On social media, I saw the much more vulgar
“Learned engineering just to become the condom between Claude Code and prod”
And that (re)framing helped as well to think about the “what are we even (left) doing” as an industry
On social media, I saw the much more vulgar
“Learned engineering just to become the condom between Claude Code and prod”
And that (re)framing helped as well to think about the “what are we even (left) doing” as an industry
With the recent wave of posts about Claude rewriting entire codebases from Zig/Electron to Rust/Swift, I can't help but question the prompter's actual confidence in the final result. Gaining a thorough understanding of the generated output still demands an enormous amount of effort. I suspect the reality is that most people just chain a few review agents together, and if they output "LGTM", the code gets committed and pushed.
I have been doing daily agentic coding myself since last November, but lately Im having concerns. We are on the verge of becoming Warhammer 40k Tech-Priests: chanting sacred prompts to appease the machine spirit, praying for a good result. The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.
> The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.
but this is similar to a lot of other technical fields that have width and depth. People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler. People now can only design a part of a CPU, and not the entirety. Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end.
Yet, we all trust these things.
Trusting the output of an abstraction explicitly designed, engineered, and tested by other humans with an actual understanding of the layer beneath you is not comparable to trusting a non-deterministic, statistical next-word-predictor with no mind or ability to be morally responsible for what it produces.
Assuming most humans accept moral responsibility seems rather dangerous in itself. Especially as they climb the corporate ladder.
Luckily, accountability does exist in most professional settings so someone accepting moral responsibility is not required.
It doesn't always land on the right person but it's usually a motivating factor for people to make an effort.
> People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler.
This was OK as long as you understood enough Assembly to debug it. Even though I haven't written much Assembly directly, I can still debug it when there are compiler bugs, which does ocasionally happen.
If you lose the ability to both write and debug code then things get much worse. If no one at a company can do that, then you truly are at the mercy of the LLMs.
As for hardware bugs, those are only possibly to identify (by excluding any other possibility) and work-around, since most engineers don't have the luxury of being able to change the hardware.
I'm wondering if some of us will become consultants to companies that lost the ability to handle code. When I was in university the going meme was that old COBOL programmers were making a lot of money in consulting jobs, maybe this will be the new version of that.
This might grow bigger than cobol.
There will be a large number of companies that will be staffed entirely by vibe coders and when an issue crops up that cannot be debugged by them a consultancy will be brought it. The consultants will use their superior agentic skills supported with actual coding and software archeology experience.
Some other companies will have both vibe coders and systems engineers on staff.
I’m just making this up, it probably won’t be like that. But it’s interesting to think about it.
With the crucial difference that these processes deterministically return correct & working results (save for bugs which can be fixed and then stay fixed). Cannot be guaranteed for LLM output, no matter how much effort we put in.
> Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end.
There are YouTube videos of a guy doing chip fabrication in his clean room shed. Just as I understand the assembly output of my compiler (… and no, I don't work in a low level language), he understands chip fabrication end to end.
CS is not that wide, not yet. No, one cannot know every facet of the field, but one can know enough about the facets one is in contact with that they're not "here be dragons" on the map. All the way down to the hardware.
> There are YouTube videos of a guy doing chip fabrication in his clean room shed
The fact this is "a guy", and probably there are very few people in the world who would be able to execute such a thing, probably should tell you how difficult that actually is. You're actually unintentionally making parent's point stronger, as obviously the production processes used for market products is much, much more complicated than what a guy in a shed does.
> Just as I understand the assembly output of my compiler
Fair enough, this is probably way more common than "person who understands the entire chip manufacturing process from beginning to end", but it's still something that less and less people know about, in a room of 100 average developers, probably few of them could realistically claim to understand all the assembly output of their compiler, if even they're familiar enough with that their language outputs assembly in the first place.
The range of skills in developers is enourmous, you have Klaus working as IT+web dev+database+admin in a tiny 2 person web shop, and on the other hand you have Anders who is a ML expert optimizing CUDA kernels, and everything in-between. That all (or even most) of them know the far end of what they currently know is wishful thinking really, Klaus doesn't need to know about what the NVCC compiler outputs, nor do Anders need to know about the specific constraints of mapping packaged products to order shipments, that's all fine.
And this is fine! This is the whole point of living in a civilization. Master your craft, get useful, trade with people who know other useful things, everyone is better off.
You could just as easily point out that subsistence farmers exist. That’s great, but we still need industrial agriculture to feed everyone. No single human fully understands that domain either… even ignoring the chemistry, biology and meteorology, those farms use digitally controlled tools! That means all of computer science is embedded in farming.
It’s great to pursue broad knowledge. It’s important to understand your dependencies and respect the abstractions you build on. It’s pure hubris to think an individual auteur can challenge a multi-billion person civilization.
> Yet, we all trust these things.
We trust them - in large part - because we know that professionals took the care and responsibility to build the foundations correctly.
And if the foundations failed in some way, those same professionals would suffer a hit to their reputation.
An AI is not an abstraction. It is not remotely the same thing as a compiler!
> Yet, we all trust these things.
Yes! Because of two words. Consistency and Reliability.
All the physics equations, we trust them not because they are pretty, but because they have been consistent with experiment. Simplified models of transistors are also consistent within a temperature range. Boolean Logic is also consistent, the Turing Machine is consistent,…, the electronics inside a chip is reliable. The instruction set is reliable, etc,…
> Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end
I strongly doubt that. The actual theoretical knowledge is taught at school and you can take an iron and some electronic elements and build some 8bit computer. Modern chip manufacturing is a matter of scale. It’s cumbersome to design with logic gates, so we invented hardware design languages (just like it’s cumbersome to deal with opcodes) and they are reliable. And instead of PCB, we just use a silicium wafer.
God the "compiler abstraction" argument is so tired, why does anyone even remotely thinks its accurate anymore
Most developers by any metric haven't hopped onto the full agentic AI bandwagon. People who want to stop understanding code will indeed largely lose their technical skills, but they're a minority of developers. Its one of the reasons why I think its a terrible idea to invest in personally, being skilled at something has never once been a negative for me in my entire life even if it requires work
> The foundational knowledge is lost ...
Not yet. The world still pretty much runs on systems not written by LLMs. And humans wrote all of that. LLMs runs on OSes and hardware created by "not LLMS".
And seen the "quality" of the output of LLMs (and I pay three AI subscriptions), I don't think we're getting rid of human-produced code, OSes, hardware, anytime soon.
It's interesting to me, I have never once felt this. I have basically just been excited by using AI for coding. I've been a software engineer for 15 years and before that a physics PH.D. student (and 1 year professional scientist) who focused largely on computational work. I love programming and I've felt reinvigorated by the introduction of AI and developing systems around it.
I tend to think it's just different personality types. There are a lot of different type in engineering. There's a significant set of people that really love to just be given detailed, well described set of work and crank it out, they don't really want to be involved in much outside of just implementing the plan. That is not all engineers but certainly a chunk of them. I could see that group feeling a bit sidelined by AI. But that's not me, so I am just speculating.
I enjoy and use AI a lot both for personal projects, but also at work. I think that feeling of “we’ve become claude code babysitters” is a lot more prevalent in larger teams and/or in work environments where … most people have resorted to claude coding all the time.
You can’t not claude code if everyone else is pushing to main (or opening prs which get ai reviewed), and once your days become mostly prompting and ai code review, you start remembering the days (mere months ago) where work did not feel or look like this at all.
The condom image is both an exaggeration, but is also almost a too-accurate depiction of what work has become - very rapidly - for many people.
I’m sure people were also very excited to get their first cars after years of riding on horses. It doesn’t mean new kinds of pollution (and accidents) are not happening, or that we don’t miss horse riding haha
Cheers
We once interviewed a candidate for a senior engineering position and when asked what his primary role was at his current job, he said "I mostly make sure that nobody changes the software".
He wasn't wrong, and his role was still valuable to the company.
The mental model I like to use is something along the lines of the LLM is a firehose and my brain is a mere straw and that we have to eventually get all the important parts to trickle through my straw sized brain. Or another way, the LLM is all the dough shoved into a pasta extruder and all the dough needs to eventually extrude out of my brain into prod-pasta.
A whole new meaning to penetration testing
Thanks, I hate it.
Describes how I feel.
>"what are we even (left) doing"
Maybe that's you. In my case, it's going better than ever.
You guys are using protection?
Raw_Claude can just go straight in prod.
I guarantee that the major players will offer straight-to-CEO interfaces where the user provides ALL info and AI will proceed to orchestrate the entire company, from finances to deployment. We're screwed, without protection.
polsia.com AI slop spelled backwards.
I am rawdogging my server by letting user report bugs and send feature requests to a sorting bot
Don't do that, you might import a std
Yeah bro passwordless sudo for claude all the way...