An interesting trend is these comments: the worse a code base is, the more helpful AI is for expanding it (without actually fixing the underlying problems like repetitive overly long unexpressive code).
This is so fucking sad to acknowledge that a lot of people just want to squeeze any profit left in the industry, even though they know AI is a great tool for developers, not a replacement. They must know that because anyone who can access it can replicate the same things, making these products uncompetitive.
AI is a great tool for developers, not a replacement
AI isn’t a great tool for developers. It’s a great tool for mitigating the knowledge gap between an individual’s academic understanding of a development project and the syntax involved in the language they are attempting to deploy.
As the number of programming languages has proliferated faster than the volume of developers versed in each language, and the older languages have lost much of their professional base to retirement and layoffs, we’ve needed increasingly elaborate tools to fill in the skills gaps.
But AI doesn’t fix the underlying problem of an increasingly large backlog of code desperately in need of refactor or replacement. It just papers over the problem with a cheat-sheet of simple conversions that junior developers can leverage to liter the next iteration of the codebase with bandaids.
A proper solution to our coding backlog would be educational first and foremost. We need more rigorously enforced orthodox approaches to coding. We need more backwards compatibility between systems. We need to refine the number of languages in active use and narrow the size and scope of their libraries. We need a more universalist approach to building and maintaining database schemas, digital communications, and business practices. We need a publicly funded open source community of developers to build the backbone of software into the 21st century.
What we’re producing is the opposite of that. Less rigor. Fewer recognizable standards. Less training. Poorer code hygiene and weaker enforcement of best practices. More bugs. So many more bugs. And enormous volumes of legacy code that nobody will be able to maintain - or even understand - in another twenty years.
Developers developers developers developers, developers developers developers developers AI
Forward-thinking companies should use AI to transform each developer into a “10x developer,”
Developer + AI ≠ Developer x 10
At best, it means 1.25 x Developer, but in most cases, it will mean 0.5 x Developer. Because AI cannot be trusted to generate safe, reliable code.
I think 10x is a reasonable long term goal, given continued improvements in models, agentic systems, tooling, and proper use of them.
It’s close already for some use cases, for example understanding a new code base with the help of cursor agent is kind of insane.
We’ve only had these tools for a few years, and I expect software development will be unrecognizable in ten more.
It also depends on the usecase. It likely can help you better at throwing webpages together from zero, but will fall apart once it has to be used to generate code for lesser-discussed things. Someone once tried to solve an OpenGL issue I had with ChatGPT, and first it tried to suggest me using SDL2 or GLFW instead, then it spat out a barely working code that was the same as mine, and still wrong.
A lot of it instead (from what I’ve heard from industry connections) being that the employees are being forced to use AI so hard they’re threatened with firings, so they use most of their tokens to amuse themselves with stuff like rewriting the documentation in a pirate style or Old English. And at the very worst, they’re actually working in constant overtime now, because people were fired, contracts were not extended, etc.
It’s made me a 10x developer.
As someone who transitioned form Junior to Dev as we embraced LLMs. Our company saved that much time that we all got a pay rise with a reduction in hours to boot.
Sick of all this anti LLM rhetoric when it’s a tool to aid you. People out here thinking we just ask ChatGPT and copy and paste. Which isn’t the case at all.
It helps you understand topics much quicker, can review code, read documentation, etc.
My boss is the smartest person I’ve ever met in my life and has an insane cv in the dev and open source world. If he is happy to integrate it in our work then I’m fine with it. After all we run a highly successful business with many high profile clients.
Edit: love the downvotes that don’t explain themselves. Like I’m not earning more money for doing less hours and productivity has increased. Feel like many of the haters of LLMs don’t even work in the bloody industry. 😂
Man, I wish LLMs were more useful to me than line completion tool we already had in normal languages in normal IDEs.
So far everything I’ve seen it do even with agentic approaches, is just not covering my use cases.
At best I can have it generate some correct-ish terraform boilerplate. Or writing mediocre code in languages I have to use once in blue moon, that I still then have to correct. Cursorrules are meh.
Me: fintech, 15y of exp.
On the other hand I can imagine it creating some bullshit boilerplate in companies that require bullshit boilerplate.
Btw I don’t think code throughput is what distinguished Junior from Dev. I rather think it’s realizing the steep decline in “Doner-Kebab” effect :)
I am not anti-AI or something like it and I use AI on a daily basis. If you work on a domain where there’s plenty code written for it or documentation, AI acts like a very efficient search tool. It does not replace traditional documentation or stack overflow, but it significantly reduces the time I take searching for specific syntax, or an example of how to use a library, or how to use a specific feature or parameter of a library. Occasionally it gives me bad advice as well, such as doing something that results in low performance, low security, but then I can check the actual documentation and code to see the details. For code reviews, I think it’s only partially useful, while sometimes it spits something useful, most of the time it spits out bad or irrelevant advice that ends up polluting the code review screen for actual human devs trying to review the code. However, even with all the gains, which is kind of a mixed bag, I think it’s very unlikely AI will increase speed 10 fold. At best, it will be like a 25% improvement at best, and only specific to some times in the project lifecycle, and most of the gains only happen when you are dealing with generating boilerplate code and adding non business-specific functionality. Most of the time I had to maintain existing code, debug existing functionality and fix some security flaws, AI didn’t help me at all.
This assumes it is about output. 20 years of experience tell me it’s not about output, but about profits and those can be increased without touching output at all. 🤷♂️
