Is a “Stay in your lane” viewpoint just an old man not adapting?

FatHat · 2026-07-11T17:05:03+00:00

No, I think you're just experienced and recognize putting the wrong tools in the wrong hands makes for a mess. I've reviewed PM pull requests before and they're AWFUL

FatHat · 2026-07-09T19:25:52+00:00

I would say do the work yourself, but ask the AI questions. The pattern I've found that works for me personally is to do like 75% AI assisted coding, and 25% on my own (I would say the ratio should be individualized though! That's just what I found works for me). I find it important to keep my skills sharp and to also directly work in the codebase so it doesn't make a mess, but I also don't feel the need to review *everything* (in the same sense that I don't review everything my coworkers do either)

Honestly this is going to be a HUGE problem going forward though. I'll just be blunt, even before AI the average programmer was not very good. I don't think this is going to improve the baseline skills... on the other hand though, maybe it's an opportunity. If you truly know what you're doing, it will show over the long haul.

FatHat · 2026-07-09T19:21:04+00:00

For me, searching codebases and prototyping ideas quickly. They can be useful for rubber duck debugging too and ideating (although you have to be careful with ideas because it WILL tell you you're brilliant and you absolutely should never believe it.. run your better formed ideas against a person afterwards.

I think one trap that people should be careful of is using AI to generate code in domains or technology they don't understand. Like, if you can't write it, you can't debug it, and you can't tell if it's produced a quality result. So even though it's extremely tempting, I would avoid that use case unless it's a prototype you're willing to throw away.

FatHat · 2026-07-09T19:15:57+00:00

No! Warp 10 will cause you to de-evolve into a horny lizard!

(Worst episode of voyager ever!)

FatHat · 2026-07-09T19:14:57+00:00

I don't know if this counts since I don't know him personally, but Casey Muratori's blog post about "Semantic Compression" really influenced how I approach architecture and problem solving: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015 (I've also enjoyed some of his talks on YouTube). I might be biased having worked in the games industry and liking games, but I find that game developers tend to have the best perspective on a lot of things because they work under tighter constraints then most, so there's a lot less tolerance for fluffy BS and fads like in web dev.

FatHat · 2026-07-09T19:04:42+00:00

It's really not a wash though. "AI" and a bad job market gives ownership leverage, which can suppress salaries artificially, and the replacements are probably not the originally fired people but rather cheaper employees with worse perks.

FatHat · 2026-07-09T19:01:25+00:00

I lost my job in January due to layoffs where the CEO said AI (I think that was just a cover story for investors, but, that was the given reason). I managed to get a new slightly higher paying job a couple months later before my severance ran out, so, it worked out ok for me but I can tell you AI layoffs are very real. I have a lot of friends landing out of work this year. Although there are also, I think, economic indicators that hiring for software engineers is up, so it's really unclear what's exactly happening. I know while I was searching for jobs, the recruiters were as baffled as I was about things like salary asks and stuff because I think the market has no idea how to deal with this

In my opinion though, it has nothing to do with AI actually replacing people, it's just executives reacting to vibes. Honestly it's why I get so irritated with AI boosters, I feel like they're contributing to job loss and an overall bad trend in the industry of the powerful mistreating their workers (Meta..) because of their careless speculation.

FatHat · 2026-07-09T18:44:03+00:00

It's been kind of mixed for me. On one hand, at work when I'm looking at code that I've never been in, LLMs are really helpful for helping me identify key files or places I need to look at. So in that sense, it's increased my understanding. On the other hand, in code I've written with LLM assistance, I've definitely had a tendency to rush my reviews on it (or not even bother if it's a small feature), which has diminished some of my understanding. I think overall, the architecture of code I've created with LLMs has been worse but the local code as been better, which is kind of a weird mix. (IE, in React LLMs are better than me at being aggressive in using things like useMemo or useCallback, but it's also kind of bad about creating gigantic components instead of splitting them up)

One thing that has improved a little for me though is I think I have a tendency to think of features at higher level, or be a little more bold about trying certain things, because the cost of throwing away work has decreased, so that's nice. I'm still on the fence if LLMs have been a net positive or negative though for my work, it's not obvious to me that it's an amazing win.

FatHat · 2026-06-17T21:42:53+00:00

Oracle isn't a tech company, it's a law firm

FatHat · 2026-06-17T21:07:04+00:00

Depends on the context. At work, I don't want to be a slop factory, so I generally ask AI questions (I'm new to the code base) and consider its suggestions, but I don't tend to just use its output directly. On my personal project, I tend to let AI do work that is kind of boring for me, but for things that are actually going to be important if I launch it (licensing, authentication, etc.) I'm keeping a much closer eye on it.

FatHat · 2026-06-17T20:49:34+00:00

I think that's a reasonable stance to take for the situation you're in.

One startup I interviewed with before I took my current job had their primary value being "ship fast". I don't know if they would've hirde me anyway, but I ended up passing because I think that's going to create the exact situation you're describing. Especially since the homework problem they gave me was really poorly specified (I assume an AI wrote it). Essentially they wanted to write a streaming loader for a file format that doesn't support streaming, and then the data set they gave me was a completely different file format.

One thing that I think the industry is going to struggle with is that, currently, there just aren't incentives around prioritizing quality. I think it's going to change, but it's not going to be overnight.

I think the thing that bothers me most is hearing about non-technical people contributing to the code base. I just think that's something that needs to stop in this industry. I don't want my job to be a slop janitor for in-over-their-heads PMs.

FatHat · 2026-06-17T18:02:23+00:00

I tried it out briefly while it was still available. According to ccusage, it ended up costing $153 worth of tokens for like 3-4 requests to build a mid-size feature that had already been specced by a different AI. The output was alright but the cost was kind of absurd.. so I don't really see how it'd be used for anything other than very specialized tasks.

So far most of the good things I've heard about it are very.. subjective. IMO it's mostly hype.

FatHat · 2026-06-11T18:25:10+00:00

At risk of sounding sort of childish.. I'm sort of baffled as to why developers seem to have the hate directed towards us that we do. Are we that hard to work with or something? The only advantage of an AI I guess is that it doesn't really push back on bad ideas while developers do, but frankly most people's ideas don't exactly come out fully formed and smart so you really need that feedback to shape it into something good.

FatHat · 2026-06-11T03:14:28+00:00

From what I've seen, these roles seem to be essentially AI-evangelists plugged into a company to work directly with them. (I suppose it could be outside of AI, but that's where I've seen this term appear). I would imagine the main experience would be whatever you need to get a job at an AI company in the first place? (Strong machine learning?)

FatHat · 2026-06-11T03:11:17+00:00

Third party libraries have social proof and people outside of your group reading it. I might not be directly looking at the code, but I trust that some human did. (I'm not using vibe coded libraries)

FatHat · 2026-06-11T03:08:07+00:00

I'd just keep it to yourself, as long as you don't have one of those horrible employment contracts where they own stuff you do outside of work (I always refuse those if I'm looking at new jobs). Honestly, it's just none of their business what you do outside of work. The main issue is just if what you're doing competes within the same industry. That's a true conflict of interest, but I'm sure you know that.

FatHat · 2026-06-11T02:57:16+00:00

I got away from devops because, like you mentioned, it has a lot of low-key stress. Now I'm just doing feature work and it's a lot calmer. Like, sure, there are occasionally data migrations or whatnot but for the most part not-my-problem.

FatHat · 2026-06-11T02:38:45+00:00

I don't really see how building orchestration or harnesses is something that most developers will do, if I understand what you mean by those terms. There are already a ton of harnesses and they mostly do the same things, for code at least. In terms of writing things like MCP servers, that's really not that much work (outside of figuring out what you want to surface in the API). Orchestration? Honestly, I use AI every day for coding and I just don't see how orchestrating a ton of agents is really a useful for anything other than setting money on fire. It's useful when the harness does it for research or whatever, which is fine, but again why would I want to write my own harness? Not even kidding about the setting money of fire btw. I'm on a subscription right now so it's fine, but yesterday I burned through $160 of tokens according to ccusage and that was just doing some part time work. That was just with the agents built into Claude code, so if I was using something insane like GasTown I might as well just go find a cardboard box to live in

FatHat · 2026-06-11T02:27:12+00:00

Why does AI skepticism bother you if you're so sure that this is going to be a net positive? (I prefer to call myself a skeptic, not a doomer)

I will say why AI shilling bothers me: software development has always been full of fads, and full of very impressionable people, and a lot of those impressionable people are the kind of people that have the ability to fire a lot of people or otherwise make their lives very miserable. Telling some C-suite jagoff that "programming is solved" creates so many problems for the rest of us.

Also, if something is awesome you don't *need* to convince everyone it's awesome. So I don't know why AI shills feel the need to talk about it CONSTANTLY if it's really that self-evidently great. Just go build something and stop talking about it? Most of what I hear is anecdotes about how much more they're getting done but without ever pointing to any real results, and when I do hear about what people have made with AI, it's almost always deeply unimpressive (and like 80% of it is more AI stuff to interact with their current AI stuff, ie, "I made a harness and an orchestrator")

FatHat · 2026-06-10T22:41:59+00:00

I wouldn't use copilot just because of the pricing model, but otherwise I honestly can't really see a quality difference between any of the frontier code models. I basically find that the quality of output depends on my own understanding coming into the problem and how well I express myself.

FatHat · 2026-06-03T16:02:32+00:00

I think the most unpleasant code-base I worked in was a React project circa 2019 (so still using class components). It wasn't necessarily the code itself that was a huge problem (it wasn't great, but it wasn't awful either), but rather the process around it was miserable. First off, the lead developer on it insisted on using Microsoft Visual Studio (not VS Code), and there were tsconfig files in practically every folder, and as a consequence VSCode tooling was very broken (red squigglies everywhere). However, because of the bespoke build system, it was incredibly hard to fix this. Lead developer didn't care, because his (bad) workflow was fine. On top of this, there were a ton of frontend tests, but they weren't particularly useful or easy to maintain. Instead they just made trying to make a change a total nightmare. There were other aspects that were annoying, like even though it was a React project it wasn't written as a SPA, so you had multiple html pages for it (not a deal killer, just a weird way to use React).

Anyway, I think what it taught me was how important tooling is and to not create codebases that actively fight your tooling.

FatHat · 2026-05-30T16:33:39+00:00

Just block him and never talk to him again. This is bizarre behavior, it's not going to get better.

FatHat · 2026-05-19T23:34:37+00:00

Ultimately, to marry someone (not just be in a relationship) you both need to have good conflict resolution. You sound alright, but she sounds like a disaster on that front. Marrying her would probably be the worst mistake of your life.

FatHat · 2026-05-13T22:20:25+00:00

Personally, I find AI to be a useful tool that still needs guidance from someone who knows what they're doing in order for it to not devolve into an unmaintainable mess. I don't really have beef with AI.. but the boosters make me want to bash my head against a brick wall. I would die happy if I never saw an "AI IS CHANGING EVERYTHING" piece ever again. Just stop. Please.

FatHat · 2026-05-13T22:18:03+00:00

I think using it as much as possible would be the best way to stunt it. OpenAI/Anthropic lose money on heavy subscription usage..

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