alt Hacker NewsMy advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI.
My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still generate a sub-par result while a great dev can produce great results.
The choices involved in using these tools are also not as binary as they are often made out to be, especially since agents have taken off. You can very much still decide to dedicate part of your day to chiseling away at important code to make it just right and make sure your brain is engaged in the result and exploring and growing with the problem at hand, while feeding background queues of agents with other tasks.
I would in fact say the biggest challenge of the AI tool revolution in terms of what to adapt to is just good ol' personal time management.
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Yes, absolutely. I think the companies that don't understand software, don't value software and that think that all tech is fundamentally equivalent, and who will therefore always choose the cheaper option, and fire all their good people, will eventually fail.
And I think AI is in fact a great opportunity for good devs to produce good software much faster.
I think the issue is that given the speed the bad dev can generate sub-par results that at face value look good enough overwhelm any procedures in place.
Pair that with management telling us to go with AI to go as fast as possible means that there is very little time to do course correction.
I think no one is better positioned to use these tools than experienced developers.
I agree with the quality comments. The problem with AI coding isn't so much the slop, it's the developers not realizing its slop and trying to pass it off as a working product in code reviews. Some of the stuff I've reviewed in the past 6 months has been a real eye opener.
For me the problem is simple: we are in an active prisoner's dilemma with AI adoption where the outcome is worse collectively by not asking the right questions for optimal human results, we are defecting and using ai selfishly because we are rewarded by it. There's lots of potential for our use to be turned against us as we train these models for companies that have no commitment to give to the common good or return money to us or to common welfare if our jobs are disrupted and an AI replaces us fully.
> If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI.
I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.