Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
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@schrottkatze@catgirl.cloud @Purple@woof.tech shiny previous employers and good contacts (I know, it's not fair)
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@schrottkatze@catgirl.cloud @Purple@woof.tech shiny previous employers and good contacts (I know, it's not fair)
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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.
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It’s much easier to write your own Forth than to make your own screws! It’s a wonderfully simple and expressive language. Ages ago I wrote a tiny Forth that interactively compiled to 68000 machine code.
More recently I learned Elm — that was extremely mind-bending and hard in a very satisfying way.
I’ve also had fun making screw-like threaded inserts because I needed bigger ones than I could easily get.
I’ve had so much fun learning new things to build stuff I wanted and needed.
Making tools to make this work easier is an essential part of this process — and making tools to make tools.
Some folks who are heavily into LLM-assisted programming seem to be getting lost:
Paraphrasing:
“This is the last month that programming will cost anything and I’m examining the implications of the cost of code going to 0
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I’ve had so much fun learning new things to build stuff I wanted and needed.
Making tools to make this work easier is an essential part of this process — and making tools to make tools.
Some folks who are heavily into LLM-assisted programming seem to be getting lost:
Paraphrasing:
“This is the last month that programming will cost anything and I’m examining the implications of the cost of code going to 0
@stepheneb I need to get my tap and die game on. But/and: I get so much more out of understanding older techniques and subtractive processes for making things, vs friends who 3d print or CNC route everything. And making tools to make tools is everything about long-term process improvement.
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@TheMNWolf @yon @Purple yeah, i suspect many teams understand their code less and less as the time goes.
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@stepheneb I need to get my tap and die game on. But/and: I get so much more out of understanding older techniques and subtractive processes for making things, vs friends who 3d print or CNC route everything. And making tools to make tools is everything about long-term process improvement.
Yes!
And sometimes I use my 3D printer to make jigs for precision work in wood or metal. It’s a wonderful affordance to be able to minutely change a dimension or angle and reprint.
It’s also great for this kind of work! Many iterations involved to get it to work just right.
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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 i have a lot of feelings about how many senior devs i am working with who are starting to rely on ai shit
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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 Oh hey I just posted about this a couple hours ago too. Yes. It's insane.
https://mastodon.slightlycyberpunk.com/@admin/115860580140572578
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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 asking people to explain "their" work needs to be a thing, both in work and in education. If they cannot, the inference is that they didn't do it.
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@stepheneb I need to get my tap and die game on. But/and: I get so much more out of understanding older techniques and subtractive processes for making things, vs friends who 3d print or CNC route everything. And making tools to make tools is everything about long-term process improvement.
@danlyke @stepheneb @Purple One of the things I did when I bought my KLR650 in 2012 was to buy a set of US and Metric taps and dies, both Lowe’s house brand, and both fairly cheap. I use them for all sorts of things, including threading the tang of a knife so I can use hardware-store hardware to form the pommel [1], restoring stripped threads in all sorts of household things, and most recently, making my own damn screws.
Buy cheap, use them, upgrade if needed.
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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
