Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple The effects are, to say the least, absolutely disastrous, but who's going to do something about it? Shareholders and management are in love with this because productivity numbers go up while cost goes down (even if the quality goes trough the toilet) -
@f4grx It's exactly this!!
People who used to do their craft just fine but have now almost kinda turned into zombies?
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@Purple The effects are, to say the least, absolutely disastrous, but who's going to do something about it? Shareholders and management are in love with this because productivity numbers go up while cost goes down (even if the quality goes trough the toilet)
@reiddragon Eventually the house of cards will collapse because the technical debt being created is enormous
So yeah, I assume investors absolutely love it for now, but when the tide turns who picks up the rubble?
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@reiddragon Eventually the house of cards will collapse because the technical debt being created is enormous
So yeah, I assume investors absolutely love it for now, but when the tide turns who picks up the rubble?
@Purple oh, it's not just technical debt. The current mess with AI is fundamentally linked with the general political and economical direction the world's been taking.
As for who'll have to thanklessly clean up the mess, I think it's pretty obvious that it's the programmers who have been yelling in the void about this bullshit since the beginning and who will be blamed for it all, anyway -
@f4grx It's exactly this!!
People who used to do their craft just fine but have now almost kinda turned into zombies?
@Purple I know it's ridiculous. Cant wait for all of this to be over.
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@Purple i have a lot of feelings about how many senior devs i am working with who are starting to rely on ai shit
@dexiheart @Purple At the kickoff for my current project we were going through the technical design doc and when we came to one section, the lead eng just casually said "Ignore this part. It's an AI hallucination."
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@TheMNWolf @Purple The amount of verification needed goes up steeply as you can trust the AI. You can’t trust a human to write perfect code (hence tests), but an AI can just go wild and do anything.
So if you don’t understand the business rules needed nor can develop at the level the AI is trying to do, it won’t work.
But if you let it into production the good old “it will happen and your options don’t matter” kicks in.
It’s like having me review papers about quantum mechanics. I can find some spelling errors, but I will have no clue if something is plausible sounding gibberish or the real deal.
Well I guess the upside is that qualified and trained developers will become more and more scarce. Yay future we didn’t want.
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@TheMNWolf @yon @Purple yeah, i suspect many teams understand their code less and less as the time goes.
@river @TheMNWolf @Purple Code and *business rules*, the much more difficult part vs most code written today.
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple@woof.tech yup, about a year ago my old boss switched over to being dependent on chatgpt, then claude exclusively and then shilling it as the only way developers should be doing things ;~;
I think that developers are particularly vulnerable to being lobotomised via ai because many are so dopamine hungry for a quick hit of solving a problem in the most efficient way, and ai seems like it’s efficient as the person using it isn’t using their own brainpower, if efficiency is measured by how much we use. We need to try and make it so developers care about the efficiency of code itself rather than creating the code otherwise it’s just gonna be a bunch of trash -
Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple seniors often develop dementia as they age, maybe the AI in LLM use is Accelerated Incoherence.
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple On the bright side, there are "some" benefits that I've seen in my experiments. The biggest is "planning"
We get requests from clients for modifications that often make no sense and are simply a disaster..... yet, we often just get to it and start framing it out so we can really get an idea of what needs to be done.
with this AI stuff, you can write up the entire process - the business logic - and then include the steps to getting it done and really get it planned out. Then you can have something like Claude CLI dig through it and actually write up a plan - not the code. And THEN, you can break it into manageable pieces, push them into individual branches and THEN start work.
at that point, I'd say 70% of the front-end UI can be done with AI, and then you do the rest. I mean, it is no different than the scaffolding that you get with AngularCLI or VisualStudio, etc...
The real problem is laziness. It's too easy to just make it work and push your PR without even looking at "how" it works.
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple So far I've only seen AI vomit from junior devs... Which got better over time, mostly because they learnt it's easier to review and fix it themselves before sending me a MR for review to which I reply, that they should fix the obvious stuff first and then get 30 comments from me in the following iterations anyways...
Most seniors don't really use AI... Some even forget they have an AI subscription...
I'm one of the seniors that use it more often. But I'm using it more like a glorified search engine, getting inspiration for problem solutions (good way to find methods in libraries that I might have missed... if they exist and are not hallucinations), sometimes to get clues on cryptic compiler errors.
I don't usually accept generated code/changes but tend to do it myself after I understand the suggested solution. In my experience it's a lot faster than cleaning up up the generated code. -
I think AI is incredibly weak at actually understanding problems with any moderate degree of complexity.
People forget it's a language model that is just very advanced at predicting what would be a likely, or seemingly sensible answer to a prompt. It's kinda inherent to it's design, they try to overcome it by having it write it's own prompt ("thinking mode") but even then it still just doesn't grasp the full idea
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@anne_twain @halfy In all honesty I hope to be out of that place before that happens
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple You're not going crazy, no. I worry that LLMs are only capable of emitting *memes* and that some of those memes negatively impact critical thinking by terminating or flattening lines of inquiry. Chronic exposure seems to be required, at least; it's not a one-shot or acute effect. I left more words and links here: https://lobste.rs/s/jucg4w/i_don_t_care_how_well_your_ai_works#c_gkbrmj
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