A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering

30 years in the industry for me. It’s been a wild last few years watching this transformation. Like the OP I find it wholly unpleasant and I also can’t deny the productivity boost. I’m very glad I’m nearly ready for retirement and I look forward to watching this “progress” from a comfortable distance.

Why do some software engineers love AI and some hate it?

I've got senior engineers (20+ yoe) who have never been having more fun and then some who feel like OP here.

Why is it so decisive? There's no other tool (not even emacs) that's caused this sort of division.

For a hundred years software was inscrutable enough to normies that you could be an artisan. But most professions haven't had that luxury for a long, long time. Try making and selling pretty much anything else you built by hand.

Now it's software people's turn to feel the pain of being a starving artist and watch as your attractive friends with no skills and a social media presence "make it" with their genius.

We haven't even begun to feel the weight of it yet.

I anticipate and welcome the market price of slopware dropping to zero, given that it’s now in infinite supply. Too much talent has been cohabiting with SO copypasters, MBA idiots, and management dorks for too long, time to break up.

I can't deny this is true, but it hasn't made me hate my job. More than anything, I'm trying to figure out how to thrive in a very different environment. I've definitely realized that sitting there and handcrafting my code to try to make it perfect isn't what my employer is going to want; they want a balanced trade-off. So, I need to find a good split in the middle where I can still add value by using my experience and skills to shape good quality, maintainable code, but I also am trying to use LLMs in places where they are doing a good job. The quality of the generated code, sans the unbelievably bad English prose, has gone up a fair bit, making me wince a bit less about it.

But, the sentiment about drowning in slop, well. Yeah kind of. I am not sure the polite way to tell people they should be thinking for themselves rather than just repeating what an LLM told them.

I absolutely use LLMs to assist in reviewing my own code as well as others, but I am always using my own judgment and speaking in my own voice. I will never copy-paste an LLM comment as if I wrote it, and I don't think even with a proper disclaimer that I'll ever copy-paste an LLM comment that I don't understand enough to confirm and rephrase on my own - instead, I use the LLM insights as a starting point. If I don't understand them, I dig deeper. If I disagree with the comment, I disregard it. And finally, if I understand it fully and agree with it, then I bring it up in code review, in my own voice.

I'm a little more lax when it comes to LLM generated code. A lot of test suites are already kind of a bit pointless thanks to the flawed prioritization of code coverage as a metric (it isn't a bad one generally, but there are cases where it is tragically bad, like when the code you are testing is effectively a DSL and the assertions are restatements of the DSL's contents...) and even when it's not, LLMs are often useful for generating decent test suites. Still a good idea to read them, but I give LLM-generated tests less attention and manually exercising code more attention: it seems like a good tradeoff to get a productivity improvement from LLMs.

To me the biggest sin is using LLMs or generative AI and pretending it is your own human expression. Please use your own words. If that's too much effort, I'm afraid I don't really want you working where I work or posting where I post, just for the sake of everyone's sanity. All of your LLM-assisted blog posts read like absolute shit and I'm tired of all of the excuses for it.

>I’d love to find a corner of the world where this hasn’t happened yet [...]

Start one?

There's definitely a market for software that doesn't give off the corporate, mass-produced, one-size-fits-all energy. 37signals famously made quite a business out of it.

There has always been some level of misalignment between the (beauty of high) quality of products made by craftsmen and the value of these products by whoever consumes them.

If you zoom out and look at other industries, we've seen this before many many times: Fast food completely commoditized the food industry. There are still extremely skilled people making the "highest quality" food. For example those at michelin star restaurants, these businesses typically don't make money by selling food anymore, they stay around for other reasons (hotel needs a fancy restaurant with a famous chef). We've seen the same when it comes to many other products: toys, furniture, most electronics, etc.

Nobody can swim against the forces of capitalism here, just not enough people care about high quality hand crafted software (the only people that really do are people right here in this thread hand crafting software). Sure there will be some corners of the economy where people doing everything by hand will keep their head above the water.

Think of it this way: back when people were sending letters to each others and responses took weeks, people (non professional writers) put a lot of thought into writing these letters. I'm sure if you show these people the average (non AI) emails we've been sending each other the last few decades they will complain about all the slop too (including how we all converse to each other right here). But you can definitely argue that this exponentially increased communication and sharing of ideas has outweighed our decreased ability to write properly (in self defense: I'm not a native english speaker).

This obviously sucks for those who care about high quality hand crafted software, but this is going to open the floodgates in terms of the accessibility of software development. And it's yet to be seen whether this is going to take all our jobs away or not. What's very much true (like the article says) is that the future job of software dev is going to look different, and the change is coming fast.

After we get through this slop phase, I think software engineering won’t be about code at all, if it even exists as a profession. Feels like the beginning of the end for the craft.

It's strange to see this on the site:

> While I may use AI for work, my website, and all the content on it, is entirely written by hand.

I mean, if you're tired of the slop and what AI is doing to the industry, why do you need to use it for a simple personal website?