On: Things that have a bigger impact than coding assistants

[apwell23]

they are "game changers" if you are a mediocre software dev thats churning out crud widgets .

any decent software developer uses and creates abstractions instead of generating reams of code using AI.

From what i've seen at work AI is "game changer" for coding in worst sense. reams and reams of duplicated code that looks slightly different from other generated code doing similar things. Before AI ppl used to stop and create some library now they just generate shit because its so easy. AI is death of software engineering.

[righthand → apwell23]

Any good engineer enjoys creating abstractions too instead of hoping a machine trained on code golf will solve the problems.

My manager probably adds 10+ hours to my week by pushing Llm code at our projects only to follow up with several merge requests to fix his work. I just approve whatever he pushes because he isn’t interested in actually solving the problem. He’s interested in seeing if he can fiddle the solution out of an Llm. Each time it involves me telling him the answer. His boss is the same way. Literally dragging the company efficiency down and proving the efficiency gains are meaningless.

[apwell23 → righthand]

This is all of junior engineers on my team now. I shudder to think about having to maintain all this generated crap.

[righthand → apwell23]

You don’t maintain it, you wait until a bug comes your way from their work and pass it down to them to screw around with more. Let them maintain it and eat their own careers.

[sebstefan → apwell23]

I'll dump you some of my last queries

> I'd like to output lines where .stack_trace is non empty with JQ

I vaguely remembered that it sometimes has "null" and sometimes has empty strings

Time gained ~60s looking at the doc

> Here is a Jira ticket's description: ```....``` Please rephrase this more clearly and make the text flow better?

^ Then I picked and chose the improvements

No time gained but quality improved

> Critique this for accuracy: (A long comment about the properties of randomness)

No time gained but quality improved

> How do I make excel prompt me to select the goddamn delimiter when I open a CSV file instead of just picking a random fucking one that never works

Question was filtered due to content policy, because apparently they don't want you to offend the robot

[apwell23 → sebstefan]

not sure how these are examples of

> real game changers are “chat-with-codebase” or agentic development tools

[sebstefan → apwell23]

It's not an example of that, just a response to

>From what i've seen at work AI is "game changer" for coding in worst sense

[apwell23 → sebstefan]

Ah gotcha. yea those are some of the ways i use llms too.

There is a pesudo-mandate at work that all new code must be generated by LLMs so ppl are checking in llm junk without proper vetting.

Why extract common logic into a method when you can just generate junk