If models are getting exponentially cheaper and more powerful, going all in a year ago is kind of insane. There's ostensibly this reverse token value inflation where whatever you spend on AI today, you'll get much more for the same dollar tomorrow (assuming models get cheaper and better). There's really a weird sort of late mover's advantage to just holding off and saving your money unless you expect your profit to grow faster than AI becomes more powerful.
proc0
Yeah this is what happens when you think code is the product. It's really the understanding and also the design of the software that is the "engine" of value, and the problem is that it's hard to justify spending money to build something that is intangible and might be visible in the future. When non-technical people call the shots, they will rarely bet on spending time and effort on designing things properly because they can't see the value and it's hard to communicate and convince others of its business value.
voidfunc
Just do what management wants and take the bag of money. That's all everyone is doing up the chain anyways.
tayo42
Pangram said the op post is 100% AI generated. It does seem to have ai pacing and ends with a question. > The part that actually hurts is who is left. That line actually made me suspicious. Op doesn't respond, also has a hidden profile. This stuff is all over reddit now.
NoPicklez
> Except half of us haven't written anything non trivial in a year and it shows. I spent 2 days on something I would have done in an afternoon in 2024. This is the part that bugs me with AI usage is that it drives the use of it to benefit the company but not the individual. Yes AI allows me to be faster as work (in theory), but as a result I lose out in my own learning as an employee, I lose out in my own cognitive ability to learn, make mistakes and build upon my knowledge and skills.
dilap
I guess mgmt also mandated they use AI to write their reddit posts?
ToyKeeper
Posted in a subreddit for vibe coding enthusiasts. Top-rated reply tells submitter to solve their AI problem by adding more AI. Magnificent.
pessimizer
What do you do when your entirely AI written codebase runs like shit? Do you prompt it to "do better"? "Find the things that you did that are badly, and do them better. Add a directive to claude.md to do it right the first time, next time." If AI codes better than humans, I don't understand why it has a dozen copies of stuff everywhere. Even people who suck don't suck that much. I don't even understand how you can get away with it unless you're writing functional code.
danmcr
I have a friend who works at a large F100 and in his 12 years as a dev, he has never dreaded his job as he does now. He's working 10 hrs. a day, just entering things into Claude, waiting, reviewing, and learning absolutely nothing. At this point anyone who was truly passionate about programming, is just less and less motivated to become a better engineer.
Refreeze5224
This is the very obvious logical conclusion of AI and programming. The bean counters don't care if you understand anything, or if your skills atrophy. Unless and until the cost of no one understanding the code outweighs having to pay those pesky humans and all their wants and needs, this will continue to be the norm.
cadamsdotcom
Someone is rife for disruption.
netrem
One counter argument to this is that realistically nobody 'understood' the codebase even before AI. A couple months after not touching code it was always a mystery. You'd know the high level architecture but you can still know that even while using AI.
VCFundedGenYer
Catsarch link for those who don't want to use reddit with an account: https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1xq2n3t/a_...
j45
It means the mandate was not detailed or developed enough yet to be able to look out for the things that needt o e now.
WillAdams
One thing which was put forward a while back was Literate Programming as an aid for LLMs to parse/work with code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300747 Try having the agents consistently document the entire code base, then review each section and see what can be understood/worked with?
stego-tech
I really wish more folks would have the stones to name and shame these shitty companies and leaders in public. Stop letting the C-Suite control the narrative and just be bluntly honest with these slapdash, fad-chasing, shitshow LLM “implementations”. It’s not properly using the tools, it’s not improving products, it’s just burning money in the furnace of Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, nVidia, and OpenAI. You’re not building world-changing pipelines, your executives demanded you gamble at the slop machine as fast as possible to inflate share values so they can parachute out. You owe them nothing, so start snitching. Scream openly about the harm this blind push into fads did to the humans, the product, the customers, and the shareholders. The truly excellent use of LLMs continues getting overshadowed by the blind fealty marches and purity tests orgs instituted around mass-adoption and cognitive-offloading, and you’re doing every stakeholder a disservice by pussy-footing around the issue. Find your spine and name names.
ianm218
If you put this into pangram it is 100% AI generated. People on reddit/ youtube are engagement farming anti ai content... with ai text and scripts etc. The actual content is somewhat relatable but don't fall for the bait.
thewanderer1983
Meanwhile before AI, very large code bases existed where nobody fully understood them, people churned at these companies or projects, and who knows what is in them (xz backdoor)
didntknowyou
oh cmon it's not like AI existed since they were born. if they seriously forgot how to code in the 6 months AI was mandated then they deserve to be restructured. some of these reddit posts are pure bait or bs
marcus_holmes
AI is an accelerator. In this case it accelerated piling up the tech debt. There's no reason they couldn't have paused the relentless production of features to do a few runs of cleaning up the code base while it was still readable.
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Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
marginalia_nu
If models are getting exponentially cheaper and more powerful, going all in a year ago is kind of insane. There's ostensibly this reverse token value inflation where whatever you spend on AI today, you'll get much more for the same dollar tomorrow (assuming models get cheaper and better). There's really a weird sort of late mover's advantage to just holding off and saving your money unless you expect your profit to grow faster than AI becomes more powerful.
proc0
Yeah this is what happens when you think code is the product. It's really the understanding and also the design of the software that is the "engine" of value, and the problem is that it's hard to justify spending money to build something that is intangible and might be visible in the future. When non-technical people call the shots, they will rarely bet on spending time and effort on designing things properly because they can't see the value and it's hard to communicate and convince others of its business value.
voidfunc
Just do what management wants and take the bag of money. That's all everyone is doing up the chain anyways.
tayo42
Pangram said the op post is 100% AI generated. It does seem to have ai pacing and ends with a question. > The part that actually hurts is who is left. That line actually made me suspicious. Op doesn't respond, also has a hidden profile. This stuff is all over reddit now.
NoPicklez
> Except half of us haven't written anything non trivial in a year and it shows. I spent 2 days on something I would have done in an afternoon in 2024. This is the part that bugs me with AI usage is that it drives the use of it to benefit the company but not the individual. Yes AI allows me to be faster as work (in theory), but as a result I lose out in my own learning as an employee, I lose out in my own cognitive ability to learn, make mistakes and build upon my knowledge and skills.
dilap
I guess mgmt also mandated they use AI to write their reddit posts?
ToyKeeper
Posted in a subreddit for vibe coding enthusiasts. Top-rated reply tells submitter to solve their AI problem by adding more AI. Magnificent.
pessimizer
What do you do when your entirely AI written codebase runs like shit? Do you prompt it to "do better"? "Find the things that you did that are badly, and do them better. Add a directive to claude.md to do it right the first time, next time." If AI codes better than humans, I don't understand why it has a dozen copies of stuff everywhere. Even people who suck don't suck that much. I don't even understand how you can get away with it unless you're writing functional code.
danmcr
I have a friend who works at a large F100 and in his 12 years as a dev, he has never dreaded his job as he does now. He's working 10 hrs. a day, just entering things into Claude, waiting, reviewing, and learning absolutely nothing. At this point anyone who was truly passionate about programming, is just less and less motivated to become a better engineer.
Refreeze5224
This is the very obvious logical conclusion of AI and programming. The bean counters don't care if you understand anything, or if your skills atrophy. Unless and until the cost of no one understanding the code outweighs having to pay those pesky humans and all their wants and needs, this will continue to be the norm.
cadamsdotcom
Someone is rife for disruption.
netrem
One counter argument to this is that realistically nobody 'understood' the codebase even before AI. A couple months after not touching code it was always a mystery. You'd know the high level architecture but you can still know that even while using AI.
VCFundedGenYer
Catsarch link for those who don't want to use reddit with an account: https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1xq2n3t/a_...
j45
It means the mandate was not detailed or developed enough yet to be able to look out for the things that needt o e now.
WillAdams
One thing which was put forward a while back was Literate Programming as an aid for LLMs to parse/work with code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300747 Try having the agents consistently document the entire code base, then review each section and see what can be understood/worked with?
stego-tech
I really wish more folks would have the stones to name and shame these shitty companies and leaders in public. Stop letting the C-Suite control the narrative and just be bluntly honest with these slapdash, fad-chasing, shitshow LLM “implementations”. It’s not properly using the tools, it’s not improving products, it’s just burning money in the furnace of Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, nVidia, and OpenAI. You’re not building world-changing pipelines, your executives demanded you gamble at the slop machine as fast as possible to inflate share values so they can parachute out. You owe them nothing, so start snitching. Scream openly about the harm this blind push into fads did to the humans, the product, the customers, and the shareholders. The truly excellent use of LLMs continues getting overshadowed by the blind fealty marches and purity tests orgs instituted around mass-adoption and cognitive-offloading, and you’re doing every stakeholder a disservice by pussy-footing around the issue. Find your spine and name names.
ianm218
If you put this into pangram it is 100% AI generated. People on reddit/ youtube are engagement farming anti ai content... with ai text and scripts etc. The actual content is somewhat relatable but don't fall for the bait.
thewanderer1983
Meanwhile before AI, very large code bases existed where nobody fully understood them, people churned at these companies or projects, and who knows what is in them (xz backdoor)
didntknowyou
oh cmon it's not like AI existed since they were born. if they seriously forgot how to code in the 6 months AI was mandated then they deserve to be restructured. some of these reddit posts are pure bait or bs
marcus_holmes
AI is an accelerator. In this case it accelerated piling up the tech debt. There's no reason they couldn't have paused the relentless production of features to do a few runs of cleaning up the code base while it was still readable.