[ericlamb89]

> "The engineers refusing to try aren’t protecting themselves; quite the opposite, they’re falling behind. The gap is widening between engineers who’ve integrated these tools and engineers who haven’t. The first group is shipping faster, taking on bigger challenges. The second group is… not."

Honest question for the engineers here. Have you seen this happening at your company? Are strong engineers falling behind when refusing to integrate AI into their workflow?

[janice1999]

In my experience it's weak and inexperienced developers who gravitate to AI tools. Unfortunately they lack the domain knowledge to correctly evaluate the outcome of the AI tools they use. AI weaponizes them against their colleagues by enabling them to open more PRs and generate more text which may look reasonable at first but falls apart under serious review. Any gains I may get from AI myself is eaten away in this way.

[halfcat]

No. The opposite. The people who “move faster” are literally just producing tech debt that they get a quick high five for, then months later we limp along still dealing with it.

A guy will proudly deploy something he vibe coded, or “write the documentation” for some app that a contractor wrote, and then we get someone in the business telling us there’s a bug because it doesn’t do what the documentation says, and now I’m spending half a day in meetings to explain and now we have a project to overhaul the documentation (meaning we aren’t working on other things), all because someone spent 90 seconds to have AI generate “documentation” and gave themselves a pat on the back.

I look at what was produced and just lay my head down on the desk. It’s all crap. I just see a stream of things to fix, convention not followed, 20 extra libraries included when 2 would have done. Code not organized, where this new function should have gone in a different module, because where it is now creates tight coupling between two modules that were intentionally built to not be coupled before.

It’s a meme at this point to say, ”all code is tech debt”, but that’s all I’ve seen it produce: crap that I have to clean up, and it can produce it way faster than I can clean it up, so we literally have more tech debt and more non-working crap than we would have had if we just wrote it by hand.

We have a ton of internal apps that were working, then someone took a shortcut and 6 months later we’re still paying for the shortcut.

It’s not about moving faster today. It’s about keeping the ship pointed in the right direction. AI is a guy a guy on a jet ski doing backflips, telling is we’re falling behind because our cargo ship hasn’t adopted jet skis.

AI is a guy on his high horse, telling everyone how much faster they could go if they also had a horse. Except the horse takes a dump in the middle of the office and the whole office spends half their day shoveling crap because this one guy thinks he’s going faster.

[eudamoniac]

This is exactly what I've seen. A perfect description. I am the tech lead for one part of a project. I review all PRs and don't let slop through, and there is a lot trying to get through. The other part of the project is getting worse by the day. Sometimes I peek into their PRs and feel a great sadness. There are daily issues and crashes. My repo has not had a bug in over a year.

[gordonhart]

As before, the big gap I still see is between engineers who set something up the right way and engineers who push code up without considering the bigger picture.

One nice change however is that you can guide the latter towards a total refactor during code review and it takes them a ~day instead of a ~week.

[timbaboon]

If anything I’ve learnt more because I’m having to go and find bugs in areas that I’m not super clued up on… yet ;)