I have an interesting observation from the programmers on my team.
The good ones are increasingly producing good solutions much faster than before.
The not so good ones, are doing the same bullshit they did before, but now the don't even bother to check it. For example one requirement to "not implement it in the frontend" led to 3 times PR rejected, because it still has been implemented (even if it's partially there) in the frontend.
I'm not sure what's the reason, but I assume it's
- inability to understand architecture choices and their consequences
- "don't bother me with shit, just pay me a salary" attitude
but the AI lead to amplification of the good and the bad in people.
>"don't bother me with shit, just pay me a salary"
Well I'll admit this is me. Albeit previously I would have to generate working solutions meticulously to get my code reviewed and merged, as is normal. And it would be good work I could be proud of because _I_ wrote it!
But now the same people who would scrutinize me also outpace me with agents (the good developers you refer to) and also continue to scrutinize me. I recognize my own mediocrity in the face of my peers. So I don't know, I don't really care about my work quality anymore, the incentive of "do enough to put bread on the table" is now a much higher bar that I am struggling to meet.
This year has made me realize salary work really isn't a proper incentive to fully apply myself because being stuck under these guardrails and leadership decisions are a huge turn off. More than ever.
When you put a person who cares inside of a culture that doesn't and just wants to get things out to meet short term goals and figure out the cost later, you get this. Working on some projects its reasonable, but on others, especially services that customers really depend on where the cost of failure is high, it really is short term thinking. If speed is the only moat a company has, its just going to be death marches.
This situation sounds very similar to mine.
I'm also like: why would you give the execs more productivity for no additional pay? The puritanical love of work and individualistic competitiveness in the US is so counterproductive to any sort of gains in livelihood for the average person.
I'm not too familiar with the US workplace, but don't you have salary negotiations? Wouldn't you want more leverage for arguing for a higher salary, if you're unhappy with your salary? I'm also curious what work structure makes you feel like you're working for execs, rather than for your clients/customers/end-users. Surely you want the people who use your systems to have a smooth experience?
Making end users happy is a side effect. My own well being comes first.
You postulated this in another reply to me so I'll say here, why would I seek to make end users happy and work myself to the bone when leadership reaps the awards?
Even with salary negotiation there is almost no commensurate compensation you get under any employer that matches the value you bring to the company. That's how it's designed of course, by taking a base wage you trade off the risk of your income stream suddenly failing.
I am at that point now where that risk does not seem so scary anymore, which is odd to me. I never thought I'd consider taking the risk before. And I am learning that founders are usually driven by the feeling that I have.
Not really. American Corporations have successfully changed the culture to a point where asking about salary is considered a flaw to the worker. It somehow demonstrates a lack of loyalty.
Things are getting better, but HR still routinely preaches that you should never share your salary with anyone else. A lot of times they infer you will be fired for it.
Salary negotiations are sort of constrained to cost of annual living increases, or promotions. outside of that, you are not expected to ever talk about salary. ever.
I somewhat agree, but one is lucky to have any work at all these days, which unfortunately takes precedence.
This is the "got mine, fuck you" attitude that is part of the reason of a political shift to the right. And the worst part is, I get it, it's just also at odds with my more social leaning values.
Like, I don't mind paying taxes and social contributions, but I'm at a point now where I have to dip into my savings on the regular to match the monthly expenses and there hasn't been anything going in there for years.
I try to discern between the GMFY crowd and people who are just burnt out or dealing with life, because I have sympathy for the latter. Thankfully, the GMFY's will often be vocal with their dirtbaggery and let you know exactly who they are. They seem blissfully unaware that everyone is watching them and they are trashing their reputations.
I think the swing to the right is due to nation-state propaganda organs being defunded or replaced worldwide. People are naturally change averse, so either conservative or reactionary. Without the constant 'nudges', you're getting to see people's prickly natures coming out more.
> The puritanical love of work and individualistic competitiveness in the US is so counterproductive to any sort of gains in livelihood for the average person
History shows that it isn’t.
I'm always curious why people who don't care about work or tech spend time commenting on career sites and topics
Because they used to care.
Just because I am not happy with my employment situation doesn't mean I don't care about tech. I am privileged to even say that my job hasn't sucked all the joy out of building projects outside of work. None of this is a prerequisite for me ranting :)
Do you care about your users? If you care about tech, I'm sure you're as dissatisfied with the current state of broken and invasive software as the rest of us. I don't know the exact nature of your work, but don't you care about the experience of your clients or end-users?
Would you take a bullet for your clients and end-users?
Burning yourself out to patch over unsustainable working conditions is a slow bullet.
100%. I've been combating burnout over the last year or so. A saying that has stuck with me recently is "you don't need to set yourself on fire to make others warm." Trying to fix things by yourself in a massive bureaucracy is nigh impossible, so I've resigned myself to stop going the extra mile for the sake of the health and wellbeing of myself and my family.
Many smart people get bored and get all the joy sucked out of them when living and working under circumstances.
Some people enjoy the challenge and may compensate outside work hours, often doing overtime without compensation, that often implies less of a life outside of work or work concerns, promoting their personal branding, conferences, etc.
Just because these people exist and get rewarded does not mean their work environment is not predatory.
I like tech
Thank you for this honest take.
Thank you for posting. I felt almost like I was reading my own thoughts. You're not alone
You're lucky. Every single person (n of around 10) I've been unlucky enough to review code for lost between 0.5 and 3 promotion levels of competence when they started using LLM code generation, and it's been worse for the better programmers because they have more capacity to lose skills.
My personal "favorite" was when the lead engineer who onboarded me half a decade prior forgot the written policy he'd put in place of "no raw js dates. use this library for everything date related instead" and sent up an MR that not only used javascript dates, but did complex operations on them (incorrectly at that, because it didn't account for timezones, daylight saving, years that had a leap day, and months that weren't 30 days).
From what I can tell, it's the exact same reason people drive faster than is prudent or use their cellphone while driving. It feels safe and good right up until it isn't and you crash. And because most places don't have anywhere close to adequate specification detail, test coverage, or review coverage, the broken bits aren't even noticed until much later.
I think for a lot of people it's that they stopped caring or obsessing over the (perceived) small details; AI makes it very easy to work on a higher level. I suspect (don't quote me on this) that it's the same for a lot of developers that grew to more lead / managerial positions - at some point the details don't matter much to you personally and you need to spend your energy elsewhere.
But I hope people are gathering metrics. We had an extra meeting the other day because we're seeing an upwards trend in outages, the meeting was mainly about how it affects various departments (like customer support) and potential revenue loss (can't sell a product/service if the signup page is down for three days).
Thing is, there's no one cause for any of those - we have hundreds of engineers, dozens of applications and 3rd party integrations, millions of (potential) customers each running their own set of devices, and it's pretty much impossible to control everything.
But this goes beyond whether or not code was written by an attentive hand working under a strict set of policies or an AI that figures it out on the go, and goes up a level to things like realtime monitoring and incident responses.
You're right that as a person moves into management/staff+ that individual details matter less for them, because they begin to deal at a more strategic or operational level, but someone still needs to obsess over the small details (to make things easier, let's assume we're only talking about the details that actually matter and that there's broad agreement what that set is). It's not that those details stop mattering to them, it's that they have to depend on the assumption/promise that someone else is going to mind those details for them, so that they can work on things with a broader perspective.
The problem comes when no one is actually minding those details anymore. If those details aren't actually minded, then the work at the higher levels will be much less useful and effective, and in the worst cases won't matter at all.
I am seeing the same. The skillsets degrading rather rapidly, people not able to maintain focus and becoming less sharp in general. The brain rot associated with short form videos is affecting our industry via LLMs. It doesn't give me any joy to see it happening, especially to people I care about.
I don't know why I haven't been able to see the similarity between short form content and LLMs in our industry until reading your comment, but that is apt. That's the impression I'm getting. I stay away from "agentic code generation" as much as possible, just like I avoid short form content mills like the plague. That said, LLMs have been a huge boon for me as a research assistant. Being able to look up very niche problems, and have responses be tailored to me, is awesome. My brain stays sharp and I still enjoy the fun of putting the pieces together myself much faster than before.
I don't personally like LLMs for research assistance (yet?) because i can't get over the hallucinating or rather, waste too much time validating that it's not currently overcast when they tell me the sky is in fact blue.
But, especially as code gets flung over the wall faster and with less care, I do think they are getting to be pretty great at reviewing code for specific things that a linter can't easily catch and for looking for security, implementation, and architectural flaws before I have to look for them. A couple examples of what i mean: 'does the code use knex.raw with a template literal?', 'does the code do n+1 db lookups instead of something better?' 'do all the added/modified tests follow the test case template defined here?'
Agreed. I trust it more as a codebase query system rather than a codebase writer.
Amplifier of human intent. Do you want to work hard and cure cancer? Great! AI can help. Do you want to phone it in and do the bare minimum? AI can help you do that, too.
Long time ago, me and a friend of mine had a joke about PMs: to calculate how managers combine, you multiply their performance rates: two poor managers (e.g. 0.5*0.7) will give you worse performance than if you had one bad manager. My similar formula about AI and developers is that it works like raising to the power of two: if you have a bad dev, you get 0.5^2: more mess more quickly. If you have a great dev, you get 1.5^2 - exponentially better :)
I've used an even less-kind framing in the past: incompetence is multiplicative. Two half-wits together gets you a quarter-wit.
I had a similar thought earlier this year - competence is additive, incompetence is multiplicative.
... quadratically better
Maybe he had AI assist him with that comment
Yes, these are my colleagues. Same crap as before. At least now I can setup an automatic ai review that is told what is not allowed (the errors they do all the time and refuse to learn) and I get PRs that have passed 8 review turns and are somewhat better.
I don’t think the good programmer bad programmer framing is helpful. I think AI fits the working style of some developers better than others. Where it fits I’ve seen some developers become so productive that they suck all the air out of the room and drown everyone else in review - not clear if this is good or bad. Where it doesn’t fit I’ve seen developers shut down because they find the workflow so depressing and their former productivity craters. Similarly I’ve seen perfectly good developers turn into slop generation machines and go largely unchecked because everyone else gets alarm fatigue from reviewing their PRs.
Yeah the review fatigue thing is a huge problem at the moment. When your work becomes 90% reviewing AI code, it is very demotivating.
I have been focusing a lot more on testing and "manual" validation than on reviewing individual lines of code. (And on setting up rules for what the lines of code should look like that are easily checked with deterministic tools or by llms.)
For large diffs, I’ll have the human driver walk me through the code in a call and if they understand it well enough to explain it to me, and explain the implications of the changes, that’s good enough for me; if they can’t answer how something works, I’ll respectfully turn down their contribution.
This cost shifting is how I stay sane and avoid burn out at work as well as stay apprised of major behavioral changes in the software we run.
I also think it’s important to emphasize that in an organization, individual productivity is secondary to group productivity, and group productivity is different than the sum of its parts.
I understand your reasoning but my reaction to this suggestion is very strong revulsion :) On both sides of it, I would despise this process.
But you're right about thinking in terms of group productivity and costs and incentives.
We solved this at work by creating a system that has an LLM read a Jira ticket assigned to Mike, create an implementation by itself and post a PR using a service account. Then Mike can come along and review it, thereby satisfying peer review as it was authored by a different user (in our SCM) than the one that reviewed it.
Needless to say it is getting really hard to care about my job anymore
> I have been focusing a lot more on testing and "manual" validation than on reviewing individual lines of code.
Same, but there is a reason I did not choose to work in QA so this sucks too
Fair. But a big part of what I disliked was the tedium, which is largely alleviated. I quite enjoy making sure things I'm building work properly, now.
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I've seen this phrased as "some people enjoy software development because they like making things, others enjoy it because they like solving the mental problems it throws up, others enjoy it because it pays well", and AI is really only helping the first type of programmer.
Turns out, business also favor "making things" at least before the other categories.
Although I believe they favor "making the right things" even more. Which is harder but neither the 2nd och 3rd categories help here.
I've seen no evidence that they favour making the right things at all ;)
Lots of evidence that they favour making the thing that the executive wants made, regardless of what the nerds pushing the nerd-buttons think is the right thing.
This is spot on to what I have noticed as well. The slackers are still the slackers with no real self drive or enthusiasm for the tech and just keep doing the same thing, but instead of using Google/stackoverflow to copy and paste from they use Claude/Gemini to do the same thing.
Totally agree. AI amplifies what's there already
"don't even bother to check it."
I have to admit it gets really exhausting to review the AI output. It comes in so fast and more and more it's quite good. So it's very tempting to get more relaxed about reviews. I guess in a sense manual coding gave you some mental downtime while writing code. With AI you don't get that anymore. It's always full speed.
The problem is that humans are badly suited to remaining attentive in these circumstances. Take the combination of “overwhelming amount of output”, “99% of the time it does the right thing in the right way” and we are basically wired for vigilance to flag.
It makes me admire people like Linus Thorvalds. His job is mostly to read code and stay on top of the contributions of many people. I don’t think I could do that.
It’s easier to remain vigilant when a large part of the contributions are bad or incorrect than when it’s a very small percentage.
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There should be people whose sole job is to do PR reviews.
The PR reviewers delegate work to programmers, the programmers delegate the work to AI; then, the programmer reviews the AIs work, and the PR reviewer reviews the PR.
Those "architects" or other idea people should be reviewing the PRs and keeping an eye on the whole system. That's their job, right?
Usually the programmers are responsible for their own work, and then also reviewing their own work, which is just weird. The context switching is very draining.
The problem is that PR reviews are viewed as a side-task, and it's a thankless job. The guy who implemented the fancy new feature will be personally thanked by the CEO and taken out to lunch, the PR reviewer who pointed out in the original PR that it would corrupt the database gets a "nice catch" comment, and that's it.
This is one of those cases where companies unfortunately misalign their interests with yours.
You will never get a promotion for reviewing other people's pull requests.
You mean you will never get a promotion for rejecting other people's bad pull requests.
Can I get a promotion for asking AI to write code for me and the putting it into a PR?
The answer is always "if you are chummy with the manager and make them feel good". Any accomplishments made is secondary as long as it can be spun to satisfy this condition.
Totally. Skip the PR and show it to a higher up manager.
when I'm working as an architect, my job is to put myself out of a job by teaching everyone to be an architect - for themselves and for each other. that admixture of high and low level concerns breeds really effective teams. with the side bonus that everyone has a chance to grow into larger responsibilities.
"my job is to put myself out of a job by teaching everyone to be an architect"
I used to do that but it's a dangerous game. If you don't make sure to still be very visible to management further up, you end up with a stalled career or being laid off.
This reminds me of an observation a flat-mate made when I was at university: Drugs amplify your personality. If you were cool before-hand, you would be more cool on drugs. If you were an asshole, you would be more of an asshole on drugs.
I've noticed the same thing about agentic coding. Not really the agents, but the way people responded to agents. If you were the kind of coder who was a little unsure of yourself, agents made you more unsure of yourself. If you were confident with your abilities, you were more confident.
By the transitive nature of HN comments, we can therefore conclude that LLM coding agents are drugs.
I am now wondering if there's a conversation to be had about Dunning-Kruger and Impostor Syndrome. In the modern agentic era, is it better to hire people who know less than experts, though clearly somewhere above complete novice? Perhaps this is why I find it difficult to find a job. Perhaps I am "overfit" to the world before descriptive ambiguity was an advantage?
I am reminded of the words of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs: "act like a dumb-sh*t and they'll treat you like an equal."
Anyway... yes... I agree with @freefaler on this one. AI is a qualia amplifier.
> If you were confident with your abilities, you were more confident
Confidence isn't a very good indicator of skills though
I've met a ton of high confidence people who are actually dogshit at what they do. Confidently incompetent is a dangerous mix and this is the sort of person I see amplifying themselves with AI the most.
Sure. But when you're trying to convince other people you know what you're talking about, confidence is probably about 50% of the game. To be sure, you need some skill, but given candidates who are a "grade a coder with zero confidence" and a "grade b coder with moderate confidence" and "grade c coder with extreme confidence," I am confident in saying the grade c coder will get hired 50% of the time.
It turns out that software engineering in large organizations is a process greatly influenced by human psychology.
Also, "confidence w/o ability" is the core of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You have to know a fair amount to understand how shit you are at things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
> "grade c coder with extreme confidence," I am confident in saying the grade c coder will get hired 50% of the time.
I agree with you. That's why everything is shit!
I'm pretty sure Bill Cosby said it first:
I said to a guy, "Tell me, what is it about cocaine that makes it so wonderful," and he said, "Because it intensifies your personality." I said, "Yes, but what if you're an asshole?"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083652/characters/nm0001070/
> drugs
slightly off topic, but we need to be clear that certain harder drugs -- the ones most likely to kill you -- can absolutely change people
To quote Faith No More: "The drug modified my personality. I was like a Crack Hitler."
I suspect the speaker was "diet pepsi hitler" before becoming "crack hitler."
Not necessarily. I'm thinking of TV shows now (yes I need to go out more) where people lose their inhibitions (House did it iirc), and they "became" assholes - or they were assholes all along.
But if you're an asshole on the inside but it never comes out, are you really one? This is a pretty dangerous trap. Compare abusive situations where someone needles someone else for ages until they've had enough and the target gets angry. What would be a good response? "I'm sorry I made you angry" or "I knew you were really like this all along!"
(there is no correct answer by the way, it depends on many factors and relationships can't be abstracted away that easily, let alone by an external person on the internet who hears only one side of the story)
Anyway, if Hitler was Hitler but had filters so he never actually said what was really on his mind, we wouldn't have had WW2 and co. In theory.
When the loop speeds up you need good judgement more often. It explains the divergence and it explains why I feel so tired at the end of a workday.
Applying judgment is much harder when the amount of stuff that theoretically needs judgment is not actually processable by humans. I don’t want to throw my hands up and give up but I honestly haven’t found a middle ground that works.
Indeed. I’m personally doubling down on model-centric programming and keep tight control of the models, while being more permissive with the transformations between models.
It is nice that models remain stable, explains points of the architecture and an llm is good at following instructions that model changes needs a human in the loop. Languages with good static type systems cause friction in a transformation to show up in the types, which act as (weak) specifications.
It works to some extent
Yeah this tracks my own experience. AI has amplified both my ability to do "just do it fast and suffer the knowledge that it isn't great" and my default toward endless tweaking perfectionism. I can just give the AI the requirements and ignore the results, but I can also do infinite rounds of human and adversarial AI review and validation. Both things are easier now.
Exactly what I saw as well. Some not so good ones have even stopped using AI at all, arguing it 'just got confused'. Good ones on the other hand are embracing it, hugely increasing productivity and constantly finding new ways to use it.
> Some not so good ones have even stopped using AI at all, arguing it 'just got confused'. Good ones on the other hand are embracing it
The behaviour of the good programmers is in my experience very "spread": some embrace strongly embrace LLMs for programming, some strongly reject LLMs for programming, with everything in-between.
The explanatory variables that I rather think are good predictors whether a good programmer will embrace or reject LLMs for coding are rather the following ones:
1. Is the programmer biased towards the "artisan" side of programming, or does he see the code as a means to an end?
2. Is the programmer either
- in love,
- interested in, or
- does the programmer have to work with
more obscure programming languages and/or the abstractions and mental models that these programming languages are based on? If this is the case, using an AI is often more of a hindrance than help because there exists much less training data, and/or the programmer will much more often be confronted with the observation that the AI model simply does not "get" what he wants, and will very often get annoyed by bad AI code hallucinations.
The best one I've seen aren't so interested in the "artisanal" part of the programming, but on the "practical engineering" part.
They constantly are poking at the requirements to understand what's the purpose and they find a better, simpler or sometimes hackier (for temporary stuff) solution, but they are on time, they solutions work and they get shit done.
I've seen some really crafty "artisanal" ones that debate for hours and rewrite 10 time the release scripts... Not the most efficient way to spend their time.
So, yes, purchasing code from Anthropic is going to McDonald's for dinner. It's not very good, but it gets the job done fast, so long as you don't care about cooking.
What other enjoyable things do you think we can automate, so that the people that hate doing them can cheaply replace the people who enjoy doing them?
Do you think we'll leave any work that people enjoy?
The purpose of software is to be useful to users, not provide a reason for you to get paid a salary to solve puzzles very slowly.
If that was the purpose, we wouldn't dimiss consumer sentiment of software getting constantly worse with a shrug.
We all know the real purpose of Big Tech.
And what's the point of spending most of your life doing work that sucks so that others can hate their job too? It seems like a bad idea to make everything worse so we can have more bad software.
And, yes, the resulting software also sucks, and I'd pay extra to avoid it. There's been a noticeable drop in software quality over the last year or two.
The point is to survive and care for your family.
In a free market economy, you get from the butcher the meat only if you can give the butcher something in return. It might be cleaning the store, or throwing out the smelly bloody stuff out.
It's not pretty, but life is not pretty.
It is great to find a way to swap for other's needs what you're good at and enjoy, and sometimes it's possible.
However, since you need to solve another's person problem to barter with from something, it's by default not something you like, but something the other person needs. And this frequently is not what you would like to do at the moment.
So basically, this is life, sometimes we can write beautiful code, sometimes we need to fix a messy code our client uses every day.
And sometime we don't have the pleasure to work on the computer at all, because AI took our job away, and we end up cleaning the store.
Cool, "Life is getting worse, shut up and deal. Altman needs his returns."
Got it.
Dude, it's not Altman, it's the real world.
If you can do something for your client, then you get to eat what you both voluntary agreed the deal is worth.
Does a plumber work for Altman, or for himself? Why this need to have a boss and not live by the direct fruits of your own labor?
Ah, my bad -- "Suck it up, shits getting worse for everyone because of what this industry is doing. The future sucks because of us, get used to it."
> And what's the point of spending most of your life doing work that sucks so that others can hate their job too?
I mean in my case i'd be absolutely fine doing work that sucks infinitely if that means that my users are happy. It really drives me crazy all the discourse I've seen over the years about devs that care about their own quality of life/job. Like, no, the only thing that should matter to you is your users, no matter the job. If what makes them genuinely happy is for you to take dirt out of a hole and put it back, and on top of this you get paid, we live in completely different planets if you don't rush to the nearest shovel.
It's okay if it did both. The pre-AI world was not some hellscape - people felt they had a purpose. Not so much now.
yeah, some people - wanting to derive some enjoyment and meaning from the work they spend most of their lives doing to further enrich someone who is already rich - like give the calvinism a break am i right folks?
Calvinist "work ethic" is a problematic doctrine, but it's still more moral than a structurally oppressive synecure.
You're comfortably ensconced within a powerful economic inequality machine, and you're fighting for your right... to party? It's a bit gauche.
At least I tell myself I'm keeping the lights on for many families.
yes i think happiness is meaningful and in a just world would be a non-negotiable part of participating in society (economically or otherwise)
You're right—happiness is meaningful, and the pursuit of eudaimonia may well be the most moral act.
Can you truly be happy while billions suffer unnecessarily?
By this logic, no one is ever allowed to ask for more except for the person who has the least. It is nonsense.
Can't we ask on behalf of one another?
Until half a year ago I used to agree with you, but nowadays Claude has gotten so good that I have to admit it's a better programmer than myself. Its coding style is excellent, it follows whatever conventions are used in the codebase, it has excellent suggestions for refactorings and it spots omissions or mistakes in the specifications I give it.
(I'm using mostly Scala as a language in a large microservices environment)
I dont know any worker that intentionally chooses a job they dislike unless they need a survival job, and people doing survival jobs generally put it low effort. Programming requires high levels of effort and concentration and it would'nt be my first choice of survival job. If ALL the interesting parts of a programmers job disappear, then I guess the job is over unless you like typing prompts all day.
With this answer, you rather have revealed which style of programming you are strongly biased to.
Yes, there is a genuine divide between people drawn to programming for the art and people drawn to it for the practical. AI has impacted the former much more intensely and negatively than the latter. It's really a bummer.
Funny how "maybe they work in different domain" doesn't come up here as well.
When y'all talk about these LLM programmers, what are they programming? The next startup Typescript website, a new OS, a C++ firmware for a fridge or a control system for cancer treatment machines?
> Funny how "maybe they work in different domain" doesn't come up here as well.
Good point. :-)
We build an open source framework that could be the solution to this problem, as it lets you automate the dev - test - review cycle where there is currently a lot of variance among developers: https://github.com/the-open-engine/zeroshot
(so you can plan instead)
> The not so good ones, are doing the same bullshit they did before, but now the don't even bother to check it.
What bothers me greatly is how the not so good ones are now delegating all their contributions, code and otherwise, to AI assistants, and fail to to any cursory check in what they are delivering. It's sheer laziness and irresponsibility.
So far I've seen junior developers who found sudden passions for code reviews to post high volume of comments on any PR to showcase their technical prowess, but the comments clearly don't match the code or context and we're obviously posted without looking. I've also seen old but barely competent developers leaning quite heavily on AI assistants to formulate troubleshooting theories that are based on scenarios that deeply contrast with the actual problem, and go to the extent of announcing they identified root causes when they didn't even tried to reproduce them in the actual system, because if they had tried they would notice the whole theory is impossible.
Everyone talks about high productivity gains, but these types manage to use AI to waste everyone's time.
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> but the AI lead to amplification of the good and the bad in people.
LLMs absolutely project who we are back at us.
The x^5 paradigm: good programmers (positive x) are 5× better and bad ones (negative x) are 5× worse.
as long as im working for a rich guys company i will be the 'just pay me' dude