This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
lol sure they are.
They're desperately trying to pump this AI shit up with these fake stories before they go public
Investors really are dumber demographic than MAGA.
Investors really are dumber demographic than MAGA.
Herd behavior.
Cory Doctor's recent book on Centaurs and Reverse Centaurs is worth reading.
The core idea of that is that centaurs are a human top and machine / alien body, they're effectively augmented humans with all this technology to help them excel.
Reverse Centaurs are human bodies and machine / alien tops, where the humans are just checking the work of systems and are subservient to them. He points out that that's one of the fundamental differences between Amazon and the Postal Service is that in the case of Amazon drivers, they basically function as a reverse Centaurs where they are just an appendage of the delivery car, tracked and managed by that car, to do the tasks the car can't do on its own.
very interesting concept. another example might be railway drivers who are merely appendices to the vehicle. the vehicle largely drives itself, the driver is mostly there to check tickets, answer passenger's questions, etc.
That makes sense. Software engineers have gone from being artists (because yes, software architecture is an art) to becoming AI managers. It's demoralising.
I believe open-source software will continue to provide a refuge for artists.
Yup. I'm watching my artform die in real time. Not only will my career no longer exist in the form I enjoy it, but the art form itself will die. Nobody is going to appreciate artisan code like they do other forms of art.
for the last three years and a bit, silicon valley has promised eradication of everything from writer to filmmaker as a career. after all this i don't think that devs get to hitch their wagon to artists for sympathy points
That's a very warped impression of Silicon Valley. And it probably comes from Hollywood movies, which is super ironic since you mentioned writers and filmmmakers.
Dumb representation of computers in movies has done more to harm their image than actual software ever did. Most of the AI hype is based on fantastic notions of AI as seen in movies.
I believe open-source software will continue to provide a refuge for artists.
Yes. My work is open source, and pretty unchanged. We get some AI pull requests now that take longer to review than doing the work ourselves.
I think a key difference is that there was never any tolerance for bullshit in my team's code base.
We don't have thousands of points of boilerplate, or a big pile of "not invented here" crap code.
So we don't have somewhere for the AI to really shine.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that code can be art but I was never able to express myself on that level at my corporate jobs. I was always limited to writing code that aligned with the company’s rigid style guide, and never allowed to implement new design patterns that would’ve improved things but deviated from the way things were done in the existing codebase.
Thus, I’m not too miffed about being forced to use coding agents at work because writing corporate-sanitary code already felt like a robotic process before LLMs existed. Personal hobby projects and open source contributions are where we can express ourselves freely and create our art the way we want to. They’ll never be able to take that from us.
Most of my career I was allowed to write code how I wanted. I made it beautiful and nice to read. It was genuinely fun to find the best way to implement each feature.
My final job, I was forced to add semicolons on new lines for each if else statement, even for early returns, remove hyphens from my comments because they were "improper grammar", put a useless giant copy pasted comment at the start of each file so you can't even see any code without scrolling, one separate file for each class even if it's an internal helper class used nowhere else, and use interfaces and MVVM for literally everything, even when it was severely over-engineering (or should I say overengineering). It just felt soul crushing to make this ugly ass code that took forever to write, just because the style guide said so.
Then A.I. happened and I quit being a software engineer completely. Telling an A.I. to do my work for me is just depressing. What's even the point anymore? I still code for fun but I'm done with the industry.
These days it’s very common to write whatever code you want, and a formatter automatically rewrites it to conform to the projects rules during precommit.
Which is great because it allows you to focus on intent instead of format, and completely avoids any team disagreements or change rejections for trivial bullshit.
My favourite part is when your style or the auto formatter changes over time and you have to decide between:
Plus it doesn't fix the problem of auto formatters writing ugly code. You can't easily tell the auto formatter that early returns can be bracketless for brevity, but nothing else can be. Unless you add a comment like \\ ignore-rule-2753674 which makes me want to throw up
I wish I could work somewhere like your first paragraph. My career has been your second paragraph, probably because I’ve only worked on medical devices and we gotta have higher standards than a lot of developers. It also got taken a bit too much to the extreme tho
Believe it or not my first paragraph was working on medical software lol. It was good though, I liked the feeling of helping doctors help people, making the world a better place.
If you don't mind me asking, to which career did you switch to?
Unemployed / disability lol. But if I could still move around I'd probably get into something outdoorsy. Park ranger or the like. Keeping a candle lit though, in case one day I miraculously recover or medical science advances or something.
Edit: actually it's the reason I did software engineering in the first place. But actually this industry is now hostile to people with disability. Can I work from home because leaving the house is hard? No, everyone must be in office chained to your desk 9/9/6. Can I be neurodivergent? No, everyone must have constant in person meetings and work in open plan offices.
You worked places with style guides? Did... Did you have a real testing environment that wasn't prod too?
I got taken off a project recently for being too direct about how the rest of the team was just spray and praying entirely AI generated code with no standards or review whatsoever, and they were charging ahead like it was a race to implement features we hadn't even discussed if we wanted/needed.
If you can't tell me how it works, you can't confirm that we actually need it, you can't tell me the upstream and downstream effects (or confirm they don't exist), and you can't even confirm that we even want it to do the thing it only supposedly does, then we have better things to do than go on a wild goose chase trying to debug it when there's a looming deadline for things that legitimately do not work that we need. Stop vibe coding and actually review the existing shit for fucks sake. If the requirements have never been clear, solve that instead of generating more slop. Maybe update some of the existing documentation instead of having AI wholesale hallucinate entirely new not quite right ones over and over.
Anyway, please tell me more happy development bedtime stories. I need to chase away the nightmares.
You worked places with style guides? Did... Did you have a real testing environment that wasn't prod too?
Yes, and the style guides reached far beyond things like “use camel case”. I’m talking guidelines for how whole blocks of code should be formatted. Also weren’t allowed to throw exceptions at all even though we were using up-to-date modern C++. Some guidelines had good intentions and others were just put in by OCD control freaks that no one felt like opposing.
And yes, we had a testing environment, although we mostly depended on manual QA rather than software tests. Medical devices can’t test in prod, fortunately
There are many C++ features that make the language worse. Exceptions is one of them. It's not strange to have them banned.
Critical systems often only allow you to use a subset of the language. Dynamic (heap) allocations, recursive functions, exceptions are features that are often banned. In medical devices, safety is critical, so it makes sense. Otherwise you could get a Therac-like scenario due to an unhandled exception.
bordering on???
Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.
I think that's pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of places around me cut back. Thankfully, I'm not forced to use AI directly. We do have it for code reviews (which I don't hate as a concept, but would prefer local models trained on ethically-sourced data).
Ours is trying to cut everything to the bone to avoid admitting AI is not the future.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
We have execs trying extremely hard to push products through purchasing that are literally illegal for us to use because of the data being used.
Huh. Maybe I will have a shot at getting a job... Oh, wait, I have 35 years experience, am over 50 and have been unemployed for 16 months. Never mind.
I gave up the humiliating shit show called a job search 3 months ago, and frankly my last job killed any interest in software development anyway.
It's all idiots telling professionals they're wrong and incompetent while blaming them for the ongoing production failures we solved and explained every month for a year but still can't get the code past review because "it does too much". 30 fucking lines of code "does too much". Pompous morons.
We're a threat of competence, and they're excising us relentlessly. I will laugh bitterly as I watch the soon to be torrent of fiascos and lamentations these idiots spout while still finding a way to blame software engineers.
I'm with you, MasterBlaster!
It sucks for lots of us, more every day, so at least we're not miserable, alone.
my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand
Now that is a palpable irony. So much disruption in this space so some investors could profit off of a tech they don't even understand.
Yeah based on WYEA’s articles recently I would say that is the case. As providers move to token based billing, trying to find a way to break even, the rising costs will lower usage, which will probably then drive up costs further as the (imaginary) capital has already been spent on the DCs.
with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately
Meanwhile, my company has forgotten how to write bash scripts... More and more things that could just be bash scripts are being added as stupid Claude.md scripts.
Hahahaha. Let's go! grabs popcorn
More and more things that could just be bash scripts are being added as stupid Claude.md scripts.
But they can pay an ongoing subscription cost for the Claude script, and it may sometimes hallucinate.
The bash script would be free forever and keep working unchanged for decades.
It's too soon to know which approach is the right way. (I nearly died of sarcasm, there.)
Anyway, I agree. There may not be enough popcorn for all of this!
Why would you want the same result twice?
As a freelance dev it’s not quite as bad now but it’s insane to see that some of my clients think I got replaced by a machine now only to show me a buggy vibe coded mess of an app that is poorly designed and works half the time at best. I like some of the LLM tools but it’s important to understand their abilities and limitations especially in regards to future capabilities as there are hard limits to how capable they can become.
Way too many people think the tools are smart because they can „talk“ and these same people do not understand any of the underlying tech.
Some of my clients send ChatGPT written instructions now that are missing half the context of what I‘m actually doing.
I call it "Turing's Revenge" where, once the bot can pass the Turing test, we find out the hard way if humans are intelligent... and we appear to have a lot of failed models, mostly in management.
Reverse Turing test?
Holy cow. I'm stealing that. The reverse Turing test is whether we humans have the brains not to turn everything over to untrusted AI. Lol.
FUCKING GOOD.
STOP BUILDING EVIL SHIT.
Yeah, lots of them have been living in the lap of luxury building the tools and platforms that have ruined society, without a second thought about it.
