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by DrewADesign 295 days ago
Maybe I’ve misunderstood this, so correct me if I’m wrong… do actual professional developers let enough code be generated to include entire libraries that handle things as important as authentication, and then build on top of it without making sure the previously generated code actually does what it’s supposed to? Just accept local PRs written by AI, with a very sternly worded “now you better not make any bullshit” system prompt? All this just in time to ramp up AI penetration tools. Jesus.

It’s kind of crazy to me how the cool kid take on software development, as recent as 3 years ago, was: strictly-typed everything, ‘real men’ don’t use garbage collection, everything must be optimized to death even when it isn’t really necessary, etc. and now it seems to be ‘you don’t seriously expect me to look at ‘every single line of code’ I submit, do you?’
2 comments
poszlem 295 days ago
The mistake you’re making is assuming it’s the same group of people saying both things. The “strictly typed, no GC, optimize everything” crowd hasn’t suddenly turned into the “lol I don’t read my AI-generated PRs” crowd. Those are two different tribes of devs with completely different value systems.

What’s changed isn’t that the same engineers did a 180 on principles, it’s that the discourse got hijacked by a new set of people who think shipping fast with AI is cooler than sweating over type systems. The obsession with performance purity was always more of a niche cultural flex than a universal law, and now the flex du jour is “look how much I can outsource to the machine.”

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DrewADesign 295 days ago
No— I’m not assuming that but I absolutely can see how what I wrote could come across like that. Dominant voices in many communities change more frequently than the core principles of the people in them— some people just get louder, more visible, and more numerous and others fall to the wayside, especially when there’s marketing or some sort of ‘movement’ involved. (And there’s all sorts of ‘movements’ involved in tech hype and some of them are bovine.)

Your read on the situation concurs with mine. Cheers.

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jmvldz 295 days ago
I'm trying to prototype extremely quickly and I'm working on my project alone so yes, often I accept PRs without looking too closely at the code if my local testing succeeds.

I'm using Typescript and Rust and I think it's critical to use strict typing with LLMs to catch simple bugs.

I've worked at Uber as an infra engineer and at Gem as an engineering manager so I do consider myself an "actual professional developer". The critical bit is the context of the project I'm working on. If I were at a tech company building software, I'd be much more reticent to ship AI generated PRs whole cloth.

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DrewADesign 295 days ago
Well, prototyping is indeed a whole different ball of wax.
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