AI coding "assistants"

SauRoNZA said:
I mean consulting like that to a company by its very nature is always going to have casualties…but odds are that old auntie was raking in way too much money for doing much too little just because of being there forever and a day and she’s not going to learn new skills and would get there eventually either way.

On the other hand it makes room for youngsters starting at the bottom and gives them a development path and a means to go up in the world.

Not the case in all industries and not a universal truth for sure, but it’s not all bad everywhere.

Maybe somewhat unrelated but I’ve changed my hiring practises the last two years or so and stopped trying to replace seniors from outside, who can’t walk in the door and just start working right away and need six months to become truly useful, in favour of slotting folks in at the bottom instead who are already familiar with the surroundings and upskilling them over time instead.

Means I can get away cheaper for sure, but also means I have an entire promotion path for them over the next few years and they also tend to stick around far longer as there isn’t an automatic ceiling where they have to move to another team or outside to a different role entirely.

And in those cases I think AI stands to benefit them greatly.
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I always felt bad though, but agreed - the nature of that business.

Moving people up into senior positions is a great initiative - everyone is probably supercharged in skills with AI now. Question though: if you move an intermediate/junior into an open senior position, do you hire a new junior? Or are your juniors now more skilled and faster in executing their tasks that you need to hire more skills less now?
 
InTheWild said:
I always felt bad though, but agreed - the nature of that business.

Moving people up into senior positions is a great initiative - everyone is probably supercharged in skills with AI now. Question though: if you move an intermediate/junior into an open senior position, do you hire a new junior? Or are your juniors now more skilled and faster in executing their tasks that you need to hire more skills less now?
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You hire dem vibe coders :laugh:
 
saor said:
I despise the prospect of human creativity (d)evolving into the art of getting really really good at prompting AI. I'm lucky in that I use AI tools for certain things, but the overwhelming majority of the work I do is still a human clicking a mouse and work that I enjoy. The day the majority of my day is prompting AI feels like the day I'll start staring out the window more.

AI has jaded me in certain ways. I see digital art nowadays and usually just skim right over it - being unable to tell whether a human spent 50 hrs meticulously crafting this thing or 2 minutes prompting an AI. I do understand how some people don't care and merely enjoy the end-product, but I love the behind the scene details of things almost more than the thing; the time, effort and craft that goes into making something. And when I start seeing the things I do through that same jaded lens...ja, not looking forward to that day arriving.
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I'm probably in a different boat than most on here. My future and past has been very dependent on startups. So AI has given us a leg up where we can build and break down very fast if products do not work. Sure, my programmer mind hates this, but in reality I need to be really good at prompting AI otherwise we fall way behind. .
 
I've been developing for a long time. I enjoy solving problems and building solutions, but I haven't enjoyed writing code for a long time. So, I enjoy having something that will write my code for me while I think about the bigger things.

What I really enjoy is being able to take an idea and prototype it within a very short space of time. My experience makes it easier to get the generated code to look the way I want it to and make the application production-ready.
 
InTheWild said:
I always felt bad though, but agreed - the nature of that business.

Moving people up into senior positions is a great initiative - everyone is probably supercharged in skills with AI now. Question though: if you move an intermediate/junior into an open senior position, do you hire a new junior? Or are your juniors now more skilled and faster in executing their tasks that you need to hire more skills less now?
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If you hire better skilled people that work together with AI, you will spend less time trying to understand and fix what the AI generates. With junior devs and other inexperienced people you always run the risk of missing some security flaw that results in your dating app's database being leaked to the world
 
InTheWild said:
I always felt bad though, but agreed - the nature of that business.

Moving people up into senior positions is a great initiative - everyone is probably supercharged in skills with AI now. Question though: if you move an intermediate/junior into an open senior position, do you hire a new junior? Or are your juniors now more skilled and faster in executing their tasks that you need to hire more skills less now?
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Yeah that’s the idea we feed in new hires from the bottom rather than struggling to chase unicorns for senior positions.

So they’ll start at Junior, move to Intermediate and then the really stellar ones go up to senior roles.

We kind of incubate them in one team and then I poach them over to my team after mentoring them for a time.

Interesting case where we have some very scarce skills requirements in a South African context.
 
I despise using AI to write my code.

I love development, why would I want to outsource - kill me now.

Obviously, I use AI every day, but its usually as a “colleague” to discuss problems with.

Its also great for writing documentation
 
s0lar said:
Clocking around 20 years of development experience. Here is my read and am I the only one?

My days used to start with requirements gathering i.e. enterprise architecture then I would move on to solution architecture. Diagrams, requirements, dependancies .etc Then onto spooling up the unknown in the stack or SDK or whatever it may be. Taking great pride in my code skills and expansive knowledge across the stack. Delivering a solution with a great sense of pride as it was created top to bottom.

Past couple of month I have been pretty much peer reviewing my prompts to copilot and cursor. In all honesty more often than not the code it spits out is better than mine.

I am not enjoying development anymore. Wheres the challenge? Where is the creativity and creation?

Am I the only one to embrace AI assisted coding but finding the 9-5 now a bit of a bore?
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I have been vibe coding with ChatGPT Plus and wrote software that I never knew was even possible. ChatGPT Plus is expensive but well worth it. I wrote controller code in Python, created a companion app in Android using Kotlin. They now us it to track inventory in real time. It was easy and fast.

If ChatGPT can turn dumb **** like me into a coder, coding professionals jobs must be 100 times easier.
 
semaphore said:
AI generated code is pure slop.
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From what's been said in this and another thread I think it depends on the application, and its requirements. No doubt the AI system chosen as well.

semaphore said:
Not to mention a breach of risk compliance on our code.
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At the very least I would have all AI code fully analysed before integrating.
 
Brian_G said:
From what's been said in this and another thread I think it depends on the application, and its requirements. No doubt the AI system chosen as well.
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We’ll agree to disagree.
Brian_G said:
At the very least I would have all AI code fully analysed before integrating.
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It has nothing to do with analysis, everything to do with pumping our code out. Proprietary trade secrets, snd if you think companies like Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t using your data - well I have bridge to sell you.
 
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Jackal65 said:
I have been vibe coding with ChatGPT Plus and wrote software that I never knew was even possible. ChatGPT Plus is expensive but well worth it. I wrote controller code in Python, created a companion app in Android using Kotlin. They now us it to track inventory in real time. It was easy and fast.

If ChatGPT can turn dumb **** like me into a coder, coding professionals jobs must be 100 times easier.
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Using AI has shown to reduce critical thinking and atrophying of creativity.


I’ll admit I was fascinated about it, but I barely use it anymore. I do write my own ML based solutions but they are traditional models and are not based on transformer architecture.
 
semaphore said:
We’ll agree to disagree.

It has nothing to do with analysis, everything to do with pumping our code out. Proprietary trade secrets, snd if you think companies like Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t using your data - well I have bridge to sell you.
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Sounds a bit biased from me but its one of the reasons I won't touch Grok code. Already its always trying to insert itself into material that our one person does ( marketing etc ), I don't trust its code sanctity at all.

Reality is, models need to learn code as well as patterns and practices ( to use a old phrase ) . Sure, they consumed from the available data sources ( stack overflow etc ), now they need a new source AND never mind the rapid changing codebase. Someone mentioned scripting a couple posts back, its awesome for that especially as I'm not a linux fundi but it now lets me do great things in what to me was a operating system I had barely ever used. Great for concept to enviro conversion, what used to be what I would refer to as syntactically challenged. If you know and design the concept, are able to show it in at least a good psuedo form or alternative language , it works really really well.

Someone mentioned old devs a while back ( 20 years or more exp ), what a lot of current don't realize is that the focus for them is by nature always been around the problems and that passage of time has also allowed many to see languages rise and fall, most having coded in a substantial amount of differant ones. Concepts are moveable, code is just execution, design and practices are still what sets people apart.
 
Thinking of the ten's of thousands of hours to the early mornings I have poured into coding, learning various languages, frameworks, architectural best practises .etc

Pretty much anybody can code now. A online acquaintance of mine with zero node coding experience who is a cannabis farm manager by trade built and deployed this all through AI in a afternoon. https://github.com/ItsBlunty/RF4-Records

Currently I focus on backend. Literally I start with the acceptance criteria. I define the API contract and set start by getting the AI to write the unit tests aligning to the functional requirements. Then tell it to create the API continuously asking it to test against the unit tests. Later the integration tests. I literally don't touch a line of code other than perhaps adding environment variables or something trivial like that.

People who think the IA is somehow substandard and requires a person to make it better are mistaken.

1. For large code bases MCP is becoming the norm, it will know your stack from 3rd party integrations, platform infrastructure all the way to front end better than you.
2. Worried about proprietary IP or secret data getting out in the wild. You can pay for a walled garden with most LLM providers. Do I trust this no, but the highly sensitive and regulated multinational I work for does. And they have a huge team of in house legal pitbull's.
3. You do not need to tell it what to do. It can take the product/solution requirements from auto annotated teams meeting and fire off a pipeline to all the way to delivery. That or a simple prompt once it has context it will pick up what you may have dropped.

/rant - waits for salary drops for development/architecture professionals, looks how to move into potato farming as a career move :unsure:
 
s0lar said:
Clocking around 20 years of development experience. Here is my read and am I the only one?

My days used to start with requirements gathering i.e. enterprise architecture then I would move on to solution architecture. Diagrams, requirements, dependancies .etc Then onto spooling up the unknown in the stack or SDK or whatever it may be. Taking great pride in my code skills and expansive knowledge across the stack. Delivering a solution with a great sense of pride as it was created top to bottom.

Past couple of month I have been pretty much peer reviewing my prompts to copilot and cursor. In all honesty more often than not the code it spits out is better than mine.

I am not enjoying development anymore. Wheres the challenge? Where is the creativity and creation?

Am I the only one to embrace AI assisted coding but finding the 9-5 now a bit of a bore?
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If you like working from specs, you can look at this repo: https://github.com/github/spec-kit
It is still a work in progress but to quote them:

What is Spec-Driven Development?​

Spec-Driven Development flips the script on traditional software development. For decades, code has been king — specifications were just scaffolding we built and discarded once the "real work" of coding began. Spec-Driven Development changes this: specifications become executable, directly generating working implementations rather than just guiding them.
 
My take is that on current trajectory there is going to be little need for human coding within a very short time frame. We've gone from intelligent inline code completion, to generating code in a single file, to scaffolding and generating an entire solution, to deploying into a pipeline in a frighteningly short amount of time and this will essentially make coding irrelevant.

At the moment, though, I feel you still need some idea of architecture and integration to produce a coherent and scaleable product and to sanity check it, which is where decades of programming experience helps - but for how much longer?

The more sustainable and critical role is going to be in how creatively you use AI to craft a solution - how well you gather requirements from the actual humans that will use the product, how well you specify and prompt what you need and how well you ensure that the results match expectations - i.e. all the things that require astute observation, good ideas, and actually speaking to and communicating with people.

If I had to guess, there will inevitably be a point when any kind of "programming language" will be obviated - i.e. there won't even be readable code as it will be more efficient for AI to generate machine code directly. The only remaining task for a human will be to come up with ideas for software, know what it needs to do and to communicate it coherently.
 
MrGray said:
My take is that on current trajectory there is going to be little need for human coding within a very short time frame. We've gone from intelligent inline code completion, to generating code in a single file, to scaffolding and generating an entire solution, to deploying into a pipeline in a frighteningly short amount of time and this will essentially make coding irrelevant.

At the moment, though, I feel you still need some idea of architecture and integration to produce a coherent and scaleable product and to sanity check it, which is where decades of programming experience helps - but for how much longer?

The more sustainable and critical role is going to be in how creatively you use AI to craft a solution - how well you gather requirements from the actual humans that will use the product, how well you specify and prompt what you need and how well you ensure that the results match expectations - i.e. all the things that require astute observation, good ideas, and actually speaking to and communicating with people.

If I had to guess, there will inevitably be a point when any kind of "programming language" will be obviated - i.e. there won't even be readable code as it will be more efficient for AI to generate machine code directly. The only remaining task for a human will be to come up with ideas for software, know what it needs to do and to communicate it coherently.
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Totally agree, even the enterprise architecture i.e. business value, roadmaps and general product trajectory can be handled by AI in the near future.

Anyhow what pains me is I have a youngster in the family just finishing up school and seeing my success asking me what they should study. I don't want to be doom and gloom but how of a right mind can I tell them to get a CS degree?

Progress is inevitable but how disruptive AI is, is nothing like we have ever seen before. This is not a horse .vs locomotive moment.
 
s0lar said:
Totally agree, even the enterprise architecture i.e. business value, roadmaps and general product trajectory can be handled by AI in the near future.

Anyhow what pains me is I have a youngster in the family just finishing up school and seeing my success asking me what they should study. I don't want to be doom and gloom but how of a right mind can I tell them to get a CS degree?

Progress is inevitable but how disruptive AI is, is nothing like we have ever seen before. This is not a horse .vs locomotive moment.
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IMHO the only value of a CS degree now is at the extremes - i.e. either at the very complex and low level engineering stuff, as in how you actually build AI chips and the mathematical theory behind AI etc, or the management stuff like IT infrastructure, data center builds and logistics, etc. Everything in between is gone. Basically, you need the skills that can either maintain and improve on AI infrastructure, or the skills needed to deliver it.
 
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