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by airza 61 days ago
I agree with the general sentiment that the structure of society is going to change, but I don't know what the satisfying solution is. It's hard to imagine not participating will work, or even be financially viable for me, for long.
2 comments

I agree. I'm the AI luddite on my team of red team security engineers, but I'm still using it in very limited use cases. As much as I disagree with how the guardrails around AI are being handled, I still need to use it to stay relevant in my field and not get canned.
I'm already adding "Agentic Workflows" as a skill in my LinkedIn profile. Cringed hard at that, but oh well...
What if the hiring managers at the jobs you'd actually prefer to work at also cringe when they see it on your profile?
It's becoming so ubiquitous, I highly doubt it. At worst I think a manager would just see it as fluff, but not a negative.
I hope the hiring managers I would actually want to work for would see it as a red flag on resumes
At this point, I'd assume those hiring managers are also being forced to use AI in their jobs (or pretend, at least) and probably wouldn't read too much into it if it's not a substantial portion of their resume. I do feel the same way, though.
Why? It's just the name of the game, everyone gets it. Especially if you're a generalist/frontend type.
I asked coz know several managers who would look upon it as a red flag and I suspect OP would probably prefer to work for them rather than AI sheep.
That's actually a really good point.
I'm using claude but then refuse to do much cleaning up of what it spews. Im leaving that for the PR reviewers who love AI and going through slop. If they want slop, I'll give them the slop they want.
Not advocating that people should follow this but:

As someone that loves cleaning up code, I'm actually asking the vibe coders in the team (designer, PM and SEO guy) to just give me small PRs and then I clean up instead of reviewing. I know they will just put the text back in code anyway, so it's less work for me to refactor it.

With a caveat: if they give me >1000 lines or too many features in the same PR, I ask them to reduce the scope, sometimes to start from scratch.

And I also started doing this with another engineer: no review cycle, we just clean up each other's code and merge.

I'm honestly surprised at how much I prefer this to the traditional structure of code reviews.

Additionally, I don't have to follow Jira tickets with lengthy SEO specs or "please change this according to Figma". They just the changes themselves and we go on with our lives.

Favorited. I was talking to someone (non-dev) yesterday who prototypes with Claude and then goes back/forth with the lead engineer to clean it up and make it production worthy (or at least more robust). I like that model.
Just started work on a project. Greenfield and "AI accelerated". PRs diffs are in the range of 10s of thousands of lines. In the PR, it is suggested to not actually read all the code as it would take too long.
If you push a change, or you approve, you're responsible for the change and its effects later. Regardless of size. If change is too big, tell your teammates its too big to review and to refactor to bite-size with their great coding agents. Use AI models also for review of large changes, consider a checklist . Setup CI and integration tests (also can be AI assisted)
Agreed, and something will go wrong (as every junior has experienced). You cannot lay blame on the AI when git blame shows your name.
Oh there's plenty of CI, linting, etc. Half of which is not properly plumbed in.
Yeah, but look at all those green tests!
I thought the de facto policy was that the individual remains responsible in a team context.
That attitude is so last-month, get with the program!
Sweet summer child.
based. our CEO has made it clear that we're expected to use LLMs to shit out as many features as we can as quickly as we can, so that's exactly what I'm doing. Can't wait to watch leadership flail around in a year or two when the long term consequences start to become apparent
> when the long term consequences start to become apparent

Choose your own story!

and then a) programmers become relevant again and slowly fix all this crap, b) Claude 7.16 waltz through fixing things as it goes.

You'll just get laid off and they'll be onto the next hype cycle as visionaries.
That's exactly it. This person does not understand the coercive competition of the market. If you don't use new tech, you are going to be undercut by people who do. And every HR dept is going to expect to to have experience with AI even if the department that’s hiring doesn't really use it. If the author's supposed solution to the problem has negative personal consequences, why would you do it? To be nice?
No. I'm doing it because I care more whether I can live with myself than whether I impress people with the name of who I work for. Hence much of my recent comment history here, for example. I don't want any of these people getting the idea they should want me to work with them, either. I do want my name on every industry blacklist I can possibly get it on. Those will eventually be revealed - remember Franklin's dictum, fellas! That shit always comes out in the end - and I look forward to that day with pleased and eager anticipation.

At the moment I'm more looking at menial work for one of the local universities. Money is money, and my needs are small; the work is honest, I still should have a decade or so of physical labor left in me, and it carries the perk of free tuition for the degree I never had time for. I would have the time and energy to write, perhaps, even! And, however badly the people in charge are running things lately, the world will always need someone good at cleaning a toilet. (And I am already pretty good at cleaning a toilet!)

That's nice for you but other people have kids to feed and don't particularly care about your little crusade, which will fail.
Theres no reason to assume that. Its equally likely trying to replace jobs with AI is the "little crusade" thst no one cares about and will fail.
I wouldn't say no one cares about it, and I am not at all sure it will fail - nor that it should; there are better futures available from here, also.

Honestly, if I'd cottoned on quicker to the guy's real problem, I would've treated him more gently sooner. It's not quite true that an addict can't help himself, and in the place where that's false is the hope of recovery. But to blame people for getting hooked on the shit Silicon Valley is pushing, would be like blaming people for getting an opioid habit when the hardest imaginable versions of that drug were handed out like candy for decades.

Exactly like, in fact. Some people on this forum have BOP numbers waiting for them. You know who you are. In time, so will everyone.

Go look in a mirror, not at me. That's where the argument is waiting that you're feeling urged toward.
What you just said was an elaborate tu quoque fallacy. You aren't comprehending my basic point, which is that individual ethical decisions are not going to make a difference when all of the broader incentives are causing people to act otherwise.
The idea behind principles is that you're supposed to stick to them anyways.
Really weird that you're basically advocating people to not have principles if they don't align with "broader incentives". Also lol at you pulling the "some people have kids to feed" bullshit in a thread where we're all making way more money than most people.
If you keep telling yourself that, do you think it will eventually help you sleep at night?
What makes you think none of us have families?
If you have a family and you are doing what this guy is suggesting, that is extremely concerning to me. Seeking a low wage, menial job at a time when costs are rising due to the oil spike? Dumbest move you could make.
I said "menial." I did not say "low wage." And given the utter footlessness of your own situation as you yourself continue to show it, you are bold indeed in presuming to advise anyone else on their finances.

But you continue to astonish me with your assumptions! Is it a gambling debt? Get a little too happy on Robinhood or Polymarket, maybe? Were you really really counting on a crypto tax holiday? To keep from having to tell the wife, maybe?

On a side note, the mods here aren't great fans of either my opinions or my stubborn insistence on their accurate expression (1) but apparently that distaste extends not quite so far that they see fit to ban me. (Or not at the time of this writing, anyway.) No blame, of course; even if the place is looking sort of shabby and down at the mouth these days, at least when not seen through eyes of nostalgia for the high times of the 2010s, this is still their house.

Don't worry, though! Once the rate limiter is satisfied, I'll be right back here and we can talk about how you keep deceitfully attributing to me a statement you yourself made up. But I hope instead to find by then (assuming you are in the US as your usage leads me to do) that you have called the National Gambling Addiction Hotline, which is open 24/7 at (844) 779-2637, or failing that the SAMHSA helpline at 988. Help is available, but you do have to take the first step.

(1) I appreciate this is my own view of the matter, and that others will reasonably describe the thing in different terms. Nevertheless.

Because I don't like the feeling my conscience gives me by doing something I think is evil and bad. Some people have moral lines that they won't cross when finding jobs.

If my competitors are filling their flour with sawdust, guess I got to just do the same?

No, we won't do the same, but enough people will that it doesn't matter. Such is the way it goes.
Your moral compass is skewed. Customers don't care what tools we use, they just want products that work. Is a wheat farmer who ploughs a field with horses more moral than one who uses a tractor? The resulting flour tastes the same either way.
Its not the same. Its clearly shit to replace flour with sawdust.

Having different opinions on AI/LLMs doesn't make the use of it the same as replacing flour with sawdust.

The AI 'image' slop for example, i don't think its bad. But i also don't think it takes anything from a real artist. It takes jobs from people with drawing skills but it doesn't change anything for an artist.

This is only true if the new technology is actually significantly useful. Which so far AI has not proven to be. Theres no reason to assume people using AI will, on the long term, outcompete those who don't.