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u/IanCrapReport 19h ago
You don’t get paid in how you made it, you get paid on what gets produced.
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 17h ago
True, but if you make it poorly and it's impossible to maintain, you may not keep getting paid.
As a professor once told me, it's not how efficient the code is, it's how easily it is to maintain
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u/scbiowastate 16h ago edited 8h ago
Bro they get promoted because of how quickly they ‘delivered’ their spaghetti code mess ticking time bomb which satisfied the requirements of the time but is built on a sand foundation.
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u/Blaxican_since_99 15h ago
Genuinely my experience as well, people (or their AI agents rather) pumping out crap at 2x the rate of properly developed solutions is rewarded since it looks good to non-tech managers whos entire thought process boils down to minimizing man hours (labor costs) and maximizing outputs and profits with no other nuance.
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u/dimiderv 6h ago
Like before AI no one wrote bad code and there was never shitty code that devs had to maintain
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u/Blaxican_since_99 6h ago
They did, management didnt have the expectation that we were all somehow cyborg coders who could 2x our output thanks to this new magical tool thats been shoved down everyones throats as the fixall for any problem. The shitty code isnt new, however the pressure to pump out as much shitty code as possible with any and all standards thrown out the window seems to be increasing.
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u/lobax 46m ago
Ofc there was. But the person producing shitty code now has 10x output. While the person that actually cares about quality, maintainability, security, reliability and all that other important stuff has maybe 2x in output.
But all those non-functional requirements are things middle management loves to ignore until the product gets hacked or the poor quality loses them a client. Then they will pretend that security was always their top priority and have a “security and reliability sprint” for 2 weeks that they pretend will fix all problems before going back to ignoring the topic.
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u/r2k-in-the-vortex 13h ago
It's a matter of time/cost. When it's 10X cheaper, then it doesn't matter as long as it does the basic functionality, you can throw it out and reimplement better later. And maybe it's good enough, or not that necessary in the first place, so you don't even need to bother to improve anything. Much better than paying full price upfront and later discovering that crap, it was all for nothing, it's not even needed.
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u/scbiowastate 13h ago
When’s the last time you met with upper management and explained how you wanted to ‘throw it out and reimplement it’ that went well
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 13h ago
I finally this year got the blessing from my higher ups to redevelop a piece of our base code that was a mess and a pain to work on. Of course it helped the new features we were adding related to it, and I was able to argue a complete rebuild was the better choice to implement the new logic.
Also making the case I was doing as a quality of life, where we could add more functionality with it easily (for something we don't even know of yet).
But as a professor once told me, going back and cleaning up old code like that is one of the most expensive processes
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u/r2k-in-the-vortex 13h ago
You don't explain unnecessary details to upper managment, they don't care and they don't need to know.
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 15h ago
I guess I take for granted where I work, since we thankfully don't have that
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u/Antilock049 14h ago
Most solutions don't require what you're describing. Reddit does sure love to jerk poetic about it though.
Turns out, a working product is the best way to make a better product.
Doesn't really matter if that working product is spaghetti code or AAAAAAA reddit approved grade.
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 14h ago
The threshold for what is "maintainable" has widened exponentially with AI agents. As long as your agent understands it, it's effectively maintainable. If it gets into a state that's not maintainable even by your AI (which is hard to do), you can just tell the AI to refactor it to be more maintainable lol.
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u/waraholic 14h ago
Once your code is that far gone the AI is going to make regressions trying to fix it and you'll have customer impacting bugs and a loss of trust in your product.
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 13h ago
Perhaps, but this is such an easy thing to avoid with maintainability rules in an md file.
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u/waraholic 13h ago
Write maintainable code. No mistakes.
Forgot that part, thanks.
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u/AnUninterestingEvent 12h ago
The entire purpose of a maintainable code base is to make life easier for the humans maintaining it. If humans are no longer reading or maintaining the code, then who is the maintainability for? What's the point? It doesn't make the end product work better. If the human brain could process unorganized code as quickly and accurately as AI can, maintainability would never have been a priority to begin with.
That being said, I prefer my agent to follow a certain structure and certain set of rules because it's just how I've always done things pre-AI. Plus I assume that AI is better at reading organized code. But I honestly have no evidence that it matters.
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 13h ago
You do have a point, I guess part of it is that I seemed to have developed a skill that I need to understand how the code works that I write. So if I don't understand the AI's code, I don't trust it, and question if it can really debug itself (and fix itself). Especially has some stuff co-pilot has thrown me as suggestions have been dead wrong
That all said, I do worry it could always get to that point. Like AI keeps fixing it but makes it worst and worst (like from a maintenance side). The old put a band-aid on it, instead of fixing the root problem, which can result in much costlier and time consuming. Where AI finally can't fix it, and now you have a mess
(that or it gets more expensive to fix each time due to token usage)
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u/JerodTheAwesome 16h ago
Idk Claude’s comments and organizational structure plblows mine out of the water.
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u/jenso2k 9h ago
maintainable isn’t as much of a thing anymore, as long as the AI understands it. sad but true
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 8h ago
LOL I guess my ways are becoming relics (I'm the guy who writes his code, formats it, etc, like it's a piece of art)
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 19h ago
And if you allowed that code to go into production that had edge cases that cause data integrity issues or security breaches, who gets the blame?
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u/SirCampYourLane 18h ago
Bold to assume I wouldn't have been far worse than the AI I asked to make my code for me
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u/IanCrapReport 19h ago
Same person as always, the junior developer that your agent is making commits under.
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u/lleti 18h ago
I used to find it funny seeing redditors cope over writing syntax getting delegated to the robots
It’s genuinely now starting to get sad. I’ve written syntax for over 20 years now, why the fuck are people mad they don’t get to waste their time the same way?
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u/Active_Name5021 17h ago edited 17h ago
Ah yea, because coding is when you spend your time thinking about syntax.
Me, an experienced coder: "Ah yea, after "if" you have to add ( and then eventually ), oh and don't forget to open { and close } afterwards. There might be some semicolons at some point"
Good thing this extremely heavy cognitive load has been taken off my shoulders now!
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u/awesomeusername2w 15h ago
There levels to it. Knowing which abstract factory you need to extend in spring to add some interceptor somewhere is also sucks. I know what I want to do with the request, how to modify etc. Claude will wire that in in whatever framework we currently working in.
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u/Active_Name5021 10h ago
Sure, but that's not syntax, that's remembering which APIs do what, which I agree is rather tedious
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u/absalom86 15h ago
This. If you think people care that you looked at the code or wrote it yourself you are in for a rude awakening.
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u/Sbadabam278 14h ago
Yeah ok but why am I paying you then instead of spinning up an agent myself . Result is all that matters I agree - why do you specifically get a salary?
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u/Temporary-Ad2956 13h ago
Try doing that, still takes ages and needs expertise.
Treating the code as a black box is a different thing to not looking at it
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u/ganja_and_code 15h ago
True, but how you make something is the only thing that determines the quality and reliability of the thing you produced.
If you don't check your work, you can't trust that it was reliable or good quality.
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u/new_check 16h ago
I cannot stress to you the extent to which that is not how anything works. You literally get paid based on the effort your labor requires and the rareness of the necessary skill.
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u/new_check 16h ago
Like if that was true, textiles would cost thousands of dollars because that's what they cost back when they were made by hand.
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u/GoldDHD 19h ago
I'm old enough to remember compilers failing. My parents are old enough to remember perforated cards and why bugs where literal bugs. IE 'this generation doesn't even know how to code'.
I'm not saying that cuck coding is great, but it may end up being this generation compiler
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u/deaddyfreddy 14h ago
There's a fundamental difference: if a compiler suddenly produces unpredictable results, it's a bug, if an LLM does that, it's a feature. Of course, we can add more safeguards and limit the natural language used in prompts to a small subset to make it less ambiguous, and add very strict programmatic rules.
Finally, we can write a long enough prompt in this language so the result is always reproducible! Checkmate, AI-haters! What a time to be alive, don't you agree?
I have one question: What should we name the language? I vote for "Programming Language!" /s
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u/GoldDHD 14h ago
I get the joke, I really do, and personally I feel like you would get ruby on rails out of that simplification, but realistically it is possible that AI will be good enough soon enough
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u/deaddyfreddy 13h ago
I feel like you would get ruby on rails out of that simplification
More Lisp-like, Clojure, for example. Everything is symmetrical: open bracket/close bracket, strict rules - the order is always "(verb objects...)", very high-level, minimal ambiguity, immutable by default, etc. The fun thing is most business-logic modules I write follow a similar pattern.
(defn main [params] (->> (io/read-input params) (utils/validate-input params) (utils/prepare-input params) (business-module/process-data params) (utils/prepare-output params) (io/write-output params)))Which is not that different from writing a prompt, actually, but it follows strict high-level rules already.
but realistically it is possible that AI will be good enough soon enough
The problem is it would still be a probabilistic system.
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u/renome 12h ago
It's possible but far from guaranteed still. We're hitting diminishing returns and have been for a few years. Noticed how openai and anthropic have been in perfect harmony with begging for "safety" regulation slowing down development? Having to invest in another generation of flagship model that's marginay better than its immediate predecessor may realistically banrkupt them right now
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u/haitei 16h ago
WDYM old enough to remember. I had to work around a MSVC bug like a month ago.
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u/Mars_Bear2552 7h ago edited 7h ago
yeah but that's MSVC.
may as well use the Sig P320 as a reason to claim that guns are constantly malfunctioning.
LLVM bugs are much more noteworthy.
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u/mpbh 19h ago
Coding isn't a job, software development is. You didn't need to code to build software before AI and you don't need to code to do it now.
Architects design buildings but never hammer a single nail.
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u/russianrug 16h ago
Yeah but I’ll bet any architect could visit a jobsite and know what’s going on and whether it’s being done right.
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u/RepresentativeDog791 13h ago
I’d say that’s untrue, architects often won’t get their hands dirty and have no idea about grouting technique
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u/granitrocky2 14h ago
Right? Architects don't just throw a column in the middle of a room with no support below it because "I don't need to understand why this works, it just does."
Every analogy I ever hear AI bros use is nonsensical.
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u/UndocumentedMartian 19h ago
Architects also expect the workers to know how to their jobs.
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u/shacksrus 16h ago
Architects expect developers and contractors to be lowest common denominator unless theyre working on high end commercial/residential. And even then they expect just a step above lcd.
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u/the_hair_of_aenarion 16h ago
People have argued for years that it's not the low level language skills there are important it's the higher level skills. Knowing all the pieces of the puzzle is way more important than how to centre divs.
But also skills are massively eroding. Juniors are making changes without understanding them. Product managers are committing into projects as though they know what the code is doing. Anarchy.
Won't be for long anyway. Industry keeps making us all redundant.
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u/Cozart_Games 15h ago
This paired with higher expectations and shorter deadlines forces everyone to lean on AI more, understand less, and everyone suffers because of it
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u/Thalanator 12h ago edited 12h ago
I fear architecture, systems thinking and essentially all thinking skills on the end will not be impossoble for AI to conquer either. At least for 95% of use cases that benefit from closely following estabilished best practices as opposed to doing something revolutionary. Frontier models are quite damn hardcore now compared to just 6 months ago, im surprised (and a bit scared) basically weekly now just how much they can do at work (and we dont even have access to fable or comparable models), even though total time saved isnt that insane yet because we do have to review
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u/-F1ngo 12h ago
The thing is: If there are crucial (economically demanded) skills that are eroding because of AI, retaining those skills and developing them will remain a competitive advantage. And if that's the case, the problem of deskilling should solve itself sooner or later. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself...
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u/Thalanator 12h ago
I do want to believe this too, it is fun and rewarding to use these skills. I am just stunned looking at the continued speed of model progress and for a big bunch of skills, in particular those trained at junior level, it is already too late. I find myself moving goalposts at an alarming rate. We will have to see how Seniors fare in whatever the market (d)evolves toward in the near to mid future.
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u/TheTacoInquisition 15m ago
I've yet to see AI ge anywhere near not making horrible design choices. Even with explicit prompting, it l9ves to over complicate or just flat out break architectural rules. And once it's done it once without correction, it does it more.
I've been surprised in the opposite way over the last couple of months. The agents seem to be getting worse, ignoring rules more often and making worse choices.
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u/Obey_Void 19h ago
How exactly would you build software without coding?
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u/willow-kitty 17h ago
Someone was coding, but there were sometimes people involved in key roles who weren't. Picture a good product owner working with a systems architect on what people need, what's technically feasible, and a high level design on how to do it, which gets passed off to a mix of juniors and seniors who work out the code. They're all involved in building the software, but not all of them are coding. You could maybe draw parallels to those same two people passing the requirements and high-level design off to Claude.
I don't think it quite works, though. Even back then, architects who weren't still coding got stale and out of touch, and they were expected to review key PRs for design alignment and stuff. You also gain insights from doing parts of the work that you don't from delegating it, and you miss that if you delegate everything.
I have seen some interesting examples of people really experienced, old-school waterfall architects using AI agents to build whole applications from detailed (like > 100 page) specs, but it's weird.
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u/hugopurdy 12h ago edited 12h ago
domain driven design, api-contracts, workflows, infra, integrations, atomicity, telemetry, error handling. Then that bit of domain specific processing that powers the features.
Its more the other way round. How exactly would you build software without architecting?
I've seen people code this way and they get themselves into all sorts of trouble. Often by not spilling their problems into space and trying to spin on a dime.
Like defaulting to inline retries demanding to finish NOAW, instead of treating integration as a process where you can spill state to disk. Relax bruh, update the state with the attempt and pass it off for something else to decide if a retry is required. Agile and aggressive sprint planning can make this harder because people are trying to bodge code into a fixed amount of time when it needs to be more sophisticated.
You dime spin and you produce a func that can complete in anything from 40ms to 5m and none of the detail is surfaced. Much easier to see when you design that integration behaviour as part of the domain.I got a worker downstream from a scheduler going all Alzheimer's trying to fucking second guess whether it should respond to the important real time event or not. But take a second look and everything is validatable at the point of feeding the scheduler. I move it there, half the dumb logic disappears, events fire more consistently on time because it ain't gotta pull half the object graph to work out what its got to do, it just does it.
The fundamental difference between coding and systems is if you're just trying to finish up your tickets for the day or if you're actually trying to build a cohesive and robust system.
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u/SaIemKing 13h ago
You have some one or some thing else build it for you, and then say you did it.
The problem with AI is that people aren't even part of the brain storming or writing algorithms. It's just here's my input, I want this output. Wow, I'm so smart.
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u/r2k-in-the-vortex 15h ago
claude
[whatever shit you want], build it
It mostly works too unless you are asking for something completely stupid and incoherent.
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u/SoulPossum 18h ago
Architects are expected to know how their code works on a structural level though. If I pitch a building that's an upside-down pyramid, I'm going to have to explain how that building can exist in a real world. That includes an understanding of how building materials would be used even if they aren't personally hammering the nails.
Shipping code you didn't write is one thing provided you know how it works and can explain it. But not looking at it means there's no way you're going to be able to troubleshoot it if it doesn't work perfectly out the gate and you won't know how to add new features. It can potentially get the job done, but so much of it is on rails that it wouldn't matter who's doing it. It'd be like demanding to be paid the same as a chef because you know how to use a microwave
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u/SirCampYourLane 18h ago
Architects famously don't often understand the physical limitations of building what they dream up, that's why civil engineers and architects are at odds.
Architect has a vision for a building, civil engineer recommends that it be a concrete box. They find a compromise that is close to what the architect wanted but also actually feasible to build
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u/Original-Poet1825 9h ago edited 9h ago
The number of people required to do things like architecting software is much lower than the labor that goes into actually creating software
People are missing the bigger picture. Companies like Zoom (which are not able to grow more) are mostly investing in engineering costs as a way to defend their market position. If those same engineers start using tons of tokens, they are not going to pass the token costs to shareholders and take a margin hit… they will fire 20-30% of their staff and keep the costs constant.
I don’t think the risk is that every single engineer gets fired. The risk is that any company where software is a cost center or any company that doesn’t have growth will get forced into mass layoffs of devs. many of these people will never find software roles again. We as devs are massively coping; the finances don’t make sense and our field is going to hit armageddon sometime in the next few years unless the tokens can be optimized to be essentially free (in which case the AI labs go bust)
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u/lurkerburzerker 12h ago
Good luck living in a building designed by an architect who doesn't know how to read or write blueprints. But hey its 10x faster and cheaper so worth it, right. 🫡
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u/Fast-Visual 19h ago
Imagine arguing for working class people to be paid less for any job.
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u/RatZveloc 17h ago
SWE is a very high-paying career and your ability in it should be reflected in your compensation
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u/-Kerrigan- 6h ago
It's the ability to deliver working software within deadlines. Some people think that it's the ability to do leet code. Usually, we get paid for the product and it's maintenance, not for "elegant solutions". The latter are there to either make one's life easier or to stroke one's ego.
Of course, an uneducated person with AI will produce about the same results a monkey would at the controls of an excavator - a broken mess. Knowing the inner workings and designs helps tremendously to take the right decisions. However, knowing to center a div by hand or to do micro optimizations - rarely matters.
9/10 programmers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between AI generated code and enterprise legacy from 10y ago anyways, yet some people like to pretend they weren't copy pasting off stack overflow a few years ago and they always "organically crafted" code.
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u/SaIemKing 13h ago
the argument isn't that you should be paid less for doing the job. it's that you're literally not doing the job
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u/steveCharlie 11h ago edited 11h ago
the job is to create software, and that's what happened.
You get paid for your output, not your process.2
u/SaIemKing 11h ago
Why pay you when something else is doing the work? We're losing the people and it's gonna turn into terrible output.
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u/steveCharlie 11h ago
Both things can be true.
You can be a good Software Engineer and delegate most of your work to AI while still reviewing it's output and increase your velocity by a great amount.Suits can then think that they can fire everyone AND then get terrible output.
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u/techxsypher 11h ago
"I built a SaaS in a weekend without writing a single line of code!"
Cool bro, I just found your Stripe secret key hardcoded in index.html and anyone can drop your database via the search bar. Enjoy the $40k AWS bill tomorrow morning
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u/Strostkovy 18h ago
Yeah, those lazy ass C coders who don't even look at the machine code that their computer generates. Most of them don't even look at the assembly code.
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u/Attileusz 17h ago
I do actually look at the generated assembly code and I recommend people to do that.
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u/Athropod101 14h ago
Looking at the generated assembly in an embedded system is what let me know I was writing my meson build wrong and not linking properly. Took a long ass time to fix that, but it would have been a nightmare to debug otherwise.
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u/BadSmash4 16h ago
I agree with this, people writing C should understand assembly and how their code gets compiled, especially if they're working in embedded environments. It's actually a pretty important skill to know how your C code is going to get potentially mangled by the compiler.
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 17h ago
I'm still waiting for those token costs to start adding up.
The other day, some devs in another department were talking about their use of Claude and Cursor. The one mentioned how much they spent in tokens on a piece of code, and it wasn't cheap. It ended up pretty nullifying the cost we charge the client. Meaning, that income that helps fund the whole company (such as departments that aren't billable) was just consumed by the cost of Tokens
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u/tacticalpotatopeeler 15h ago
People still not understanding that the job really isn’t about writing code, regardless of whether or not you use AI in any capacity
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u/justAPhoneUsername 11h ago
It's totally fine if you want to use ed (the default text editor). I don't know why so many people are complaining about it?
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u/precinct209 20h ago
Look. I'm not saying this is a commentary against vibe coding.
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u/CorrectCombination11 20h ago
What do you call tech leads that just take meetings all day?
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u/precinct209 20h ago
They should wise up and send a bot of their likeness to these meetings to save time for more important things such as I'm sure there are some
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u/dillanthumous 19h ago
Tech Leads.
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u/CorrectCombination11 19h ago
nah, I would wager that majority of the companies out there, that's just a designation rather than a distinct job title. At least that's how it works in the legacy financial services world.
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u/ultraSsak 20h ago
At work i dont look at code anymore.
When i was young, eager, i wanted the code to be perfect, refactored, cleaned up.
Noone cared. Today, I don't care either - claude, do the task that they've send me.
If im generous, i will glance at the issue assigned xD
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19h ago
[deleted]
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u/ariiizia 19h ago
Not for long once they figure out they can just cut out the middle man. Dude's providing zero value.
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u/carcusmonnor 18h ago
Its like hiring a Carpenter vs buying IKEA. Both are fine but they shouldn't cost the same and don't expect the same quality.
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u/IronLucario2012 18h ago
More like hiring a carpenter vs hiring someone who says they're a carpenter but actually just buys an IKEA knockoff whenever someone asks for anything
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u/YBHunted 20h ago
I WFH making 150k doing exactly this. Granted it has morphed into this over the last couple years. But fuck it we ball.