Management may eventually purge engineers that won’t adopt AI.
I’m a DevOps engineer (about 15 years) and in a previous life was a software engineer (15 years before that). My employer is pushing hard on AI so I reluctantly started using Claude at times. I must say that I’m fairly impressed when it comes to relatively easy tasks. We’re a large AWS user and have developed a fairly complex in-house set of python tools that encapsulate things like Terraform and Ansible. We have about 15 or so AWS sub-accounts that span logical groupings, so our IAM configuration alone was fairly complex.
I was able to point Claude at our IAM configuration and tell it to create a set of policies/roles to allow a host in one environment to access resources in a read-only manner across all our accounts. Since I’m not an IAM expert it would have taken me a few hours to figure out what it did in under 10 minutes. Two of my team reviewed the proposed changes and were perfectly fine with them.
I’ve also had it write python scripts that do things like call AWS APIs, collect JSON results, and compare it to contents pulled from a git repo of configuration data.
For relatively simple tasks like these it can be a time saver. But you still need to sanity check everything it does. I’ve seen it skip steps (like not applying IAM policies to all our accounts), and when you point it out it will apologize and fix things. But it’s that sort of failure that makes me still be wary of AI. Like why only update a subset of things and fix it only after I point it out? “All” means “all”, not “some”…
For more complex things I’m still very reluctant to trust it. When it comes to that I may use Claude to encapsulate a few API calls, but then I’ll rely on my own expertise to add in all the really important logic.
Same take here. I usually break things down to simpler tasks first and it does better. But it tends to get lost fast if things get too long or too complicated
Well written. This is pretty much exactly how our dev team is using LLMs. Verify everything, but it sure does save time.
It’s similar to being an assembler coder when higher level languages with compilers came. No need for management purging, you’ll simply be competing for a smaller segment of assigments.
I don’t know of a single developer that has actually used LLM aids say there’s no benefit to them. Those that refuse do so for some other convictions and don’t really know the difference between LLM aiding in tasks and full on yolo vibe coding.
don’t really know the difference between LLM aiding in tasks and full on yolo vibe coding.
Does management know the difference?
Not in the least, and the larger your corp, the more AI just just a shiney buzzword thing that must be attained.
What gets a lot of them hooked is that it gives them a new set of metrics to measure productivity. It doesn’t matter in the least that they’re meaningless metrics. It gives them a chart with a line, so it must be mana from the gods.
A front end developer friend of mine told me last week that three of his colleagues were laid off because his workplace adopted AI. I don’t know the size of their team so this doesn’t speak to the magnitude, only to the fact, though.
No wonder web pages are getting so bloated
I’m already watching some of my colleagues’ brains turn to mush by just blindly doing whatever the slip machine says. I don’t want to lose my skills in the same way. Years from now, I’ll be ready to retire while the technical debt piles up to critical levels, and demand for skilled and experienced critical thinkers skyrockets; then I’ll have to make the hard decision of leaving the rat race to pursue my own interests, or going back in for one last job for a massive payout.
Or I’m completely wrong and I’ll just be deemed a grumpy old relic by then, and I’ll take my severance and it still won’t be my problem any more.
Severance, you say? AI told HR that you’re not a team player. Non participation = no rewards.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant that I was going to sever one of the HR director’s limbs and take it.
I can’t stop management from purging, but management can’t stop me from being one of the few people left whose brain still works and will still possess the skills required to put out their goddamned dumpster fire once the inevitable finally catches up with them.
They’re going to have to beg real hard, though. The kind of begging that has a lot of zeroes before the decimal point.
Be careful. Everyone is replaceable.
I have other skills.
Just a heads up, drawing nsfw horse comics doesn’t count, just learned this the hard way myself
management thinks so
i feel real bad for my coworkers if they try
I’m lucky enough that management doesn’t seem interested in forcing devs to use AI (they’re pretty hands-off in general) and that I’m a greybeard who made and maintains some pretty fundamental systems in a company that’s not very large. So I’m actually more worried about the double whammy of the AI bubble popping and the energy crisis caused by the Iran war. The company managed to survive the Great Recession and COVID, but still.
No, I have a value driven mindset. If it doesn’t provide value for my work I don’t use it.
My work will speak for itself over the hype. And if it doesn’t? Well someone will
Management is paying for my AI use. After a month or so they noticed I hadn’t activated my account yet, so I did it. Haven’t ever used it. Management is happy.
I see some coworkers doing a ton of work within a day for some PoCs and that sort of stuff that I would never be able to do in the same time, but when it comes to actually fixing issues and completing tasks on average I’m still faster than everyone else.
I sold out and use ai at work. I fucking hate it. Takes all the joy out of the job and makes me dumb(er)
Management really wants to push me into using AI, but I genuinely haven’t found a use for it. It can’t handle complex things, trivial or repetitive things don’t need it, and I have two decades of content that no AI could ever reproduce.
I am in charge of policy related to Ai at work, but under different circumstances than most. The people above me asked the question, can we use Ai in a way that adds value to the product? My response was let’s test out a couple of options and make policy based on the results. We gave everyone access to Copilot as we use JetBrains products and I asked every individual what their results were after a month. Four people found that they were able to work faster, the rest said it slowed them down and the hallucinations outright fucked their shit up.
At first I couldn’t get a grasp on how this sanely work for a whole company implemented in a one size fits all manner. Then 2 of the people who used LLMs that were Jr.s left the company. When they had to transfer ownership of the internal projects to other people. I realized the mess inexperience devs with LLMs could do. They left behind untouchable code. That’s when I figured it out, the other two people were Sr.s and you need to know exactly what you are doing to get a net positive from LLM coding.
All three of us were doing slight variations of the same thing, which was very telling of what is going to happen to software over the next year. We would never touch an agent as they just inject flaws and bugs into the code base. We all found Tab complete to be useful enough to leave on, but noted it was worse that worthless quite frequently. What we were all doing was using it as a cracked out search engine through the chat features. Rarely would we accept offered changes directly, but we would manually type sections adapting them to fit better in the code, the way we all used stackoverflow 5 years ago.
I am not saying inexperienced dev can’t use LLMs effectively. You just have to know exactly what you are doing. Now the others come to me talking about MCP servers, agentic coding, whatever new snake oil is being sold to us. Now I am trying to convince these people, who initially rejected LLMs, that they are being gaslit by salesmen into thinking that LLMs are useful.
My concern is not that I will suffer from inferior production of code by not using AI. It’s that I will suffer from upper management dictating what tools should be used, without any understanding of the issues or consequences.
No.
Not even slightly. Any engineering business going all in on AI is heading down the shitter fast so it’s a useful canary for the competent people on the payroll.
I’m lucky to be in a sector that’s generally too well regulated for slop to filter through, but we’re already seeing fixer upper jobs come in from firms who picked a cheap contract from some AI-first start up and now needs someone to make their new equipment actually work and up to code.
In most cases it’d be faster and cheaper to start over but sunk cost is a bitch.
In most cases it’d be faster and cheaper to start over but sunk cost is a bitch.
- We will need 6 months and $X to rebuild everything from scratch
- But we already have a semi-working thing, can’t you fix that instead?
- Oh right, then it would be 8 months and $2X to fix that.
That’s a generous estimate. When these jobs were a matter of correcting incompetent or lazy human work, you could depend on the problem being a lack of it - lack of compliant methods, lack of error handling, lack of required documentation.
With AI, the volume of work we’d need to comb through has exploded. There’ll be three different subroutines handling the same error, each tripping up the others using it’s own subtly wrong method, and all of it couched in thousands of lines of code handling errors that could not possibly happen.
There’ll be fifty instances referencing an ISO standard and if the standard does exist it’ll have the index wrong or just invent a plausible sounding line to support whatever method was used. Once any error like this is found, ALL of it needs to be verified.
Turning someone’s slop job into something I can sign off on is several times more work than just starting over, for a worse end result. If a client can’t be made to see thats I usually advise to not take the contract.
I honestly can’t believe there are software engineers who think they can just completely ignore this technology and stay relevant.
I’m not an AI bro, I’m not happy with the direction the industry is heading. But saying this technology is useless and refusing to touch it has got to be some kind of coping mechanism. I, for one, intend to adapt and learn how to use the new tools to my advantage.
A very wise man once told me that you will adopt things naturally. Technology that will stick does not need to convince you.
- Smartphones
- Web …
When you need to be “convinced” it is not adequately thought through.
I’ve seen what happens when people use AI to handle anything other than trivial tasks. Calling it useless would be an understatement. It touched code it had no business touching and tacked its own dollar store code onto the end of what it should have been modifying.
If the hype is real, then there will be nothing to catch up to. All the ”secret techniques” will quickly be irrelevant as the technology is streamlined. Writing CLAUDE or SKILL files manually will be a thing of the past. It will figure it out itself.
Honestly “prompt engineering” is already mostly dead, and in most cases claude already handles its long term memory (claude.md, skills etc…) autonomously. You just have to nudge it here and there to document such and such details you know are important but it’s marginal.
