I don't care how well your "AI" works

Re:I don't care how well your "AI" works by eithed on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @10:01AM (#46058014)

But this is an issue of worker you're hiring. I've worked with senior engineers who a) did nothing (as - really not write any thing within the sprint, nor do any other work) b) worked on things they wanted to work on c) did ONLY things that they were assigned in the sprint (= if there were 10 tickets in the sprint and they were assigned 1 of these tickets then they would finish that ticket and not pick up anything else, staying quiet) d) worked only on tickets that have requirements explicitly stated step by step (open file a, change line 89 to be `checkBar` instead of `checkFoo`... - having to write this would take longer than doing the changes yourself as I was really writing in Jira ticket what I wanted the engineer to code, otherwise they would come back with "not enough spec, can't proceed"). All of these cases - senior people!

Sure - LLMs will do what they're told (to a specific value of "do" and "what they're told")

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Re:I don't care how well your "AI" works by cjbgkagh on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @11:09AM (#46058863)

Sure there is a wide spectrum of skills, having worked in FANG and top tier research I have a pretty good idea of the capability at the top of the spectrum. I know I wasn't hiring at that level. I was paying 2x the local market rate (non-US) and pulling from the functional programming talent pool. These were not the top 1% but I think they were easily top 10% and probably in the top 5%.

I use LLMs to build isolated components and I do the work needed to specialize them for my tasks and integrate them together. The LLMs take fewer instructions to do this and handle ambiguity far better. Additionally because of the immediate feedback look on the specs I can try first with a minimally defined spec and interactively refine as needed. It takes me far less work to write specs for LLMs than it does for other devs.

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Re:I don't care how well your "AI" works by raw_anon_1111 on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @10:19AM (#46058209)

If you are a “senior” engineer who is doing nothing but pulling well defined Jira tickets off the board, you’re horribly mis titled.

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Re:I don't care how well your "AI" works by esafak on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @11:20PM (#46065606)

> But this is an issue of worker you're hiring.

You're (unwittingly?) making an argument for using an LLM: you know what you're going to get. It does not take six months to evaluate one; six minutes suffice.

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Re:I don't care how well your "AI" works by eithed on Thursday November 27, 2025 @04:11AM (#46067335)

The argument I'm trying to make is that hiring a real person or using LLMs has upsides and downsides. People have their own agendas, can leave, can affect your business in many ways, unrelated to code etc, but also can learn, can be creative and address problems that you've not even surfaced. LLM will not and will not be capable of that.

With LLMs you know what you're going to get to a certain value. Will it not listen to you? No. Will it not follow your instructions? Maybe. Will it produce unmaintainable garbage? Most certainly. Does that matter for nondevs? Sometimes

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