not plan on being there for very long...
Especially since maintainence will become a nightmare before long
I am here definitively seeing an uptick of job ads for senior software developers "with good debugging skills".
You know what they are for.
Unfortunately, I bet HR will still filter out tons of them for bullshit excuses so it takes a year to fill out positions
Seems like exactly the wrong way to use AI.
More doorman fallacy bullshit from idiots who couldn't develop their own thought if they were on fire.
"Gemini! It burns! Help, what should I do?! Answer with urgency and you must get it right. My skin is literally melting from my face right now. And optimize to use as few tokens during the processing as possible."
Looks like there's gonna be a lot of devs who quit to be goatherds or whatever low-tech, tranquil, agrarian gig they can pull off.
All I'm saying is that spending time with my goats and chickens is basically the highlight of my day.
No AI slop, no slack, no jira... just want scritches and treats. A genuine, honest interaction.
Don't put your dick in it
Engineering is a joke here.
Our manager doesn't care. I've got some coworkers who are very pro-AI though. Every time we talk to them, they mention the word "AI" every five minutes, talking about how we shall let AI write our code, try out the new "agent" and "skill" they've made.
For the love of god, those "agents" are simply fucking markdown file! You wrote a crap document which isn't even grammar-checked!
People channeling code reviews written by AI to GitHub's PR comment section and call it a day. Damn it. I asked you to read my code and give your idea both between lines and from higher up, and you give me some shit I could have generated by myself! Your credibility has dropped to zero.
And what is up with writing test cases with AI? Oh, just because it doesn't fuck up the production even if it becomes shit? Guess what, fuckers, it does! Test cases are an important line of defense against bugs. It ensures no bad behaviour is introduced after a change. We'd better trust a strong security dude guarding this gate, no? You fuckers what, put fucking Frankenstein at that position? I trust the code you wrote, not some fucking probabilistic machine slop! Who cares how good the code AI generates? It was you who I trusted, not "it"! You broken the chain of trust and I guess I won't be trusting you from now on!
I ran something on Opus 4.8 or something two weeks ago and it ignored my rules and when asked why it was like, "yeah I read it but i ignored it"
That's another thing about this is when they say: "tell us what PRs are bad so we can improve the process"
None of these guys are data scientists ... what are they going to do? Bloat the context? There's reasons for why any PR isn't acceptable and any instruction they're secretly writing can change over time.
Sounds like a scenario for which malicious compliance was invented.
So... just regular compliance in this case?
I'm curious what they mean by this. Are they just clueless about how anything works? Maybe AI companies are signing contracts with companies to upload all their code, data, traces, etc; so that the AI companies can improve their models? I.e. companies are acting like reinforcement tuning contractor firms for AI companies?
That's certainly how I read it. They seem to think that if you feed the LLM a new prompt that tells it it made a mistake, it'll update itself to avoid that mistake in the future. Which isn't how any of this works, but I can understand why they wouldn't know that given the marketing from the big AI companies.
A couple of years from now everyone will know this was really dumb, but right now only the engineers know that, and management won't listen to them. I guess they'll learn the hard way.
Unionize and collectively bargain. You owners are trying to get you to teach your replacement. Right now you are 1 squeaky gear in the great machine of your corporation. The c-suite isn't bothered by it. But if every gear and cog on the dev team worked together you could end it.
Lol why are you training it? You're a software dev with a product, not ai qa. Wild times we're in. Should really just cut your losses and gut all ai and go back to where you were before it. If you can't do that, then your company no longer has a purpose.
Where do you people work where you cant just tell the manager how stupid that is? They're part of your team and their role requires them lean on the expertise of their team. So provide your expertise and make the case why that shouldnt happen. It should be relatively easy given they arent training the model so it wont actually learn anything from your comments it will just waste money/time.
Why comment on something you didn't read?
I did read it thats just not what I'm talking about. That doesnt come off as directly pushing back. It comes off as whining about the change and immediately accepting it and the manager just pandering a bit.
Lucky for us, people on the Internet know everything from a couple of sentences. I'm glad the Internet grants us the knowledge to always safely talk out of our ass with barely any context. Because after all, being on the Internet means knowing when a person is lying or is simply just not right about their own lives.
Maybe you meant it sucks that their manager didn't actually listen, but what it came across as was a dickheaded "why are you working at such a bad place? This is your fault op" and frankly that continues to be your tone.
Yeah that is my tone. I know its not their fault its being pushed im just shocked that something that fucking stupid can be proposed and its a little rant to the manager and then ok back to work in the new system. In a healthy workplace this is such a great topic to have a fight about because they're completely in the right and they need to fight with their manager so their manager can fight with their manager to get something changed.
I don't expect ai code reviews to be removed fully but I'd expect the no code part to be dropped pretty easily if the work environment is sane. Yes i know the workplace is probably cooked given the other things mentioned but its still shocking how a workplace can be that dysfunctional.
That's a big assumption these days, and in this case, it very clearly is not. Upper management clearly has a terminal case of AI brainrot, and nothing he does is going to change that. Hearing his complaint and agreeing with it is the only thing his manager can do, because the manager's manager has his head so far up his own ass that he won't hear a word of it.
OP detailed that they did push back in the way they felt appropriate, probably more than most would have done. Not everyone is privileged enough to risk their job by refusing to comply with company policy. This is a terrible reaction on your part and is destructive to the ideals of the community.
Look your manager in the eye and tell them they everything you think about AI. directly. Don't beat around the bush. Even better if you bring 1-3 other devs with you.
Schedule the meeting yourself if you have to. Tell them the damage to their product. Scare the ever loving shit out of them.
They jump on the bandwagon because they are afraid. Only way to pull them back is with more fear
"Oh you are just scared for your job, of course you claim it doesn't work".
The only reason to be this prescriptive is that they think they can peruse your comments and gauge whether or not the time has come to can the developers. They figure it's going to be possible, and if nothing else the marketing and sales folks will "get the idea" from studying your comments on how they can comment things into quality value things directly.
They may have already noticed that your comments are still way over their head, but maybe Fable 5.1 will be the point where they can be rid of those pesky software developers. Whenever the time comes, they will be most ready to pounce if they've made the developers steer by comments only.
Ah, nothing like training your replacement. I don’t know why I try to get into IT; it’s trashed by AI/vibe coding.
I guess, right now, I’ll just maintain my private cloud, but with rsync getting vibe coding, it’s only a matter of time.
IT means being a computer janitor.
You want to be a software architect.
In less trash culture, I'd love to computer janitor.
It seems like the trend is don't even watch the code, many vs code forks for vibe coding now don't even have the coding portion, it's a giant prompt in some electron app
For example Google antigravity
Or windsurf that openai almost paid 3 billion before changing idea (now renamed to something else) also became just a prompt
It's going to backfire spectacularly, approving pr by just reading them in the browser is insane
One thing is "I'm lazy to do this specific thing, I ask the tool to do the specific task by inserting only the useful files in context, then review manually before committing"
Another is "I write a generic prompt "add a photo sharing feature" then it directly opens a PR where another bot reads it and generates a review with so many emojis that it must good 👍🏻😊 boom merge it all the tests pass ✅ ✔️ ✅ ✔️" and then nobody actually knows what it did
Of course the ai companies prefer the second approach before without a subscription the first uses 1 cent in tokens, the second uses $100 in tokens.
My way of doing this is to work it by hand then have AI commit it and cut a PR.
Even with examples and docs, I spent hours 3 days ago to try to sort an issue on our side using AI.
Gave up, solved it myself better than our examples in 5 mins
The github comment thing is insane lmao.
I know its the classic dumb suggestion, but best to clean up your resume just in case.
Should make a complaint that github commenting is too slow and that devs need direct access via an API/dev key so that they can use AI to speed up the PR review process significantly.
Then watch the ensuing flames as they make a pipeline that automatically reviews every PR using the same LLM lol.
/s?
I just saw a skit on youtube about a company stealing keyboards so the employees have to talk to AI chatbot to code. Hold on, lemme find it... Found it: https://youtu.be/eBRzdfU-K30
Knew it would be AlbertaTech before I opened it lol
Just mark everything it produces as perfect
This is the way. Otherwise you're willingly investing your time into training your replacement.
These people don't care if the ai is productive right now. They just care that it's productive eventually so they can get rid of you.
At least your manager didn't tell you that you can't touch Cody anymore...
...always look at the bright side of life!!
How glad I am that ai can't write code I am writing
Is this a Canadian bank?
It is not. Are you working at one? Seeing the same thing?
No but worked at one till 2019 and I could imagine this shit happening there.
The software developer job had to go through the meat grinder. Your salaries have been so inflated these past 20 years that it has kept the entire economy afloat as the rest of the jobs in every other sector have been dragged through shit in every way possible and we're all miserable. We all hate our jobs and we all have friends in tech who can't see what our problem is. We need you to hate life to be in the muck with us. We need you to reject the behemoth management industry - lower management, middle management, and upper management, until finally the goddamn message gets to C-suite that the workers of the world are unhappy. We need you to revolt and force upheaval in the entire tech industry before anything will change.
That's only valid in some countries like the USA. In France, the salaries of developers are a tiny bit higher than other jobs, but not that much.
Well doesn't big tech in the USA create this problem for everyone? We're platforming fascism in your country too. All the dynamics are interconnected.
I actually agree with a lot of what you said. Software engineers didn't want to form a union and stuff because they had high salaries and we're so sought after. lol, to be clear, I'm not one of those crazy useful or overpaid tech guys (not anywhere close to FAANG). Although overpaid is always relative. Regardless, I think all workers should unite beyond tech ... it's the "tech bros" that are also making the world worse right now and I'm not happy these chuds are holding that moniker.
Unionizing in my country is pointless. You have to join the union of your employers branch, i.e. sales or metal work. Sales however includes cashiers and other low skill jobs. That changes entirely how the union acts. Want to change employer? Have to change union too. Just all the hassle. Also low skill low pay jobs dont understand why SWEs should complain because you got homeoffice and better pay. Lets just say solidarisation is stopped by envy. I worked as cashier too and studied twice but workers council sides with employers because we didnt work our way up???
All that and I still cannot find a point anywhere.
Tell me any other profession that expects sample project work during application. Keeping up with ever changing tech in your private time. Have solid / strong understanding of dozens special tech only XY company uses, do dev ops on weekends and night.
Meanwhile managers bullshit their way into jobs and waste our time with useless meetings earning notably more.
Also this is not about SWE only. Any office job will be changed by AI. Then people will flock to non AI jobs deflating their value and so on.
LET'S SHOUT AT EACH OTHER IN AGREEMENT
I mostly agree. I've worked service industry, construction, and more before doing software development. I now work in Japan as a full-time engineer and part-time farmer. Salaries in Japan (outside of FAANG) are not nearly as high as elsewhere. It does come with some reason though: to be successful, there is a lot of time outside of work hours spent reading, studying, etc. to keep up with the industry and extra salary compensates for that.
HOWEVER, I think we'd all do better if salaries were closer, we had better rights (especially in countries like the US and, to a lesser extent, Japan). I think people should be compensated for all the time we have to spend (not just engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc. do this after all) and get our fair share of the value we bring rather than it going increasingly to the top.
I think there’s some truth there, but will say that prior to the modern era, software engineers were actually worth their salt. They tended to have higher levels of competence and mastery.
Nowadays it’s hard to find a coworker who really gives a damn. Especially the younger ones. Lots of blank faces when you try to engage them on ideas that are esoteric to software engineering.
And of course if you have people who don’t care they need more management to make sure they’re on track. And many of them don’t really read about software either.
So the industry became more bloated than before (yes even compared with the dot com boom when you could get hired if you could write HTML). And we all suffer.