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No wonder open source software becomes more efficient than proprietary one.
All I hear is “I’m bad at mentoring”
And some sort of “no one wants to work any more”.
I know young brilliant people, maybe they have to be paid correctly?
There is only so much mentoring can do though. You can have the best math prof. You still need to put in the exercise to solve your differential equations to get good at it.
You get out of education what you put into it. You won’t be an artist from the best art school if you do the bare minimum to pass. You can end up as a legend of the industry coming from a noname school.
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I am not a professional coder, just a hobbyist, but I am increasingly digging into Cybersecurity concepts.
And even as an “amature Cybersecurity” person, everything about what you describe, and LLM coders, terrifies me, because that shit is never going to have any proper security methodology implemented.
On the bright side, you might be able to cash in on some bug bounties.
The problem is not only the coding but the thinking. The AI revolution will give birth to a lot more people without critical thinking and problem solving capabilities.
apart from that, learning programming went from something one does out of calling, to something one does to get a job. The percentage of programmers that actually like coding is going down, so on average they’re going to be worse
This is true for all of IT. I love IT - I’ve been into computer for 30+ years. I run a small homelab, it’ll always be a hobby and a career. But yeah, for more and more people it’s just a job.
That’s the point.
Along with censorship.
Of course they don’t. Hiring junior devs for their hard skills is a dumb proposition. Hire for their soft skills, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to work hard and learn. There is no substitute for good training and experience.
To be fair, most never could. I’ve been hiring junior devs for decades now, and all the ones straight out of university barely had any coding skills .
Its why I stopped looking at where they studied, I always first check their hobbies. if one of the hobbies is something nerdy and useless, tinkering with a raspberry or something, that indicates to me it’s someone who loves coding and probably is already reasonably good at it
Nevermind how cybersecurity is a niche field that can vary by use case and environment.
At some level, you’ll need to learn the security system of your company (or the lack there of) and the tools used by your department.
There is no class you can take that’s going to give you more than broad theory.
that s the point of being junior. Then problems show up and they are forcing them to learn to solve them
They never could
Exactly, the jr dev that could write anything useful is a rare gem. Boot camps cranking out jr dev by the dozens every couple of months didn’t help the issue. Talent needs cultivation, and since every tech company has been cutting back lately, they stopped cultivating and started sniping talent from each other. Not hard given the amount of layoffs lately. So now we have jr devs either unable to find a place to refine them, or getting hired by people who just want to save money and don’t know that you need a senior or two to wrangle them. Then chat gpt comes along and gives the illusion of sr dev advice, telling them how to write the wrong thing better, no one to teach them which tool is the right one for the job.
Our industry is in kind of a fucked state and will be for a while. Get good at cleaning up the messes that will be left behind and that will keep you fed for the next decade.
Not that this is very unique to the field, junior anything usually needs at least 6 months to get to a productive level.
Kind of wish we went with more tradesmen-like titles. Apprentice, journeyman, master. Master software developer sounds like we have honed our craft. Junior/senior just seems like a length of time.
It generally is a length of time. Your title depends on the years on the job.
To me, I feel like this is a problem perpetuated by management. I see it on the system administration side as well – they don’t care if people understand why a tool works; they just want someone who can run it. If there’s no free thought the people are interchangeable and easily replaced.
I often see it farmed out to vendors when actual thought is required, and it’s maddening.
i always found this to be upsetting as an IT tech at a former company - when a network or server had an issue and i was sent to resolve it, it was a “just reboot it” fix, which never kept the problem from recurring and bringing the server down at 07:00 the next Monday.
the limitations on the questions i could ask hurt that SLA more than any network switch’s memory leak ever did, and i felt as if my expertise meant nothing as a result.
Recently my friend was trying to get me to apply for a junior dev position. “I don’t have the right skills,” I said. “The biggest project I ever coded was a calculator for my Java final, in college, a decade and a half ago.”
It did not occur to me that showing up without the skills and using a LLM to half ass it was an option!
One can classify approaches to progress in at least four most popular ways:
The most dumb clueless jerks think that it’s replacing something known with something known and better. Progress enthusiasts, not knowing a single thing from areas they are enthusiastic about, are usually here.
The careful and kinda intellectually limited people think that it’s replacing something known with something unknown. They can sour the mood, but are generally safe for those around them.
The idealistic idiots think that it’s replacing something unknown with something known, that’s “order bringers” and revolutionaries. Everybody knows how revolutionaries do things, who doesn’t can look at Musk and DOGE.
The only sane kind think that it’s replacing something unknown with something unknown. That is, that when replacing one thing with another thing you are breaking not only what you could see and have listed for replacement. Because nature doesn’t fscking care what you want to see.
I honestly don’t know how anyone’s been able to code anything predominantly using AI that’s production worthy.
Maybe it’s the way I’m using AI, and to be honest I’ve only used chatGPT so far, but if I ask it to generate a bit of code then ask it to build on it and do the next thing, by about the third or fourth iteration it’s forgotten half of what we talked about and missed out bits of code.
On a number of occasions it’s given me a solution and when I questions it about the accuracy of it and why a bit of it probably won’t work I just get oh yes let me adjust that for you.
Maybe I’m doing AI wrong I don’t know, but quite frankly I’ll stick with stack overflow thanks.
I frankly only used those to generate pictures and sometimes helloworlds for a few languages, which didn’t work and didn’t seem to make sense. It was long enough ago.
Also I have ASD, so it’s hard enough for me to make consistent clear sense from something small. A machine-generated junk to give ideas is the last thing I need, my thought process is different.
You have to aggressively purge the current chat and give it more abstract references for context. With enough context it can rewrite some logic loops, maybe start a design pattern. You just have to aggressively check the changes.
Feels like it would be quicker and easier just to write the code myself at that point…
It’s only useful for stuff that’s been done a million times before in my experience. As soon as you do anything outside of that, it just starts hallucinating.
It’s basically like how junior devs used to go to stack overflow, grabbed whatever code looked like it would work and just plopped it in the codebase.
This is exactly right. AI can only interpolate between datapoints. I used to write code for research papers and chat gpt couldn’t understand a thing I asked of it.
I remember talking to someone about where LLMs are and aren’t useful. I pointed out that LLMs would be absolutely worthless for me as my work mostly consists of interacting with company-internal APIs, which the LLM obviously hasn’t been trained on.
The other person insisted that that is exactly what LLMs are great at. They wouldn’t explain how exactly the LLM was supposed to know how my company’s internal software, which is a trade secret, is structured.
But hey, I figured I’d give it a go. So I fired up a local Llama 3.1 instance and asked it how to set up a local copy of ASDIS, one such internal system (name and details changed to protect the innocent). And Llama did give me instructions… on how to write the American States Data Information System, a Python frontend for a single MySQL table containing basic information about the member states of the USA.
Oddly enough, that’s not what my company’s ASDIS is. It’s almost as if the LLM had no idea what I was talking about. Words fail to express my surprise at this turn of events.
Yeah, and the way it will confidently give you a wrong answer instead of either asking for more information or saying it just doesn’t know is equally annoying.
Because giving answers is not a LLM’s job. A LLM’s job is to generate text that looks like an answer. And we then try to coax framework that into generating correct answers as often as possible, with mixed results.
Stack Overflow and Google were once the “AI” of the previous generation. “These kids can’t code, they just copy what others have done”
Yeah, and copy-pasting SO answers with no thought is just as bad.
And when copy-pasting didn’t work, those who dared to rise above and understand it, became better. Same with AI, those of the new generation who see through the slop will learn. It’s the same as it has always been. Software engineering is more accessible than ever, say what you will about the current landscape of software engineering but that fact remains undeniable.
I’m glad that AI is making it easier to enter into new areas of knowledge. I just hope it won’t be used as a crutch too far into people’s journeys.
I’m glad that AI is making it easier to enter into new areas of knowledge. I just hope it won’t be used as a crutch too far into people’s journeys.
Software engineering is more accessible than ever
This is key here. Having it more accessible, we see more people who do not want to learn but still trying to code. But we also see more people who wants to learn and create solutions.
Well said. Some of the most talented devs I know use Stack Overflow. It depends on how you use it.
All the devs I know use SO…
True.
As someone who can’t code (not a developer) but occasionally needs to dip my toes in it. I’ve learned quite a bit from using chatgpt and then picking apart whatever it shat out to figure out why it’s not working. It’s still better than me starting from scratch on whatever it is I’m working on because usually I don’t even know where to begin.
Very “back in my day” energy.
I do not support AI but programming is about solving problems and not writing code.
If we are concentrating on tool, no developers and use punched card as well. Is that a bad thing?
You’re right in that the goal is problem solving, you’re wrong that inability to code isn’t a problem.
AI can make a for loop and do common tasks but the moment you have something halfway novel to do, it has a habit of shitting itself and pretending that the feces is good code. And if you can’t read code, you can’t tell the shit from the stuff you want.
It may be able to do it in the future but it can’t yet
Source: data engineer who has fought his AI a time or two.
Of course I use as well on a daily basis for coding and AI is shit.
Again, I in no way support AI, I just think that the argument made in the article is also not good.
Im in uni learning to code right now but since I’m a boomer i only spin up oligarch bots every once in a while to check for an issue that I would have to ask the teacher. It’s far more important for me to understand fundies than it is to get a working program. But that is only because ive gotten good at many other skills and realize that fundies are fundamental for a reason.
