[adamtaylor_13]

Why do some software engineers love AI and some hate it?

I've got senior engineers (20+ yoe) who have never been having more fun and then some who feel like OP here.

Why is it so decisive? There's no other tool (not even emacs) that's caused this sort of division.

[rDr4g0n]

"software engineer" covers a wide range of responsibilities. some engineers spend all their time contributing to the physics in a massive graphics engine. some spend most of their time as the sole maintainer of a web api that mostly plumbs together a bunch of services and provide data to UIs. some are frequently spitting out new services while other are maintaining 10 year old legacy codebases. the work we need to do, the tradeoffs we need to make, its just so vast.

now couple that with the wide range of variety (and dysfunction) that come from the business and organization. being a dev for a company which sells software is a whole different beast than being an in-house dev for a company which sells other products. startup, big org, old org, new org, strike team, the list goes on.

finally, engineers enjoy different aspects of building software more than others. the puzzle, the crafting, the api, the data structure, the architecture, solving end user needs, so many facets to what makes it enjoyable as a career.

this is a big reason why ai discourse online is so uneven and often unhelpful. were all assuming too much about what being a software engineer is; forgetting that my day-to-day can be wildly different than yours.

a lot of ai speedup comes from effective delegation of work. i do it, but i don't like it. it actively makes me feel tired in a way i don't feel when i do the work myself, or when i mentor and grow my team to do the work.

many other devs don't feel the way i do. some suddenly have these ai tools that make them feel more empowered and energized and excited.

llm's are genuinely a new computing paradigm because of their nature: plain human language as the interface. this is different enough that mapping our past computing concepts (like the evolution from assembly to C) may not hold as well as seem they should.

this all digs deep into who we are as individuals with specific desires, career history, goals, a specific role at a specific company. the part that's fucking beautiful and unique and human.

But if the aggressive industry-wide layoffs aren't enough of a clue, these giant ass companies (and the ai gatekeepers driving this shift) are not compatible with individual humans.

i dont mind llms as a tool, but im done with the perverse level of greed and inhumanity they seem to inspire in corporate leaders.

[nunez]

Some people never really liked writing code. They liked the result and the paycheck much more. Those folks are having the time of their lives now. Well, until the fall happens and software development is assmebly-lined.

[amboo7]

I have always liked coding (started in the 80s). But I got bored having to deal with trivialities (spending life on fixing commas) and increasing accidental complexity (having to memorize tons of APIs). Now LLMs deal with that crap and I can apply stuff I read in research papers and such, with much lower threshold.

[disgruntledphd2]

> But I got bored having to deal with trivialities

For me, at least (with probably half the experience) the trivialities are important for making me understand the design, so I can improve it.

If there's a lot of boilerplate, then we should condense that to something else.

Unfortunately, with the way these models are currently trained, they default to solving the same problem in multiple ways depending on the position of Jupiter and the Moon (apparently).

[dd8601fn]

It’s the NES Game Genie.

Unlimited lives and the ability to walk through walls is great fun for a bit. But also, you never actually played the game and it kinda ruined it for you, for all time.

You’ve seen the outcome, you solved nothing, learned nothing, and there’s zero reason for you to ever be proud of it.

The outcome isn’t yours, it’s the chatbots. Maybe you lie to yourself a bit… but you were barely necessary.

[andrekandre]

  > Why do some software engineers love AI and some hate it?

n=1 but i'd say 3 aspects for me:

1. its forced on me at $job; its just a tool so let me use it when i need it and stop making my work-life miserable with childish tokenmaxing leaderboards

2. co-workers who send low-effort low-quality pr's that introduce tons of complexity and waste everyone's time and that they cant answer basic questions about because they no longer know how it works

3. the absolute cult-like manic behavior with some people around "ai"... yes its fun and interesting and cool tech so please stop treating it like a religion ffs

just my 3c

[DSMan195276]

I agree and would add to that from my experience:

1. Too many people think that having lots of text makes something impressive, really it's just inconsiderate and nobody is reading it all.

2. Helping people often feels pointless because I can tell I'm just getting a cut/paste AI response back.

[sebular]

It’s because there always were two types of engineers and the difference was never clear until this technology existed. Some love the craft, and some love the results.

[stiglitz]

It's a Skinner box of productivity. Of course it's polarizing.

My own enthusiasm varies wildly day to day. I've been sick of squinting at punctuation marks and opening sequences of of tabs to trace through annoying abstraction layers for a long time; so I'm really excited to see those activities effectively automated away. But the same tools enable some really bad behavior (in myself and others), which really gets me down.

[agentultra]

It's not hard to observe what the tools and systems can do. It's impressive. But I suspect for some the trade-off is not worth it based on their principles. No amount of disbelief or encouragement will change that.

[anal_reactor]

1. In some areas AI is extremely proficient, in others it's "two plus two equals three". Your experience with AI will highly vary depending on how knowledgeable it is about the particular problem you're facing. It's also a skill on itself how to talk to AI, just like "googling" used to be.

2. AI allows people to 10x things. If your organization has a healthy engineering culture then I assume people don't send for review shit like "change constant into hardcoded value" and AI-generated PRs are checked to fit the broader design, but if your organization was already full of idiots, then they produce 10x the output. Good luck trying to survive that.

[piloto_ciego]

There are a lot of negative Nancy types right now. They're just really loud and whiny. They're mourning the death of a world where they're "special" and powerful very specific ways. I feel them and have some empathy, and even some sympathy. I've been through a similar loss of status and a curtailment of the future I thought I could expect. But I picked myself up and kept going and adapted, so my sympathy runs out after listening to it for awhile.

That's not to say that there aren't problems in this world and that some gnashing of teeth isn't warranted - there really are issues, even with AI, but the malcontents have never been louder in my life. Outside of tech in the rest of society, many people haven't realized that the world has basically broken since 2016 and a lot of people are finally mourning the revolution in politics that we've lived through too. It really hasn't hit how tumultuous the last decade has been for most people yet.

I was "fortunate" in that I went through a life altering tragedy about that time so I got a little bit of perspective about how replaceable I was a bit before all these guys did. I realized how short life was, and how messed up things can get and how "the system" doesn't give a rats ass about you if you can't produce. I learned that viscerally, so perhaps to my detriment, I'm like the guy in the meme, "first time?" But these doomers and ai-haters and malcontents are mourning I think. In order to feel important and special again they rail against their replacement. I get it, I am still mourning the death of my old career. Some of these guys are realizing that they can be outdone by a machine for the first time in their lives. White collar worker types who thought "knowledge work" was safe and uniquely human are mourning at their own new found mediocrity. They say they can "do it better!" and maybe they can, but that doesn't matter - they're realizing that "doing it better" is not what is required. The people who don't want to use the new tools will be like people opposing the steam engine. They may not remember that John Henry died trying to beat the steam engine - I think that's the part they may have forgotten.

No, the loud irritation and frustration is a blend of a lot of things in my mind. But largely, what I see is a bunch of people who thought they were special and smart and unreplaceable are realizing that they're just as replaceable as the rest of people. They're mourning. Marxists call this alienation if I remember my Marx.