We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering.
New data from China, 26,811 students tracked January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump 20 percent. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments.
Then exam season came. Those same students scored 20 to 40 percent worse when they couldn’t use the tool.
The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming.
We’re doing this in software right now. Vibe coding feels incredible. Features ship fast. Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase.
Commercial pilots fly with autopilot for most of every flight. They’re required to maintain manual flying proficiency regardless. If the system fails mid-air and the pilot can’t take over, people die.
Most teams using AI right now have forgotten how to fly manually. They’ve become passengers in their own systems. The autopilot flies, nobody checks instruments, and the first sign of trouble will be a breach notice or outage.
Three rules:
- Command the mission. Define architecture before prompting. Ambiguity kills in code and in flight. Delegate selectively. Offload mechanical work. Keep design and security reviews human. Verify everything. Audit before production.
- Never trust the automation without checking instruments.
- Quick wins feel good. Sustainable engineering feels boring. Boring keeps systems standing.
Organisations surviving the next two years won’t ship the fastest. They’ll be the ones who remember how to fly without the aids.
people insisting that you actually be skilled, independently of your tools, doesn’t make them Luddites. Rather, being unable to do so makes you a phony.
Off-topic.
This is kind of like the “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time” argument by your 8th grade math teacher in 2003, except instead of making yourself dependent on a little solar powered device (that you could have with you all the time if you really wanted to, even before smartphones) you’re becoming dependent on a subscription service offered by a trillion dollar company that can increase the price tenfold at will, or cut you from the platform entirely, stripping you of all your professional expertise at once.
that can increase the price tenfold at will
That will have to increase the price ten fold to stop bleeding billions of dollars every month.
The American taxpayers will save them, whether they want to or not.
You can’t bail them out, they will still be losing money. It’s not like banks.
The play now seems to be that they will offload the bags on retirement funds and US 401k accounts. The ECB already issued a warning because of this.
I’m curious if the repeated bailouts will cause an adverse selection effect - the people getting bailed out gradually become the last dollar users.
and also the calculator is actively destroying the planet.
And tells you it is your girlfriend and to shoot up your school.
I dont think so. If(here is where my argument fails for most people cause i got really good education) your teacher thought you math properly tho point isnt the calculations but that you understand the logic. With ai the problem is the same with as a calculator that just spits out derivatives, graphs, etc by just typing in a formula. The reason you have to understand those is to be able to build upon it.
100% agreed. My teacher said that he taught us tools, how they worked and how to use them, in order for us to apply them in new ways. Even with a calculator you have to understand the underlaying logic to actually do something. Don’t know basic mathematics? Good luck using a calculator.
I think its both. you have to understand it to be able to build upon it, but it’s also no nearly as readily available as pocket calculators, and they require much more energy that too. It’s not as portable as a calculator.
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I wouldn’t call 48GB of VRAM a normal gaming PC, and even with that memory you’re not getting claude intelligence or performance. It’s still much more viable than ever before though. Are you running local models with limited vram with good results?
I have a 7900 XTX with 24GB of VRAM where I am running Qwen 3.8 27B at 4 but quant with 200k context. I traded in my RTX 3070 and got it for around $700 recently. That model performs pretty similarly to Claude Sonnet 5 in performance for coding and certain other tasks and it “feels” similar to Sonnet 5 that I use as a daily driver at work. I was running Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B on the 3070 before and I still run it on my server with a 4060 and 32GB of RAM, and that model is more like Claude Haiku.
I expect 3.8 35B-A3B should be released pretty soon and provide a nice bump in performance.
I regularly follow this guy’s YouTube channel, and his latest video is about running a 177B model on his RTX 3060 via SSD offloading and getting Opus-like performance for certain tasks: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IH8XmxiwliQ.
Supposedly, open weight models that run in a data center are like 4 months behind the frontier at this point, and what can run on a gaming PC is progressing rapidly as well while the exponential gains at the frontier have largely turned into incremental gains at this point.
Maybe this is good enough for small projects but if you deal with a large codebase the small context starts be becoming a problem. In my day job I frequently keep maxing out the 1M context of Opus and Fable when I am dealing with any mildly complex task. I can’t imagine how a fully local setup could even start being viable on my 16 GB GPU. And yes I know about RAM offloading and it is really damn slow, at least from my own tests.
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I also find it useful to have the agent write any detailed info that will help needed later to a markdown file that can be re-read after compaction and r in a new session when needed.
Yes, I do that a ton. And yes, I am aware of the additional cost for when the context exceeds 150K. Still though, I try to avoid compacting too much because I found that sometimes the agent starts chasing its own tail. Also, the more of the codebase you can fit in the context the more you benefit from the cache. If you are doing a large refactoring job on a legacy codebase it really helps.
This is great info! I’ve been using OpenCode Go because I only have 16GB to work with and their limits are pretty generous. Looking forward to tiny, competent local models. Thanks o7
I’m going to stick with OpenCode Go, but the available models keep getting more expensive and the DeepSeek peak hours is annoying to deal with
The 0.4.0 release of llama.cpp just added the n-cpu-ffn flag for offloading weights for dense models to the CPU to complement the existing n-cpu-moe flag for MoE models. If you have a 16GB GPU and some extra RAM to spare, you might even be able to run Qwen 3.8 27B at a usable speed after some experimentation. I don’t own a 16GB card, so I haven’t tested it myself, and it might not work as well as I am imagining.
This is kind of like the “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time” argument
It’s not even that! Students without a calculator don’t see their test scores crater, the work just takes longer.
Also calculator is still prohibited in schools in many countries. Like mine. And I’m forever grateful for mental math skills I’ve gotten. Teaching math like that has it’s own downsides, but mental math is a soft skill that helps in life.
yea no
calculators are deterministic
come back to me when ai isn’t fucking wrong silently
This is kind of like the “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time” argument by your 8th grade math teacher in 2003
Which is grand, given we’ve had researchers agreeing effectively incorporating calculators into math education improves everyone’s ability to do math without calculators - Since the 90s
There’s pretty good arguments to include calculators from a really young age, to improve the understanding of numbers
There is no good argument for including calculators before the pupils haven’t mastered basic calculations in their head, there are good arguments against it.
ya very hard to do proper math applications even with a calculator if you lack the fundamental understanding of how it works.
To me, doing math without a calculator is like trying to do carpentry without a tape measure. It’s possible, but way harder and far less accurate for no real benefit. Back in the day, people absolutely would use abaci, slide rules, and other calculation aids while learning math. Calculators are good actually, and always have been.
If you need a calculator for the easiest quick guesstimates, you are handicapped. If you start from day one with offloading every calculation to a calculator, you will be like that.
You’re ending up with a larger group of pupils “mastering” basic calculations through counting, when you remove the calculator as a tool for learning. Using the strategy of “counting all”, is one of the clearest signs a 1st grade pupil will be behind their peers in 4th grade.
Broken calculator (just search for it), is one way to include calculators in a didactic way. But using calculators in general, improves a kids ability to estimate results - Which is an ability that helps anyone out tremendously, as it’s giving you a clear idea if something went completely wrong in a calculation
A “broken calculator” isn’t a calculator. It requires you to calculate in your head to be effective, which is exactly what I was talking about.
First you need to solidify this ability, before it makes sense to introduce reliance on calculators.
It’s still a calculator, it just misses some features. It’s one didactical way to include calculators.
It is not a functional calculator and can’t be used as such. Learning how to use a simple calculator doesn’t require much training or special skills, that children of that age wouldn’t have already aquired by other means anyway. The important skill broken calculators learn is to analyze the problem and predict solutions in your head.
You could achieve something similar by giving pupils just a piece of paper and the numbers and signs they are allowed to use. The calculator part makes checking easier, yes. That’s about it.
There’s models that run on your phone.
“You won’t have a tiny pocket computer with you all the time” really is the exact same argument with different specs. And frankly I’m a lot more likely to do math without a computer than write code without a computer.
“You won’t have a tiny pocket computer with you all the time”
likely true in 20 years
Gives them so much power
you’re becoming dependent on a subscription service offered by a trillion dollar company that can increase the price tenfold at will, or cut you from the platform entirely
with local open weight models that is no longer an argument tbh
Who can afford the hardware to run an open weight model? We aren’t all earning enough to afford high end NVIDIA cards (when they’re even available).
If you consider what companies pay for the subscription you will see that the hardware prices aren’t really the issue here.
I’ve done it at my job.
lucky for you to have your boss paid for it. but it’s likely not yours, but your company owns it, and you have access as long as you work there. after that, you can say goodbye to your “professional expertise”
this is completely different from the calculator that can run off its puny solar panel
I run my models on a 1070. It’s slow but works.
You may be overestimating the hardware requirements for current open weights. I am running Qwen3.8-27b with 52.000 tokens context on a RX 7900 XTX from 2022 with 15 - 30 tokens / second. Sure, it was a high end card back then but for a graphics card today it’s quite affordable when you’re looking for a used one. Also it’s not blazingly fast, but it gets the job done.
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“Just run it local, you can use cheap hardware”
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is running it on a $1200 card and is still struggling to get it done quickly
Keep on sucking up that slop, I’m sure paying a company to do your thinking for you will pay off in the end, as we’ve been seeing.
Solarpunk scoffing at anything but maximum efficiency for minimum price is deeply funny.
They used a computer they already own and made up for the difference with simple patience… what a corporate whore, right? How dare they want their personal machine to do private magic unless the numbers say infinite growth forever.
When I bought that card this year I payed significantly less than you’re suggesting. That’s still a lot of money but it’s not more than many gamers where willing to pay for their gpus way, way before ramageddon. Of course you can’t run open weights on a potato but you also don’t need a $4000 gpu to do so.
As for the rest of your comment? What? 🤷
How much did you pay?
I spent $70 on a “new” Aisurix amd radeon 580 2048 SP graphics card earlier this year, but it was a sidegrade more than an upgrade to the Nvidia GTX 980 i had before (which had declining Linux support).
Modern graphics cards seem to be very expensive compared to how much it used to cost to be a few years behind the cutting edge.
I payed around 700 € used, but in turn I sold my previous GPU for ~ 400 € and I got a significant performance upgrade for that money.
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Your graphics card cost more than my entire computer lmao
Sorry, I didn’t want to come across as detached. It’s true that my hardware budget increased in the last ~ 15 years but even then I would have considered 700 € (that’s what I paid for my card) a very tight budget for a moderate gaming pc in my country.
Okay, well you’re on a forum filled with nerds. The average AI user is asking ChatGPT or Claude or whatever the fuck. I garun-fucking-tee you they do not have the knowledge of local models or the capability to set one up. Like genuinely most Americans are fucking stupid.
The “open-weight models” argument just a fallacy IMHO, frontier models would require a pretty strong AI PC, not something that GTX1050 you put away as a backup could handle. The “just use smaller models” argument just gives leeway to just not using AI and using more classical methods of coding - use of dependencies, use of code generators, use of semantic search engines (can someone suggest me one?), etc. LLMs don’t do anything particularly new, they’re just mimic how humans talk.
Not every software company is a game developer, and even at home, not every programmer plays games on their PC that require a powerful GPU. If everyone working on, for example, business software all of a sudden needs a gaming PC that will be constantly running an AI model, that will greatly increase costs, both in terms of procurement of equipment and electricity. An increase in demand for powerful GPUs in fields that traditionally had no need for them isn’t exactly going to improve the hardware cost situation either.
Whether you run the model locally or you leave it to a company, someone is going to have to pay the cost.
The luddites had a point.
They weren’t opposed to technology, but the use of technology to remove skilled labor to produce inferior products.
Also, the pilot/autopilot argument is, kinda not applicable. The pilots aren’t just fucking around- autopilot systems only manage some aspects of flying, the pilots are still fully engaged.
The pilots absolutely can just fuck around for most of the flight, and even during the critical moments of takeoff and landing, the plane can do a lot of it automatically these days.
Pilots need to actively practice flying without autopilot to keep those skills up in case the autopilot fails.
the plane can do a lot of it automatically these days.
It can but nobody is out there flying CAT IIIc autoland approaches because its ‘easier’.
The pilots job is specifically to prevent to finding out phase.
I watch a lot of airplane youtube, and this just seems to be wrong. During critical phases of flight, i.e landing and descending, the pilots have a high workload even with the autopilot. They are directing the autopilot ( which isn’t obvious how to do), they’re communicating, navigating, etc.
Flight crews of the 20th century sometimes had crews of 3 or 4 people to handle all the tasks that are more automated these days. We don’t have dedicated flight engineers or navigators any more – the pilots do these jobs now too.
During the cruise phase of flight, yes the pilots have a lower workload because of the autopilot. But on lots of flights, there might not be much of a cruise at all – they climb, and then descend.
I don’t know how much commercial pilots are required to hand fly the plane, but it is a high workload even with the automation – the automation just helps them do a better job.
Just install a second autopilot that can take over if the first one fails!
They do in fact have like 3 autopilots for this reason
I feel like their point was that the gains of technology were not distributed fairly, which is largely the concern today. It’s not “technology is bad”, or “technology make bad thing”; rather, “the owners of the machine undercut our labor, and we lose our jobs”, which I think was true. In the modern world, there are likely less tailors, as a percentage of the working population, certainly in first world countries. Sweatshops still exist, and it’s people’s labor competing against a production line, in terms of ROI for a business.
I get the sense we all know AI isn’t going to bring about a uptopia for all people, because the economic systems don’t incentivize that. There’s some hypothetical world where this sort of technological advance could benefit all people, but it’s not the one we live in. That’s a reality & major problem for the technology (among other issues).
I certainly think the cost of labor for tech development is going to drop significantly due to the market pressures; look at all the tech layoffs. At the same time, the upside is these tools make certain projects accessible & possible, because prior, would have needed significant funding, amazing solo skills, etc. There’s new opportunities available, but it’ll come at the cost of cratering tech position compensation & job security.
I don’t know anyone in my field right now who feels safe (game dev), and I have many talented friends out of work.
Just look at any productivity vs wage growth chart from any country. Anyone who thinks that any efficiency gain will pay off for workers is either naive or part of the grift.
They did have a point. The printing press still changed the way information works
Luddites weren’t concerned about the printing press. Their fight was over mechanized looms and knitting frames.
Their concerns were mostly about losing their jobs, as well as the absolute dog shit quality the mechanical machines produced at the time.
In 1814, printers in London did have similar conniptions over the steam press, though.
Til I always assumed they were the dudes who drew the fancy letters
I agree with everything except for vibe coding feeling great.
Am I the only one who gets incredibly anxious relying on AI to code? I still ask it for code when I really just want to move on from a problem but it always feels like voluntarily putting mold in my floorboards.
I only use it to solve specific problems when I can’t find the solution elsewhere. Then I spend the time to understand and rewrite the code myself.
It’s the same workflow as using Stack Overflow, etc. You can’t just copy/paste solutions.
I try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.
When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.
I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.
The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously. If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is good because you can work in parallel RUNI try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously.If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is goodbecause you can work in parallelRUN~~I try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.
When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.
I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.
The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously.~~ If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is goodbecause you can work in parallelRUN
I think it sounds really weird, too. I don’t like the sound of that at all. I’m not a pro though.
I’ll admit I enjoy carrying on little tutoring sessions with my GPU though. “How might I approach something like that?” “Can you explain this concept a bit differently?”
But I try to do all the solid brain work myself. Letting the machine write the code for me feels…kinda gross.
I actually think it’s awesome that it understands coding convention and codebases and stuff well enough. Saves a lot of time digging through the wreckage of search engines…
But I don’t appreciate that a lot of its “skill” is pulled from the efforts of uncompensated coders.
“AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.” - Cory Doctorow,
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The vilification of the Luddites as cantankerous tech haters is a really good example of how malicious falsehoods can succeed, I think. I’d guess that most English speakers who know the word would define Luddite as “someone who hates technology”, and I think it resonates on some level because we all hate technology some of the time. The fact that Luddites didn’t indiscriminately hate technology, they just destroyed the means by which their oppressors oppressed them, is handily swept aside. And I never even questioned that narrative on Luddites until I happened to read up on them.
It’s sneaky, because before then “Luddite” didn’t feel like an important or politically charged term at all. It was simply a slang word for people who grump about technology. Calling people haters just short-circuits any examination of the so-called haters’ reasons. It’s exactly what people say about terrorists, except instead of technology its freedom. They just hate freedom. I wonder how many people have “terrorist = freedom hater” embedded so deeply they don’t even think about it.
One persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter
The luddites chose the wrong target. It was not the machines that were the problem. It was the Capital.
Since the machines were owned by The Capital™, it’s kinda one and the same. And much easier than stealing the machines or attacking the people who own them.
You think we should all be hand-weaving textiles because power looms took jobs away? 🤔
No, I think technology should serve the people, not the rich people who own the means of production. I suggest you actually read the article I linked.
Oh, I have read it.
Luddites were strongly motivated by loss of jobs. The article refers to this, and you can find plenty of examples of pamphlets and letters about this:
http://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/bjbecker/SpinningWeb/week8d.html (“We know that it have been mentioned to our great men and Ministers in Parliament by them that have Factorys how many poor they employ, forgetting at the same time how many more they would employ were they to have it done by hand as they used to do.”)
You can characterise this as “technology should serve the common man, not the rich people” through a modern lens of class struggle, but the clear motivation at the time was simply loss of employment and the problems that brought. If they had a more complex understanding like I think you’re voicing, I think you would see their ire directed elsewhere rather than destroying the machines.
I have a hard time telling AI authored LinkedIn thought leadership apart from formulaic LinkedIn thought leadership sometimes, but this feels AI written, which makes it fairly amusing considering the point it’s making.
(Does vibe coding feel incredible? Also, “Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase” implies that the vibe coder original dev understood the codebase at any point, which isn’t an argument I’d feel comfortable making for any of the ones I’ve worked with)
Does vibe coding feel incredible?
There’s definitely a magic in watching it print code with almost no input. Like watching git history with Gource.
It’s not good code, but it is cool to see.
Goodluck arguing this with the AI bros
“dude I have an agent of workflow that goes through the entire codebase. the agent is the expert and I am guiding it”
alright man you have fun with that
My co worker is beyond that. He says the AI is smarter than him and he just passes the captchas and interacts with the real world for it
Fucking scary people are so willing to turn off their brain. When shit goes wrong, they will hold you accountable, not the AI.
when the original dev leaves and nobody understands the code
In my experience at work, no one cares about this. They assume the AI will be able to get there with enough tokens/time with the help of the human at the other end. They have done this and decided it was good enough.
Meanwhile, people like me who don’t use AI coding agents and are PRing and modifying the code are having a hell of a time.
They assume the AI will be able to get there with enough tokens/time with the help of the human at the other end. They have done this and decided it was good enough.
Or if it does break, just hit it with the AI stick until it works again.
most users are also too accepting of slop work. So the MVP of yesterday is the final product of today.
That’s usually the case, in practice.
“There is no prototype.”
Verify everything. Audit before production.
Yeah, the move fast and break things industry already didn’t do that before AI
“Wow this could potentially be pretty amazing, but also could cause unprecedented, catastrophic, dam–”
“TOO LATE. SHIPPED. SHIPPED TO EVERYONE. WORLDWIDE. Moneymoneymoney weeeeeeee”
That’s what they’re doing for my SO’s big introductory class in the humanities. No homework, quizzes, or papers. Short answer exams done in a special testing center.
Really sucks for people who were decent at essays and turning in assignments on time but not great at exams.
yeah, but it’s great for those that hated busywork and were good at exams
I’m the “good at exams” type, I find paper writing (or novel writing… 😢) unpleasantly tedious. If we lose the “good at structuring complex thoughts in a way that can be coherently decoded by other humans” types, the “good at exams” types will suffer. We need people who can write good papers and people who can recall diverse facts and arrange them into simple shapes quickly.
It wouldn’t be hard to change things for essay-types to still get to shine. We’ve been moving away from actual home work anyway, for good reason imo (brief aside, I also think homework sends the wrong message for healthy separation between work and life in the working world). Give in class time for handwriting essays, either completed in one session or over the course of some days. In class books or e-readers for research.
If we’re being honest here, we all kind of acknowledged already that education has been in dire need of reform for a long time now, we were talking about the need for radical education reform over a decade ago… I think AI is highlighting these problems and making them worse more than they are really a root cause.
we were talking about the need for radical education reform over a decade ago
Education, and especially critical thinking, has been systematically gutted by conservative governments for at least 4 decades in the Western world. The goal is the absolute minimum knowledge and thinking skills (preferably without learning skills) necessary to complete the wage slavery tasks.
Absolutely agreed, though the problem goes beyond just funding… a lot of countries still have a very small c conservative, traditionalist, Prussian-style education system that focuses on things like rote memorization, date and event-based history education rather than critical historical analysis, etc. These existed before the great defunding and are also an albatross around the neck of education that needs to be reformed away.
Education really just needs a ground-up restructuring and rethinking, and boy is it going to be hard to make people shake up some of their preconceived notions on education.
But yeah, none of that means anything without funding and is counter to some political goals, very true.
Hard agree on Prussian-style education (which had similar goals of wage slavery when it was introduced). Unfortunately the pessimist in me thinks reform will likely have to wait until after this round of fascism has run its course, but it absolutely need to be a high priority when the time comes. Best time to plant a seed is twenty years ago…
reform will likely have to wait until after this round of fascism has run its course
Quite right. Honestly, even if we could do it now, might be best to wait until after considering who may be in charge during said reforms…
I wasn’t great at exams, but I think if I re-did university today I’d still do much better because my personal learning style is best when I talk through the material with someone. Sitting in a lecture listening to someone monologue at me, reading a static textbook, those weren’t great. But with LLMs every student now has full-time access to a “live tutor” with infinite patience and no sense of social risk from asking it dumb questions. It’s absolutely my perfect learning environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwZi58u1FjI - The Dragon Speech
All the higher mammals learn by playing, by doing, by interacting. And indeed, the higher the mammal, the more of its life it spends in play to prepare itself for adulthood. So you can see, this active role of the mind is fundamental to the way we think. It’s wired into our brains.
It’s a really great speech, and a lot of it is about the failures of our educational system.
Yeah I would have done much better in high school like this, though I don’t think AI will eliminate the poster projects unfortunately.
same, it almost makes me want to go back to uni
This isn’t programmer humor… post to the right comm like fuck_ai@lemmy.world
This is probably overly pessimistic/optimistic (depending on your outlook) in terms of timing. You won’t forget how to code after 18 months of using AI to do it instead; if you decide to go cold turkey, or OpenAI turns the screws on pricing, or whatever, you’ll be back in the swing of things in no time. The lesson from schools is that junior programmers who are learning now are not going to gain the same ability we did. (Besides that they’re finding it difficult to get hired because the AI can do junior programming fairly OK, that is). So the problem won’t be in 18 months; it’ll be in a few years at least, from that point of view.
There’s the separate question of architecture and code quality; by this point we’ve probably all seen the impenetrable morass that vibe coding leads to. That, I’m guessing, will cause problems much sooner.
That’s not what we’re talking about. Knowing how to program is just one thing. Students who use AI to cheat on theory classes won’t learn the theory. Additionally in programming classes they won’t learn how to program as well as they could
I think it is what the original post is talking about - it literally says “We’re doing this in software now … Nobody’s asking what happens in month 18”!
“Software” is not just knowing how to write code. I know from firsthand experience that experience with how a program runs, and the more technical bits help a shittton.
Uh, yes?
And using “AI” to write code or assignments will hinder a student from learning that more technical in the first place.
But the bit of the post I’m talking about isn’t about students.
This happens with students and professionals all the same. I did miss you specifying professionals in your comment but most of what I said is correct. I’m not a student and I’m still learning more just by forcing myself to do things on my own.
Nice message, but why use the slop machine to write it? Use your own words!
Linkedin has been writing like this for a decade
I see short/choppy sentences, but not a lot of other slop writing indicators. What are you on about?
Sometimes I take screenshots of this guy’s comments bc he’s like opinionated and funny
But is he opinionated or is the LLM’s training corpus opinionated? Why should I care what an autocomplete has to say about this topic?
I know that when i started using AI i got over blocks much faster. A system from design to implementation that use to take a week now only takes a few hours with most of that is testing and reviewing the code.
I don’t use agents to test and review code btw because i still want to know what’s going on but my colleagues are definitely using agents to build test large codebases. Im sorry but the truth is AI has changed how we build products in the same way intellisense and jet brains did but on a scale i haven’t seen in my lifetime.
Agreed. If you don’t use AI in coding you are not competitive with someone who does. It really is that simple. You won’t be able to keep up, your bosses will see, you will get fired and that’s that.
Even if the quality you deliver without AI is better, quality is not everything. Time is always a factor and AI beates you ten times over. The rest is sane flows with lot’s of testing etc.
This isn’t One Hour Hot Dog. If you need a big huge fix right the hell yesterday, you fucked up last week. Possibly last year. And what’s gonna prevent that sort of company-liquidating blunder is a layer of crotchety obsessives who can spend a day reading and then commit one line. ‘Hit engine with hammer: $1. Knowing where to hit: $9,999.’
A system that’s pretty good at guessing a hundred places to try hitting has obvious value. Especially when undo is a thing. But this attitude of ‘the future is now, old man!’ is almost as off-base as the folks insisting a magic coding robot won’t help anybody.
I agree with you. I’m not even 100% anti-AI even though a lot of how it is used absolutely reeks.
Of course Big Business is gonna be all about shipping it fast and cheap to the detriment of all else as long as it “works right now.” The ridiculous farce of capitalism as we know it now is that their real goal is to sell off and bail at a profit just before all that vibe-debt comes due and things implode.
It doesn’t mean it’s the best way to create software.
It reminds me of how homes nowadays are thrown together and so ridiculously shoddy because it’s all about speed and holding together just long enough to sell.
Haha, nah. If you’re generally faster with AI assistance it just means you never actually knew how to do your job properly. Sure it can help you get over some hurdles, make docs searches a bit easier if some library has crap docs, but it’s a 5% speed improvement at best and it’s all worse the moment it sends you down some stupid hallucinated rabbithole.
You should give it another go, it has evolved disturbingly since last year. It out performs a junior level software engineer in both design, implementation, testing and debugging.
The hybrid model of a senior engineer using AI to produce code while the rest of the time allocation is spent on reviewing is the new normal.
You get 4 weeks to build x feature, you spend maybe a day with the help of AI then use the rest of the allotted time testing and debugging. What’s happening now is your allotted time is shrinking because managers understand how much faster engineers are working so its a cycle of shorter deadlines which pushes everyone to use AI.
I wouldn’t worry about software engineers going extinct. The role is changing but those core skills are really important to catch mistakes from both humans and AI.
Right now theirs two types of people using AI, software engineers who learned computer science and built software products and Joe MBA who struggles to write a bat file with the latter struggling to build cohesive products
I don’t know whether this is just ragebait, whether you have never tried any advanced AI agent or whether you genuinely think you can work as fast as an AI, but I can asure you that you can’t.
