In terms of directly generating technical content, I think he mostly used gen AI for more mechanical stuff such as drafting data schemas or class structures, or for converting this or that to JSON, and perhaps not so much for generating actual program code. Maybe there's a difference to someone who likes to have lots of program logic generated.
I do think there is a difference between a skilled engineer using it for the mechanical things, and an engineer that OFFLOADS thinking/designing to it.
Theres nuance everywhere, but my original comment was definitely implying the people that attempt to lean on it very hard for their core work.
However, it does look like LLM's are racing to make these junior devs unnecessary.
The main utility of "junior devs" (regardless of age) is that they can serve as an interface to non-technical business "users". Give them the right tools, and their value will be similar to good business controllers or similar in the org.
A salary of $100-$150k is really low for someone who is really a competent developer. It's kept down by those "junior devs" (of all ages) that apply for the same jobs.
Both kinds of developers will be required until companies use AI in most of those roles, including the controllers, the developers and the business side.
.. the exact same content for a screensaver with Todd Rundgren in 1987 on the then-new color Apple Macintosh II in Sausalito, California. A different screensaver called "Flow Fazer" was more popular and sold many copies. The rival at the time was "After Dark" .. whose founder had a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley but also turned out to be independently wealthy, and then one of the wealthiest men in the Bay Area after the dot-com boom.
Thanks for reading my post. It’s nice to know I’m not writing to a complete void!
I wrote a kotlin idea plugin in a day; I’ve never used kotlin before and the jetbrains ui framework is a dogs breakfast of obscure edge cases.
I had no skills in this area, so I could happily lean into the assistance provided to get the job done. And it got done.
…but, I don’t use coding assistants day to day in languages I’m very familiar with: because they’re flat out bad compared to what I can do by hand, myself.
Even using Python, generated code is often subtly wrong and it takes more time to make sure it is correct than to do it by hand.
…now, I would assume that a professional kotlin developer would look at my plugin and go: that’s a heap of garbage, you won’t be able to upgrade that when a new version comes out (turns out, they’re right).
So, despite being a (I hope) competent programmer I have three observations:
1) the code I built worked, but was an unmaintainable mess.
2) it only took a day, so it doesn’t matter if I throw it away and build the next one from scratch.
3) There are extremely limited domains where that’s true, and I personally find myself leaning away from LLM anything where maintenance is a long term goal.
So, the point here is not that developers are good/bad:
It’s the LLM generated code is bad.
It is bad.
It is the sort of quick, rubbish prototyping code that often ends up in production…
…and then gets an expensive rewrite later, if it does the job.
The point is that if you’re in the latter phase of working on a project that is not throw away…
You know the saying.
Betty had a bit of bitter butter, so she mixed the bitter butter with the better butter.
But it made the better butter bitter.
More stuff will get done, the barrier of entry will be lower etc.
The craft of programming took a significant quality/care hit when it transitioned from "only people who care enough to learn the ins and outs of memory management can feasibly do this" to "now anyone with a technical brain and a business use case can do it". Which makes sense, the code was no longer the point.
The C++ devs rightly felt superior to the new java devs in the narrow niche of "ability to craft code." But that feeling doesn't move the needle business wise in the vast majority of circumstances. Which is always the schism between large technology leaps.
Basically, the argument of "its worse" is not WRONG. Just, the same as it did not really matter in the mid 90s. Does not matter as much now, compared to the ability to "just get something that kinda works."
In the scheme of things however, that status hardly matters compared to the "ability to get something shipped quickly" which is what the vast majority of people are paid to do.
So while I might judge those people for not meeting my personal standards or bar. In many cases that does not actually matter. They got something out there, thats all that matters.
There are two interpretations of this:
1) Those people are imposters
2) It's about you, not them
I've been personally interested in AI since the early 80's, neural nets since the 90's, and vigilant about "AI" since Alexnet.
I've also been in a tech lead role for the past ~25 years. If someone is talking about newer "AI" models in a nonsensical way, I cringe.
Bingo, this, so much this. Every dev i know who loves AI stuff was a dev that I had very little technical respect for pre AI. They got some stuff done but there was no craft or quality to it.