arcboii92

---- My poem about sacrificing Engineering Best Practices on the Altar of AI Efficiency.

First, they made CI/CD pipelines to automate the builds and deployment - and I said nothing because I didn't want to watch the scripts run. It's only running my code anyway, and more automation is good. Less for me to do!

Then, they integrated AI into our IDE - and I said nothing because the guardrails kept it in check. It's only writing code following my instructions, and more automation is good. Less for me to do!

Then, they requested source control access so the business owners could skip all the feature planning back-and-forth and just chat with an AI agent until the feature looks how they want it - and I said nothing because they're not merging into master. I'm still in charge of reviewing code, and I have an AI agent helping me review code using some rules and invariants I've handed it, and more automation is good. Less for me to do!

Now, they are requesting an always-on AI agent reviews and merges their code into master with 0 human interaction because their PRs which contain 300K lines changed each have started to pile up over the last 3 days. And I have to just do it because boss man pays my bills. But hey, more automation is good. Less for me to do.... until everything breaks and I have 1 hour to find why the million lines of code merged this week don't work anymore.

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The story makes it sound like I didn't push back. I did. But after being forced to ignore a full career's worth of red flags and best practices I'm now just whoring my skills out to see how deep this AI-fully-replacing-devs rabbit hole goes. Besides, when else am I going to have crazy money to just throw at a new server and set it up to replace the SDLC end-to-end with a rich man's AI? And there's still the fun technical challenge of "can I make this system secure enough that even when I automate myself out of a job I couldn't revenge hack it?"

Shit. Found this at 8:30am, happy to click a few times before starting work... Suddenly its 10am? Huh? Also, minor spoilers, but it looks like making a crazy OP cell form does nothing once you evolve. I had some crazy RNA/DNA numbers, then as soon as I evolved its like haha none of that matters. Reminds me of evolving out of cell form in SPORE

I've said "code was always the easy part" recently so I should probably explain where I'm coming from. I think the practice of software engineering includes that "understanding of the relationship between code, business, people and teams" you mention, which essentially boils down to the ability to skillfully design a system - regardless of whether it's a big cloud-based web application or a tiny cli tool for use within a team.

To me, the difficult parts of software engineering are in the design. That's where you're defining the problem you're trying to solve, picking what technology to build upon, what kind of architecture you're planning on implementing, ruling out what does/doesn't make sense, taking input from stakeholders, and finding the balance between price and performance. Once all that is covered I generally have a good high-level mental map of a system's structure, and actually writing the code to bring those ideas to life truly is the easier part.

That being said, I still believe writing good code is a skill that is only learned through experience/the practice of actually writing code. And that experience is necessary for reviewing code - regardless of whether the code you're reviewing was written by humans or AI.

Kind of like baking. Putting it in the oven was always the easy part. But combining the right ingredients in the right ratios is necessary, and much more difficult than the putting-it-in-the-oven part. And even then, it takes experience to know when something needs to be pulled early or left in longer. Because ovens are non-deterministic.

My brain stores it away in a magic database that cannot be queried in any useful way. If I say say "brain, give me a list of learnings from projects you have worked on" - it returns an empty set. But if I'm reviewing someone's code, my brain suddenly pipes up and says "hey, I smell bad code, this is poorly designed and will not perform well - just like that time 7 years ago in a previous role when you smashed your head on the desk for hours trying to get to the bottom of that legacy spaghetti code slowdown"

LLMs moved the moments of despair to PR reviews for me. It used to be that you could check on a junior dev occassionally throughout the day to make sure they're on the right track. Now you step away for 2 hours and they're raising a PR of bad code smell spaghetti and moving on to repeat their AI slopfest on the next task.

It's getting hard to keep up with trying to teach new devs what bad code looks like. And I swear sometimes they just copy my PR comments into their AI tool to fix the mistakes without any of the learning.

Just a random guy chiming in to say my favourite 1:1 was when Fallout 4 released and we spent the entire time talking about the game. We then made a pact that we'd save up our leave so we could take a week off when the next Elder Scrolls game was released....... I have so much leave saved up.

Just wasted half an hour at work playing the Get Rich Quick game. I remember the old days of point and click games, not knowing what the next step was, and just aimlessly clicking every item on every screen trying to make something happen

Pretty much all of the self service gas station terminals in New Zealand went down for the 29th

Pretty interesting stuff. Although in New Zealand we had our first cyclone properly hit land this year and it absolutely obliterated whole communities and disrupted our biggest agricultural region - so I'm not sure if we'll be as unaffected in 80 years as this makes out.

I've noticed this. I've had a paid subscription since GPT4 dropped but I'll probably cancel this month. Anyone got suggestions for a replacement? Preferably something that is like ChatGPT4 was on release day.

I resigned from my current role because the office culture is terrible, and I hate being around pretty much all the people outside of the IT team.

I was offered 6 figures as a counter offer for the first time in my career, which I turned down.

That was last week. New Zealand (where I'm from) hasn't shut down yet, but everything is so bleak, and I'm regretting turning down the offer. I start working from home tomorrow for my final 2 weeks here, and I can't help but feel regret. Being in the office was the one thing I hated, and now we don't have to do that.

Whats worse is I emailed the new job asking if we're still going ahead with me starting, and there was no reply.

As a kiwi it blows my mind how bad your broadband is over there. My cousin recently moved to some rural Aussie town and will be getting 25 megabit, tops. Here in NZ we're rolling out 4 gigabit connections nationwide over the next 6 months.

EDIT: props for getting rid of limits and disconnects though. NZ providers are just saying we'll be able to cope with everyone working from home because we have a fancy network.

Bonus fun fact: kumara is a loan word taken from kumar, which was it's native name in South America.

The keto generator needs a bit of work. It was suggesting waaaaay too many carbs. Throwing in things like oranges where bacon would be the better keto option