I can't state my disdain enough for the rabid, careless advancement of AI, and all the bros that keep telling me to catch up or fall behind, while they are actively causing harm to the hundreds of thousands, or millions of users they have, without care or consideration.
Nearly two decades of experience learning how to build safe, performant software, to be replaced by this shit.
We don't care about people, our customers anymore. We actively harm them for profit. This is such a garbage industry now.
I am interviewing with a small company that has adopted agentic development in a big way and is looking for a vp of engineering to guide things. I tried to present a balanced view of excitement for the possibilities built on first solving governance, guardrails and mitigating the lethal trifecta. Senior executives are not interested and my position likely disqualified me, even after I talked about needing to speak to your client data governance teams and CISOs. Crickets. They actually said we're looking for someone who's a big AI booster. Bullet dodged.
Bad take. That's impossible in our society. I wouldn't get updates from my child's kindergarten. I wouldn't be able to use public transit. I can't access my bank. I can't communicate with my family, friends, spouse, work network.
We don't have an option. Which is why a lack of care for users is abhorrent.
My perspective is to figure out how to shape the way we use AI to show the right way to use it. This comes from a place of caring about the software and its users.
I strongly believe that when used properly, AI can remove a lot of overhead that comes with writing the code (from both a critical thinking standpoint and physically it actually takes a lot more time than people realize to manually type code). You can focus on the design and have your team much more integrated in the designs and specifications of things without it being a slog to document the damn thing.
If I can go off and write up a draft and get feedback from my team in a day instead of in a week, I think that's fine. We can collectively walk through and use everyone's domain knowledge to correct details. Once everyone is onboard with the spec, I can feed that into a model to progressively do small changes rapidly but in such a way that's still manageable and reviewable for myself and the rest of my team.
If I go off and merge 45000 lines of code into main: fucking fire me and my whole team that approved that.
As with all new things that have extreme views on either side (AI is complete shit versus AI is the second coming of Christ in this case), there's generally a middle ground in between that we can collectively correct toward.
The idea that companies invested in "safe, performant software" before AI is laughable. Tech companies have never cared about the customers beyond their effect on KPIs.
Companies never cared, and most engineers didn't care much either, at least not directly. But a lot still cared to cover their ass and try to do things correctly the first time to reduce future work and headaches. Now that it's all just a few prompts away "Who cares? Ship it now, if it's broken we'll just have Claude fix it later."
Sure, but the parent said "this is such a garbage industry now", implying it was not this way before LLMs. The individuals who care about quality can still pursue quality. In fact, they are better equipped to create quality software than ever. It's a matter of spending time and attention.
The underlying problem is that quality isn't profitable. It goes beyond tech. The companies that cared about quality had their lunch eaten by the companies that chased razor-thin margins and produced disposable junk. I'm not sure what it is about AI that makes everyone forget what the world was like five years ago.
While better equipped for security with frontier models (and I agree with that) I don't know any engineers in my circle that have the time to utilise it. Half of them are laid off, by the way.
The rest, including me, are supposed to take up the slack with ridiculous deadlines and pressure. I don't have time anymore. I have to trust that my prompt and testing descriptions and harness will take care of it. And I have no clue whether that's truly happening, because I have another ticket before I get time to review, or send some swarm of test/probe agents at it. And right now I don't trust it. (Literally look at the parent article?)
I did have that time and capacity in the past. Maybe you didn't. But the landscape is, to me, objectively different now.
I fully agree that tech workers have never been less empowered. When I said that individuals have never been better equipped to pursue quality, I meant within projects they control. There will likely never be agency again at a large company.
We're on the same page about most of this, but my perspective differs in a couple of ways:
- I have worked at companies that didn't prioritize quality and had unreasonable deadlines for most of my career. It's the default state of corporations with leverage over their workers.
- This was getting worse before AI. Big tech was the anomaly in terms of pay, perks, benefits, etc, and they were already jointly deciding not to do that anymore around the time of Musk's Twitter layoffs. The main reason they had offered such a compelling environment was to prevent talented people from being hired by their competition, in which case they were perfectly happy to let them "play around" and focus on quality.
I find it frustrating when people imply that employment was an idyllic wonderland before AI ruined everything. AI is another step, potentially the final step, in boiling the middle class. It didn't invent poor working conditions, it brought tech workers down closer to everyone else's level.
The best move right now is to move to a small startup or start something on your own. I fully understand that this is easier said than done, when you have bills to pay and deadlines keep you too exhausted to escape. To some extent, that's probably part of why the deadlines exist.
Exactly. I cared, and the amazing engineers that taught me cared. We didn't have KPIs in 2008, we had code reviews and mean senior engineers (that were secretly kind) that would tear your code apart and send you back until you got it right.
And we were allowed to? I raised so many tickets over time that had no real business impact beyond "this is a security risk" and nearly all of them I was allowed to adress.
Maybe that makes me some kind of tech-boomer, like people responding to me are implying, but I don't really give a shit.
>I can't state my disdain enough for the rabid, careless advancement of AI, and all the bros that keep telling me to catch up or fall behind, while they are actively causing harm to the hundreds of thousands, or millions of users they have, without care or consideration.
Have you ever considered that the people who are pro-AI are not a monolith, and that it can be simultaneously true that you should absolutely be learning how to effectively and safely use LLMs in engineering workflows, while it is also true that there are people who are using them very unsafely?
Beig opposed to learning how to use AI correctly because some people use it recklessly is like being opposed to learning AWS in 2015 because some people left sensitive data in open S3 buckets.
Do not confuse negligent misuse of the tool for the value proposition of the tool itself.
Re-read my post before quoting it and getting defensive. I'm not anti-AI, I use Claude daily, partly because that's all the industry is now, partly because it can be an amazing tool.
I'm furious about slop-shovelling profit-driven development that actively causes harm to people. And the lack of care for, or outright disdain of customers, specifically fuelled by a misuse of AI, and the people telling me to get used to this, the people telling me to stop reading my own PRs, the people telling me this is just how it is now. When we all know that doesn't have to be true.
It's surprising how different the standards are between software engineering and all other kinds of engineering, for instance civil or mechanic.
The old joke was "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization", but in the AI era it feels like a butterfly would be enough.
Counterpoint: if programmers wrote programs the way structural engineers designed buildings, ecommerce apps would take half a decade to build and the software industry would have just gotten around to inventing Windows Vista and jQuery in the last year or so.
If you're saying e-commerce would simply be consistent and secure product catalogs with fewer promotional and tracking dark patterns, web scripting would rely on a and extensible and functional library for manipulating markup documents, and a stable OS kernel with few dark patterns and no cloud accounts, many of us would be sold in a heartbeat.
I don't think you're making the counterpoint you mean to be.
Don't be naïve - the industry wouldn't be any less laden with surveillance crapitalism; the presence of that isn't a product of the pace of development, it is a product of the nature of consumers to eagerly suffer limitless abuse so long as the product "just werks", looks/feels polished, and doesn't require any kind of learning or discomfort.
Freedom from everything you enumerated already exists for anyone who cares enough to pursue it - robust ad and script blockers, operating systems with no coercion or user hostility, simple and stable scripting languages. They're not as polished as the products of manipulative and extractive abusers like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Discord, et al., and accordingly, users shun them, for the reason I explained above.
Think about the scorn you'd feel for pants your workplace made you wear that ripped whenever you stood up unless you aced a pop quiz on the latest happenings from fashion TikTok.
That's the scorn the average person feels for user-hostile software that requires them to "learn" insipid facts that you think are important.
> it is a product of the nature of consumers to eagerly suffer limitless abuse
Ah, there's the victim blaming.
> Freedom from everything you enumerated already exists for anyone who cares enough to pursue it
Do you have any idea how daily life is for non-technical people? It isn't reasonable in our society to expect everyone to switch to FOSS, and blaming 60 year olds for getting their identity stolen because they weren't using a Linux phone or rolling their own self hosted matrix chat server is such a cruel and unbelievably out of touch take.
Are you seriously asserting that security and code quality are not important? That the implications of poor security and of unmaintainable, garbage systems are entirely made-up and immaterial?
This is hard to face for conscientious people who have built identities around their skills, but yes, objectively, as measured by decisions and results, quality¹ is not important and it never was. It's horrible to say, but no amount of indignation makes it false when it's a fact.
It's just true.
Quality has always been a luxury that almost everyone has gone without, consumers and producers both.
So who isn’t rent seeking? The tycoons, the landlords, the people who never build anything themselves and live off skimming off the top of other peoples labor?
the pendulum is starting to swing back, one of the hyperscalers that went in big on vibecoding slop is starting to re-introduce security principles to product and especially infra development. The founder bros that have little to lose will continue with what they’re doing until the public starts caring about how their data is treated.
Nearly two decades of experience learning how to build safe, performant software, to be replaced by this shit.
We don't care about people, our customers anymore. We actively harm them for profit. This is such a garbage industry now.