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by leptons 3 days ago
We still pay our software developers the same amount, but now an AI is the middleman taking more and more money (in the form of tokens) every day. With every new model, more tokens are consumed so the new model can "think" more. Nobody's even really reading or reviewing the code the AI produces, so software quality goes down, and we're paying more to produce it. And when there's a serious problem with the code? No human is going to dig through the mess the AI created - so burn even more tokens/money trying to get the AI to fix it, or just start over from scratch again with the AI, hoping for better results. It's the definition of insanity. I'm looking for a new job, maybe even a new industry, a new career path - after 30 years in this industry, software development is jumping the shark.
2 comments
pfannkuchen 3 days ago
The current crop of big influential companies is old and super bureaucratic, possibly with the exception of Apple which from the outside seems to have less bureaucracy.

I’ve been wondering whether 2006 Google, Amazon, Facebook would be acting like this if LLMs were launched back then, or if these companies are just due for getting replaced and this is just their big mistake making phase. Prior big companies also entered a big mistake making phase, the mistakes just looked different because different era etc.

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thih9 3 days ago
We’ve already lived through multiple floods of unmaintainable code, eg with unstructured JQuery.

New tech stacks will appear and they will handle the mess to some extent.

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oenton 3 days ago
As someone who hadn't used JQuery extensively because I came into the industry a little bit later when others like Prototype, Backbone and Ember were just starting to phase out, I have a lot of respect for JQuery. Or perhaps I have a lot of respect for the problems that JQuery solved which we now take for granted, like AJAX requests.

With this and the pipe dream of continuous generation and deployment of code without a human in the loop, I can't even think of a problem it's solving or attempting to solve. The closest thing I can think of is library or language upgrades... but we already have automated solutions for those e.g. codemods and migration scripts.

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leptons 3 days ago
jQuery is still used by approximately 7.78 million of the top 10 million websites. That's 77%.

React has about 3 to 4% of the top 10 million.

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leptons 3 days ago
jQuery is still used by approximately 7.78 million of the top 10 million websites. The people touting "modern frameworks" are in a niche and they don't even realize it.
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thih9 3 days ago
Cherry picked usage stats are off topic. The fact that 90% of Fortune 500 companies rely on COBOL[1] doesn’t make other languages a niche.

[1]: https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/insights/what-is-cobol

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leptons 2 days ago
>The fact that 90% of Fortune 500 companies rely on COBOL[1] doesn’t make other languages a niche.

Well that's some cherry picking. And really off-topic, because nobody here mentioned COBOL.

If someone were shitting on COBOL here, it would be right to point out that COBOL is still getting the job done at 90% of fortune 500 companies.

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