Over 12-18 months of moving my teams to LLM as the IDE I've observed they DO NOT equal a mid-level engineer on their own. More importantly, over time they code reduces to more that of a junior self-taught engineer who has no concept of software engineering (delivery as a team vs. raw academic).

I've built around Claude (althought the infra is LLM agnostic) and the code it produces is okay. You can invest and get better. However, that was the same BEFORE llm generated code.

I'm finding that my investment motions, governance motions are more about medium change, not much else.

Standardards, guidelines, et al are now stored in .md vs. wiki, docs, etc.

Code reviews are still code reviews.

Release planning is still releaes planning.

All the same motions. JUST LOTS MORE OF THEM.

But we've scaled quality throughput before. It's just with a new IDE.

My whole thesis is we've been doing this with humans since the beginning. I'm not finding anything unique about LLM generated code. You gotta define standards the "developer" can read and implement. You gotta review the code for compliance. You gotta test the code for quality. You gotta perfomrance test for scalability. Who gives a flying turkey whether a meat-puppet (human) or a clanker (llm) wrote the code? It's still just code.

We've been scaling quality alongside throuhgput for decades (at least since I joined the biz in 1999). AI is a large step forward in the automation game, but it's not new, nor are it's challenges.

Are other orgs not relying on the fundamentals of software engineering and adapting to this form of generated code?

PS: I don't allow one-shots. Same decomposition and quality assurance motions. The timeline has just shrunk, not the steps, nor the focus. The medium for documenting and governamce have shifted, same strategies and problems.

Am I really on an island with this?

You are not, software engineering is more exciting than ever for me. And getting to focus on UX development ver impl details is great without needing to change over to product or management type positions.

what's weird, is my employees abroad (outside the US) have access to Anthropic Fable .... so what exactly did we prevent by limiting United States citizens from having access ....

This right here. WTF do you do when you need to upgrade your underlying runtime such as Python, Ruby, whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ you gotta go service by service.

If needs be. Or, you upgrade the mission critical ones and leave the rest for when you pick them up again. If your culture is “leave it better than when you found it” this is a non issue.

The best is when you use containers and build against the latest runtimes in your pipelines so as to catch these issues early and always have the most up to date patches. If a service hasn’t been updated or deployed in a long time, you can just run another build and it will pull latest of whatever.

The opposite situation of needing to upgrade your entire company's codebase all at once is much more painful. With services you can upgrade runtimes on an as-needed basis. In monoliths, runtime upgrades were massive projects that required a ton of coordination between teams and months or years of work.

Fair point.

So you should re-write your logging code on each and every one of your 140+ services vs. leverage a shared module?

You can keep using an older version for a while. You shouldn't need to redeploy everything at once. If you can't keep using the older version, you did it wrong.

And ideally, your logging library should rarely need to update. If you need unique integrations per service, use a plug-in architecture and keep the plug-ins local to each service.

I wasn't taking into account velocity of fleet-wide rollout, as I agree, you can migrate over time however. however, I was focusing on the idea that anytime of fleet wide rollout for a specific change was somehow "bad."

Weird, maybe it's because I'm mostly gray haired at this point, but I find myself referring to my profession as "Computer Science" more and more as time passes.

If you truly need for MVC to manage all things state, component communications, and complex IxD in the front-end, sure, but not every app has that level of front-end complexity to warrant a SPA, in my opinion.

Fudge, I loved that guy and his work. I still remember how fun it was to binge The Road in a single day. I don't think I left my couch from the early morning on through to the late evening. Such a compelling and gripping writer.

I moved my family as the town I lived in did exactly this. They also removed support programs for those falling behind vs racing ahead. All under the equity banner.

The New town we moved to is great. Oldest kid in accelerated programs, accelerating. Younger kid got the support she needed to catch up. :chefs_kiss:

Taking a step back, I don’t know how ‘equity’ got twisted into creating a lowering tide for all vs. a rising tide for all. So confusing.