[nabla9]

> I still review every line, shape the architecture, and carry the responsibility for how it runs in production. But the sheer volume of what I now let an agent generate would have been unthinkable even six months ago.

>That said, none of this removes the need to actually be a good engineer. If you let the AI take over without judgment, you’ll end up with brittle systems and painful surprises (data loss, security holes, unscalable software). The tools are powerful, but they don’t absolve you of responsibility.

I feel the same. AI is "the code monkey". Like very inexperienced that works hard and fast, has learned a lot but can't put it into practice. They need constant supervision and review.

This will be very challenging for inexperienced programmers. Normally learn by coding. You write code for fun or for money, get review from more experienced, ask questions and improve. Now a new programmer is expected to review AI generated code and learn programming and managing AI.

[Gigachad]

>This will be very challenging for inexperienced programmers.

I'm feeling this for art. AI generated art still has obvious issues, but it produces works much better than a beginner. You also can't meaningfully reprompt or beat the model in to fixing the issues. So seemingly the only way to get actually good art is to grind through hundreds of hours of getting worse results than you could generate in seconds until you beat the models.

How many people are going to push through the painful unsatisfying work to eventually become experienced now.

[ben_w]

> So seemingly the only way to get actually good art is to grind through hundreds of hours of getting worse results than you could generate in seconds until you beat the models.

Even more frustrating: if those hundreds of hours of practice are 8 hours per week, by the time you've gotten OK the SOTA GenAI will have become noticeably better.

[JumpCrisscross]

> This will be very challenging for inexperienced programmers

It doesn't look like the undergrad-to-industry pipeline works anymore for programmers.

Those who teach themselves out of passion will always have a place. But for most coders, a graduate or PhD may become necessary. There just isn't may not be profitable niche for a CS grad out of undergrad in the private sector with AI.

[ben_w]

I suspect this already applies more broadly than just programming.

I was already reading similar stories something like a decade ago in law, with the claim then being that the first thing most law graduates did to learn the ropes and get practical experience was being automated by simple file search and almost everything being digitised (might be "digital discovery", but also I might be conflating terms).

Last I heard (may be out of date already), robotics and computer vision is currently a dichotomy of either {not good enough} and/or {not fast enough} to be a "junior gardener" or a "junior hairdresser", so this (probably) isn't yet true for all roles, but I suspect it may be true for most* desk jobs.

* not all, most: if you need a human face somewhere, the GenAI real-time conversation agents do still sometimes mess up and TTS out the | and < that come from the LLM, but other than that…