[jleyank]

Developers are “unwanted overhead” until the customer money threatens to walk out the door. They’re going to damage their future products and probably reduce their customer base (fewer consumers) and then sit there looking like gaffed fish when the budget ink turns red. “Who would have thought…”

Don’t facilitate losing your job.

[marginalia_nu]

Funny part is we've already had this exact thing happen with outsourcing. It sure looked like a bargain until you got to such pesky details as correctness and maintainability.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

I am starting to think it is a part of the management cycle. They new batch feels confident they can do X so they have to re-learn, while inflicting ridiculous amount of pain the process.

Two years ago, one former exec at my place was perfectly happy to throw resources ( his word ) from India at a problem, while unwilling to pay the vendor for the same thing. I voiced my objection once, but after it was dismissed I just watched the thing blow up.

I am not saying current situation is the same. It is not. But, it is the same hubris, which means miscalculations will happen ( like with Dorsey's Block mass firing ).

[Bridged7756]

History truly repeats itself. C-suites will forever be the source of stupid decisions in our profession.

[bluGill]

C-suites are the source of all the important decisions, both the great ones and the stupid ones. The great people in the C-suite have figured out how to get advice from people who are below them and not "yes-men" to tell them what to decide - but right or wrong the buck stops there.

[Johanx64]

For quite a while i was thinking how we're in the phase one: mountains of unmaintainable garbage code being generated... and once the shit hits the fan, some maintainability ceiling gets reached - "the real programmers" will be summoned to clean up and deal with this shit.

Now I've come to realize the error in my ways, this is probably not going to happen. What will happen is instead is that the ones doing the "shuffling of shit" is just going to also be agents themselves. Prompted by a more senior slop-grammer specialized in orchestrating "shuffling of shit".

[marginalia_nu]

You still have to ship a product though.

This task was famously incredibly difficult back when we had people producing unmaintainable mountains of millions of lines of code, to the point where shipping anything sizable in a working state on time without last minute scope reductions is nearly unheard of.

I can't imagine using AI to add another one to two zeroes to the lines of code counter would help reach the goal post.

[bluGill]

Testing to ensure the product works as expected is more than half of the product development labor if you want a quality product. This includes time spends on things like the mandatory "anti-harassment" training any competent HR is forcing you to once in a while even though not related to product delivery (or so I hope - some should be fired for the problems you are causing by not living that training)

LLMs can write a lot of code. they can even write a comprehensive test suite for that code. However they can't tell you if it doesn't work because of some interaction with something else you didn't think about. They can't tell you that all race conditions are really fixed (despite being somewhat good at tracking them down when known). They can't tell you that the program doesn't work because it doesn't do something critical that nobody thought to write into the requirements until you noticed it was missing.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

SOS.. i just got it.