[ruszki]

I’ve seen people coding for 4 decades, thinking the same as you about themselves, and were bad coders. Unfortunately, nobody can tell you whether you’re good or bad without seeing your code. Your claims means nothing on the internet.

[lukan]

What about the buisness side of things that does not care for shiny code, but shipping things to make money?

That simple arcade game (without in game transactions) needs to be fun, that website that needs to attract visitors (but not sell them anything or handle sensitive data)?

They don't care about abstract code quality, they care if it works and useful.

So a good coder here means he or she could get to working results according to what the client wants fast. And those things likely make up the vast majority of written code. So no wonder AI gets adopted as it is a powerful tool here to be even faster.

Not all code runs in airplanes, handles financial transaction or sensitive user data - for this you need the best code possible and nothing vibe coded or quick and dirty hacks.

And oh wonder, it is possible to combine both. Because yes, websites often include financial transactions nowdays, but that part can and should be handled with care. People who move slow and check things. And then those who are quick to build things on top of it.

But I strongly object to dividing programmers absolutely in good and bad programmers, when the field is so big and the requirements not the same.

Some optimize in speed, some in quality. And yes, some are just bad in both. And some can do both - but they are very rare, in my experience.

[ruszki]

> And some can do both - but they are very rare, in my experience.

As far as I know basically all of the successful software companies had these quite early. Of course, you need other kinds of people too. And not everybody needs to be like that. But you absolutely need those kind of people.

But if you give me a few examples where this was not the case, and not recently, or during the dot com boom, where hype overwrote everything, then I’ll change my mind.

[YZF]

I'm just trying to provide useful context. I can claim anything and you don't know me either way. Last I checked other than your peers (which you can imagine I've had) there is no subjective "stamp" for good vs. bad. Many people who have shipped nothing and have no experience think they're great coders as well.

[ted_bunny]

That's why they mentioned that their software was successful, it wasn't intended as idle bragging.

[ruszki]

That can still easily mean that they didn’t give any value or minuscule amount of value to the project which caused their success.

The most successful projects which I’ve seen closely, all of them had only a few people who mattered, everybody else could be replaced at any given time basically, without a real impact. All of the failing ones were those in which those people didn’t exist, or were too few of them. This is exponentially more important in early phases of projects.

[YZF]

fwiw I wrote key features/pieces of pretty much everything I worked on. I was more or less the technical lead (and later engineering manager) on all the software I shipped.

It seems people really want to not believe AI can be useful for strong developers. That's fine. I don't really have a bone in this game, I'm anonymous here, and people can think whatever they choose to ;)

[ruszki]

Anonymity is a two way thing. Maybe, I don't need to use "more or less". Maybe, I'm an ultra heavy user of AI. It's even possible that I'm magnitudes better developer in every single aspects.

Maybe not.

I'm just waiting for somebody who send me code, which was generated by AI, not overwritten almost completely, and it's not shit. The funny thing is that some people here were so convinced that AI is great, that they recorded how they work with AI. And two things:

- They were slower than manual copy pasting

- They still somehow introduced bugs, and very suboptimal solutions...

Also, it would be good, that anybody could show me anything, that shows, how people became not terrible with code review suddenly. Because before AI, it was a common knowledge, that almost everybody was bad with it, and people rarely did it properly, because it was considered annoying, and not because they were useless. There were jokes about rewriting things, exactly because of the same reasons, and they heavily based on reality. And suddenly, we pretend that this changed.

And somehow you should really would need to convince me that the 100s of thousands of lines of code which I generated with AI in the past years, somehow, it's better than what it is. But I'm sure, that it's easier to assume that I didn't try something, than showing only once what "good" means in this case. Unfortunately, there is nothing similar here, than for example "Groovy is a great programming language", which is a dead giveaway that whoever said that is not just bad developer, but somebody who I would fire immediately from every single project to which I'm related to. Especially if they are tech lead. But there are such people, and some of them would claim the same thing as you. // Obviously interns and juniors can think whatever they want. They are labeled as such, because they cannot know yet.

[YZF]

What I do at work is (obviously) not something I can share.

Groovy ;) You must love Jenkins. At least I can rest at ease you won't fire me for that infraction. I used C and C++ most of my career and more recently Go (which I really loved when it was created but my take is a bit more nuanced these days after seeing a really large code base evolve over years).

I'm confused though. You generated 100s of thousands of lines of code using AI and you think it's crap? The code AI generates for me is not some pinnacle of software engineering. It is repeating existing patterns or fairly simple concepts. I treat AI like an quick intern that scales infinitely (or a junior developer). And yes, juniors and interns don't write the best code but in many organizations there is still a fair amount of code written by them.

The thing is that in a large team/project (and the one I'm on has hundreds of developers of various skill levels) there's an endless backlog of things that can be improved including relatively easy features or refactoring. The constraints are either organizational or time. AI enables these things to get done with very little overhead so that's a net positive. It moves the needle for how much time/effort does it take to address "not that hard" issues and with proper prompting and examples it does a decent job. The bar isn't code that John Carmack would write in a week, the bar is improving a certain crappy area of the code to be more reliable or more performant or a little bit cleaner. This is life for most software projects. Yes, in a perfect world every software project is perfection. And maybe some organizations are able to approximate that.

[ruszki]

> I really loved when it was created but my take is a bit more nuanced these days after seeing a really large code base evolve over years

At least, I can be sure that we are not near the same level. But at least, you hopefully will recognize the same thing with new languages… without seeing them failing first.

> You generated 100s of thousands of lines of code using AI and you think it's crap?

This is a funny question. First of all, there are people whose job is to test LLMs. However, I’m not one of them. I simply tried them, generated, and still generate a ton of code with them, then I rewrite basically every single line of them. Because they use for example outdated patterns, which causes the same problems what you’ve seen with Go.

> It is repeating existing patterns or fairly simple concepts.

Yes, and most of the most popular ones are mediocre the best. Average code from which LLMs are learning are made by beginners, not experienced ones, because their sheer number. So LLMs will use those.

> I treat AI like an quick intern

This is always the funniest sentence regarding this. Before AI, it was quite well known that you don’t ever allow interns near important parts of the code. Now, people who supposed to know this, and the reasons for this, somehow forgot this aspect also, just like the review thing.

> AI enables these things to get done with very little overhead so that's a net positive.

No, it does allow to tick a ticket in Jira. And if you handle this in any other way, then you will fail miserably, as how for example Microsoft quite openly did with this.

> a little bit cleaner

Ah yes, the infamous “cleaner”, about which the exact opposite is quite well known, and it’s quite obviously not true with every single vibe coded projects, without exceptions. If that’s cleaner in any environment, then I have a bad news: you’ve never worked with even medior developers, ever. Seriously, that code quality, especially architecturally, is junior level shit.

My previous boss did these low hanging fruits, he at least would never tell anything more than “it’s better than nothing”. And only regarding non-important code, which can fail without real consequences. And can be shit, obviously. The whole point was that even shit is better than nothing. Not that it’s acceptable quality in any way.

At least, you were obvious at least, that your “success” is magnitudes different, than mine. And not regarding code quality, but when a project/product successful. I completely forgot that I’ve met people who sold that their teams completed the most tickets at a company in a given time frame as success. Probably we are closer than this, but still very far away.