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points by scottLobster 2 days ago | 0 comments
And how will you have the skill to go hunting inside the box if all you ever do is high level systems work?

Even if you're relying on extremely thorough test and validation, well someone who understands things at a low level has to write said tests and validations.

So long as humans are legally liable, this approach will only work until someone gets sued. Which means human experts will need to still exist and be trained, perhaps their training will just have to be more explicit rather than gained through the act of building products. Companies will hate this.

[–] mrothroc 2 days ago
How do I personally have the skill? I built it the old fashioned way: decades of doing this, starting with vi and hand coding assembly, through IDEs and high level languages, and now with distributed tracing on ephemeral serverless deployments.

How do juniors develop it? Yeah, that's the tough part. Those years spent slogging through very tedious work got me here. You have to exercise to build muscle. Maybe we need to find some way to let people exercise the skills without the hands-on slog? I'm honestly not sure, how are you seeing it handled where you are?

[–] scottLobster 2 days ago
Yeah that's my point. Sooner or later a human is going to have to go hunting "inside the box", and those humans will have to be capable of doing so competently.

I'm not seeing post-AI training of juniors handled at all, anywhere. The closest thing is what my employer does where for liability reasons every command executed by an AI agent, even as simple as an ls, has to be manually approved by the developer. This has the side effect of walking you through the AI's analysis, which can be quite educational.

Given the general culture of corporate cost-cutting (the whole appeal of AI is it doesn't need a benefits package), it's possible we're heading into a future where people trained pre-AI turn into a dedicated guild of professional troubleshooters, demanding fat paychecks to parachute in and put out fires when a company's giant blob of agents fails and their in-house staff lacks the deep knowledge to figure it out.

[–] mrothroc 2 days ago
That approval thing is interesting, for sure. It reminds me of how experts are very deliberate in narrating their thinking for juniors while they work, so juniors can learn the why behind the how.

There are definitely companies that are being short-sighted on this. I've seen this come back and bite them (usually, not always).

I'd argue that if the company doesn't provide this, then people should rely on their community. I'm lucky enough to live in a place that has lots of meetups and we talk about this. Absent that, there are plenty of active discussions online, as this very thread shows.

The bonus of working via the community is that's where you can find a new opportunity if the company doesn't take care of their people.

[–] dist-epoch 2 days ago
When compilers appeared, junior developers didn't have to develop the skill to understand assembly. Worrying about them not learning that skill because using compilers is so convenient would have been a bad move.

Now the juniors are cooked anyway, but not because they didn't learn the skill of software development.

[–] mrothroc 2 days ago
"junior developers didn't have to develop the skill to understand assembly" well that's certainly fair.

At the same time, what I saw during that time was that organizations that actively sought to help juniors transition their skills to match the tools did better than those who just left everyone to wander around in the dark.

[–] dist-epoch 2 days ago
Less than 0.1% of programmers are legally liable for the software they write.