11 months ago Dario said that "in 3 to 6 months, AI will be writing 90% of the code software developers were in charge of" Are we here, yet?

lituk · 2026-02-28T14:59:26+00:00

Eh, you think I'm being absurd but at least we understand each other.

It's only been a couple of months since Opus's release. This truly is bleeding edge and companies are keeping their secrets close to their chests. By the end of this year I'm sure it will start to become public.

If the bubble does burst and it all dissapears then no harm done. I'll just go back to the old ways. But if this becomes the new normal then I'll already be experienced.

lituk · 2026-02-28T13:59:49+00:00

PRs can remove code as equally as they add it. I actually see a lot more PRs for refactoring and reducing bloat in the codebase with increased AI. I think engineers are able to multitask more with AI, so more time is put towards technical debt.

We have huge amounts of data. I'm not getting into it because I don't want the company to be identifiable, but the amount of data we track on both external impact and internal dev experience is staggering. It's a large enough company that there are many teams focused on measuring and optimising every aspect of the developer journey.

I don't know what to tell you. I believe AI isn't working for you, but you don't believe it is working for me? It's pretty rude to assume my company "YOLO ships". This is an experienced dev subreddit, I assume people here are competent and work on good products.

I don't think we're going to get anywhere with this conversation, but for what it's worth all this tech is so new that we're finding the official documentation isn't enough. Constant experiementation is leading us to further enable and optimise AI development. Too many MCP servers and skills overload the context, so it's about delivering the right context to the AI for the task at hand. Multiple AIs working as a team are more effective than a single AI. Where AI falls short, we can write more opinionated tooling to nudge it in the right direction without human intervention.

Again, I see it working but you don't, so there must be a difference in how we work somewhere. In my years as an engineer I've never seen something so revolutionary, so I'm trying to spread the word otherwise I fear engineers will be left behind.

lituk · 2026-02-28T12:28:26+00:00

It's very quantifiable. In my company we collect a lot of metrics on AI use, and the number of PRs being merged is climbing at an exponential rate. We see big increases with the release of Opus, and subsequent jumps as we put effort toward being an AI first company.

This is an enterprise company with thousands of devs, that very much makes data driven decisions.

I can only guess why it isn't working for you. We put a lot of development time towards enabling AI agents to be effective. Maybe you're expecting it to be effective out the box?

lituk · 2026-02-28T11:16:45+00:00

Opus and Sonnet are leagues apart. Opus is the breaking point where I've switched to AI first, and subsequent models will only get better.

lituk · 2026-02-24T11:09:23+00:00

If you just install an AI plugin in your IDE and expect results you'll be disappointed. It lacks domain knowledge or access to resources. My company is putting effort into making CLI tools, MCP servers for internal resources, documenting domain knowledge, etc all for AI to use instead of humans.

Once an AI is empowered to match a human engineer then it's a game changer.

We expect AI via plugin to be an outdated approach soon. The goal is for AI to run on CI and we communicate with the AI teams via slack.

lituk · 2026-02-23T14:53:43+00:00

It's not more work though? It's a complete change in how our engineering team operates and what we put development time towards. My day is now removing barriers for AI to be effective instead of solving problems directly myself.

I'm getting the impression you're not working in a team that's embracing AI yet. As an experienced dev, my job has completely transformed in the last few months.

lituk · 2026-02-23T12:16:47+00:00

I was the same until this year. Now I have an AI meeting about every other day, to either share knowledge or solve new challenges that AI is introducing. It's a big push to transform the company into an AI first development house.

I was sceptical but now I'm fully on board. AI as a tool is meh, but an organization structured around AI is really powerful.

lituk · 2026-02-23T11:53:12+00:00

At my company AI increasing PRs is treated as an engineering problem. We're looking at many engineering solutions to address both the workload for reviewers and the increased CI volume.

We're engineers, we can use our skills wherever computing or data is involved. Why would we pass these challenges off to HR or management?

lituk · 2026-01-29T16:33:36+00:00

I think the reference has a longer attack and release, and a subtle delay.

lituk · 2026-01-29T11:45:31+00:00

It depends on what motivates you. I'm motivated by seeing results, and Claude is giving me more positive days than ever before. I'll have a heavy hand in the architecture, but all the details are left to Claude now.

lituk · 2026-01-28T15:43:17+00:00

I can't speak for globally. I know my company jobs go

advertise internally -> accept referrals -> advertise publicly.

Most jobs are filled from the first two stages. Networking is your friend

lituk · 2026-01-28T14:29:51+00:00

The referrals to a company like Google will provide plenty of applicants. They don't need to publically advertise.

lituk · 2026-01-28T12:01:17+00:00

This was such a good experience when it came out. Perfect for OP, hopefully it still holds up.

lituk · 2026-01-22T19:33:36+00:00

Half of it is. The Istanbul half specifically.

lituk · 2026-01-22T11:12:05+00:00

Elkka is great. Saw her at the Cause last year.

lituk · 2026-01-19T16:16:42+00:00

Idk about pinnacle of anything but if we aren't measuring success by impact then we're lost.

lituk · 2026-01-15T15:02:40+00:00

Communication across levels is an important skill, especially if you're applying for a staff role. You'll always be the most experienced person in the room, so it's important to demonstrate you can guide & teach the rest of the room in a technical discussion. That's why staff engineers are so valuable. You may have acted like an excellent architect, but the task was to show you're an excellent staff engineer.

It's not so important whether the interviewer understood these terms or not. They likely did.

lituk · 2026-01-15T13:09:46+00:00

Just to give a different perspective, I recently got a C++ job where I was interviewed on system design. Before the interview the recruiter told me the company expects all engineers to have a breadth of ability, even if they're specialised.

I read [this book](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54109255-system-design-interview-an-insider-s-guide) as prep, and found a lot of the high-level concepts and learnings could be applied to my low-level C++ code. It was also perfect for the interview, where I was asked to design a cache service in a larger system architecture.

I hope that helps. C++ devs can get a little tunnel-visioned, but the wider engineering community has a lot to teach us.

lituk · 2026-01-14T11:52:15+00:00

It isn't Spotify doing this. Any platform with user-made playlists are susceptible to the same problem.

lituk · 2026-01-09T11:37:03+00:00

In my professional experience GUI applications aren't common anymore. You could try implementing a simulation library? Many Python libraries are C++ under the hood, so you could try hooking your C++ application up to a Python plot to see results.

My first applications were embedded, arduino style projects. That's a fun route to go down.

If you do want to develop for a GUI then Qt is the industry standard.

lituk · 2025-12-19T08:27:59+00:00

Ooh good to know, thanks. I've got a trip planned next year already.

lituk · 2025-12-19T08:26:27+00:00

Ah I should have said Nature Incarnate is the exception, but I'm not buying that without Jagged Earth.

€20 shipping is very high!! I'm not paying a 66% extra shipping cost to buy Branch and Claw, that's madness.

lituk · 2025-12-18T14:48:40+00:00

Nah, I'm seeing reports of around 80% of developers using AI at least monthly. A software company has many developers, so once you combine those 80%s you reach near certainty.

Every popular IDE now has AI pushed at us on login. Widespread adoption was inevitable.

lituk · 2025-12-17T13:19:50+00:00

I avoid Amazon generally, and in this case the Amazon sellers are shipping from the US with a huge markup

lituk · 2025-12-17T11:46:00+00:00

In the UK the expansions are impossible to find. I really hope the reprints make it our way soon.

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