alt Hacker NewsYeah, but you had to integrate it until it at least compiled, which kind of made people think about what they're pasting.
I had a peer who suddenly started completing more stories for a month or two when our output was largely equal before. They got promoted over me. I reviewed one of their PRs... what a mess. They were supposed to implement caching. Their first attempt created the cache but never stored anything in it. Their next attempt stored the data in the cache, but never looked at the cache - always retrieving from the API. They deleted that PR to hide their incompetence and opened a new one that was finally right. He was just blindly using AI to crank out his stories.
That team had something like 40% of capacity being spent on tech debt, rework, and bug fixes. The leadership wanted speed above all else. They even tried to fire me because they thought I was slow, even though I was doing as much or more work than my peers.
Replies
> Yeah, but you had to integrate it until it at least compiled, which kind of made people think about what they're pasting
That’s a very low bar. It’s easy to get a program to compile. And if it’s interpreted, you can coast for months with no crashes, just corrupted state.
The issue is not that they can’t code, it’s that they can’t problem solve and can’t design.
The field of software is slowly getting worse for some and better for others. I'm probably going to just contract myself out.
To be fair my AI setup almost always compiles before thinking its done.
It's a frustrating situation. I had a stretch in my career when I was the clean up person who did the 90% of work that was left after management thought a junior had gotten in 90% done. It's potentially very satisfying but very easy to feel unappreciated in (e.g. they wish the junior could have gotten it done and thought I was "too slow" though in retrospect one year of that was an annus mirabilis where I completed an almost unbelievable number of diverse projects.)