• Che Banana@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      Yes, but your bosses don’t know/understand that, why pay you when they can have 3 interns & AI for freeeeeeeeeeee???

        • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          Our team lead recently sent out two fresh juniors to tackle a task, with no senior informed. And of course, they were supposed to build it in Python, even though they had no experience with it, because Python is just so easy. Apparently, those juniors had managed to build something that was working …on one machine, at some point.

          On the day when our team lead wanted to show it to the customer, the two juniors were out of house (luckily for them) and no one knew where a distribution of that working state was. The code in the repo wouldn’t compile and seemed to be missing some commits.

          So, a senior got pulled in to try to salvage it, but the juniors hadn’t set up proper dependency management, unit tests, logging, distribution bundling, nor documentation. And the code was spaghetti, too. Honestly, could have just started over fresh.

          Our team lead was fuming, but they’ve been made to understand that this was not the fault of the juniors. So, yeah, I do think on that day, they found some new appreciation for seniors.

          Heck, even I found new appreciation for what we do. All of that stuff is just the baseline from where we start a project and you easily forget that it’s there, until it’s not.

    • space@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 months ago

      Writing the actual code is the easy part. Thinking about what to write and how to organize it so it doesn’t become spaghetti is the hard part and what being a good developer is all about.

      • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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        9 months ago

        Question is: how many developers are actually good? Or better, how many produce good results? I wouldn’t call myself a great programmer, just okayish, but I certainly pushed code I knew was absolute garbage, simply because of external pressure (deadlines, legacy crap, maybe just a bad day,…).

      • explodicle@local106.com
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        9 months ago

        I’m more of a mechanical engineer than a coder, and for me it’s been super helpful writing the code. The rest of our repo is clear enough that even I can understand what it actually does by just reading it. What I’m unfamiliar with are the syntax, and which nifty things our libraries can do.

        So if you kinda understand programs but barely know the language, then it’s awesome. The actual good programmers at my company prefer a minimal working example to fix over a written feature request. Then they replace my crap with something more elegant.

      • fuzzzerd@programming.dev
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        9 months ago

        That sounds awful. Imaging going back and forth requesting changes until it gets it right. It’d be like chatting with openai only it’s trying to merge that crap into your repo.

    • jwt@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      It would probably mean the amount of coding work that companies want done would multiply 10 fold as well. I’m sure the content of the work developers do will change somewhat over time (analogous to what happened during the industrial revolution), but I doubt they’re all out of a job in the near future.

      • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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        9 months ago

        Where I’m really not sure is, what percentage of the software written today actually needs human work?

        I mean, think about all the basic form rendering, inputs masks, CRUD apps. There’s definitely a ton of work in them and they’re widely used, but I’m pretty sure that a relatively basic AI-assisted framework could recreate most of these apps with hardly any actual coding. Sure, it won’t be super efficient or elegant, but let’s be honest: nobody cares about that, if they’re good enough.

        Just look at Wix, Wordpress, Squarespace etc. Website builders basically imploded the “low effort” web design market. Who would pay hundreds for a website made by a human, if you can just click together something reasonably good looking in 2h?

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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          9 months ago

          There’s definitely a ton of work in them and they’re widely used, but I’m pretty sure that a relatively basic AI-assisted framework could recreate most of these apps with hardly any actual coding

          Any shop that’s not incompetent switched to using frameworks for that stuff 10-20 years ago, so there’s hopefully very little work left there for the AI.

          Even at a company where it’s a massive amount, that company “benefitting” from AI, really just managed to defer their “use a framework” savings 20 years late.

          • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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            9 months ago

            Frameworks still require work. And tons of that. Even just defining all the form fields, add basic validations, write all the crud stuff, tests, etc.