The window for the gunslinging no-AI coder sitting in the basement with Mountain Dew and cranking out thousands of lines a day is essentially closed now.
My previous superstar 10x engineers are now superstar 50x engineers thanks to AI-enhanced output. All metrics are up. There's also no negative effects either, in fact incidents and faults have declined.
This position is the equivalent of the delivery driver in the early 1900s who refused to get an automobile and instead insisted his horse and cart is better.
Know that if you oppose a productivity tool that transforms every other engineer, you will be managed out. I've seen it happen more than once already.
[–] dantillberg 1 day ago
[–] somenameforme 1 day ago
And while I do expect progress to eventually slow, there's no reason to yet think we're at the plateau point or necessarily even especially close, so they're probably only going to get better. But at this point, even if they didn't I'd still be saying this. 'Programming' with an LLM is a loathsome and unpleasant task, but that's because it's no longer programming but instead an entirely different design-centric domain where it's handy to have some programming knowledge to nudge it in the right direction sometimes.
I think human programmers are going to go the way of human computers. [1] And I'm obligated to link to that because now most people probably no longer even know such an occupation existed, even though it rather obviously must have if you think about the past for a moment.
[–] dantillberg 1 day ago
[–] 0xy 1 day ago
This is because these models act as a productivity enhancer for engineers. A 1x engineer becomes 5x. A 10x becomes 50x. And so on.
Slop is a risk that can be mitigated through team policy, skills and other mechanisms. Nothing we produce is slop, in fact incidents are down dramatically. It's more stable than ever.
Nobody is measuring LOCs. They're up, but that's barely relevant to me. I'd rather measure defect rate, rollback rate, sprint velocity, roadmap adherence etc. Those measure actual progress.
I don't use LOCs as a reason to manage people out. But if they're vehemently refusing to even try AI, other metrics will make it obvious that they're falling behind.
[–] rossy 1 day ago
So you could definitely be the first to explain to me why AI is the only "tool" that gets forced on developers from the top down with threats like this.
In my experience, developers have to beg management to get productivity enhancing tools like linters, version control systems, editors and IDEs approved for use. AI is the rare reversal where the decision to use it is often made by non-technical C-suite members and pushed downwards, often with the implicit or explicit threat of job loss, like you are making now. But if the productivity gains are so obvious it turns 10x engineers into 50x, why is that necessary, and why do you need to look at anything other than the quantity of a developer's output to know if they're using it?
[–] iExploder 1 day ago
Kindly enumerate the metrics.
"All metrics is up" is a message The Communist Party approves wholeheartedly. 5 year plan delivered in 1 year, give this comrade a medal! anyone?
[–] curiousaboutml 1 day ago
This is clearly about distributing the fruits of productivity evenly, whether they come from AI or any other way.
If you work for a salary and aren't a billionaire, I hope you will introspect why you assumed that your fellow working class human being was against productivity - we are on the same team my friend. If you aren't, well, I got nothing to say to you.
The rest is basic hard truth, but I really hope that the "quantity of output" rationale withers. AI's core value for programming is in input tokens, not output tokens.