Every day there a topic, or a video of a random engineer mourning loss of their craft. I can sympathize - I love programming a lot.
However I don't understand where did they work all those years?
One of the main concern is that people do not understand the code anymore.
Without any snark - the word "anymore" does not apply here. People did not understood what they are doing for decades now. Random copy-pasta from stackoverflow anyone?
Another concern is slop. I once untangled 1500 lines algorithm that turned to be a simple DFS. "Programmer" simply did not know what is DFS, copy pasted several pieces with random changes. Tell me about LLM slop.
One thing that changed is scale - now the same people who did not care have the 1000x power to produce bs. It's not LLM that tells engineers to push thing they don't understand. It's the people who care less about that code. They did not care previously, they do not care now, they will never care...
I'm a bit bitter here because I thought with LLMs we will be able to do more "right" things. Because it's essentially free now! If you care - LLM will teach you the right thing. But majority do not. And that's the problem - not LLM.
Why majority do not care is a separate topic of leadership, after all why a reasonable human would not care?
Was this a common thing? I don't know which bubble is more common, but personally I can't recall ever working with someone who couldn't explain what they did (just copy paste?), except for maybe configurations.
In my experience, people most definitely understand less of the technical implementation now vs before. Heck, not only technical, I've seen presentations from business where the presenter clearly vibed their deck and don't understand the content.
My bubble is opposite - majority did not understand simple things. I ve seen people randomly trying SO advice on “fixing” git repo, mutating objects passed as arguments (because it works!), not understanding what is env variable.
Your example just proves the point: AI is not a problem - it’s a leverage. Give it to someone who don’t care - they will do as much damage as they can.
But imho the issue is not ignorant people. It’s lack of leadership. Somehow those people got selected for the job and still keep it.
I think it's both. I want to agree with you but it's also just human nature, I notice myself slacking even when I care, because it's easy. The human brain is really good at finding shortcuts.
It's like saying it's the kids fault for being addicted to social medias and assigning no responsibility to the providers.
To be clear, I'm not advocating anti-AI laws or arguing with you, just blurting out my thoughts. Ultimately I simply feel this will not be a good thing for tech and human understanding in the short / medium term, but this is just based on vibes, like most arguments on AI are.
It was a huge thing, and I lived through all of it, yet never ran into a problem where copy-and-pasting would have been the lowest resistance solution. I never even ran into a problem where asking the question and waiting for a response would have made more sense than asking internally or working through it myself. The most difficult problems are relatively conceptual, which SO didn't like anyway.
I never really got it. I think it depended bigly on which domain and stack you were in.
However I don't understand where did they work all those years?
One of the main concern is that people do not understand the code anymore. Without any snark - the word "anymore" does not apply here. People did not understood what they are doing for decades now. Random copy-pasta from stackoverflow anyone?
Another concern is slop. I once untangled 1500 lines algorithm that turned to be a simple DFS. "Programmer" simply did not know what is DFS, copy pasted several pieces with random changes. Tell me about LLM slop.
One thing that changed is scale - now the same people who did not care have the 1000x power to produce bs. It's not LLM that tells engineers to push thing they don't understand. It's the people who care less about that code. They did not care previously, they do not care now, they will never care...
I'm a bit bitter here because I thought with LLMs we will be able to do more "right" things. Because it's essentially free now! If you care - LLM will teach you the right thing. But majority do not. And that's the problem - not LLM.
Why majority do not care is a separate topic of leadership, after all why a reasonable human would not care?
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