Ian TurnerMar 7
Matthew Garrett

My job as a senior developer with a team of juniors is to figure out what to write, sketch a PoC as guidance, and then delegate the actual implementation to them. I'm going to look at that, explain misunderstandings or poor style choices, and guide them into implementing something that meets our standards.

I don't think LLMs can do my job yet. But I think we're getting shockingly close to them being able to do the other part. And I'm worried how we're going to get more senior developers.

Mar 7 at 1:03amWeb
Show threadMatthew GarrettMar 7
I would not have said the same thing 6 months ago - the amount of progress here is significant. And I'm not denying that the technology has resulted in massive quantities of poor quality code produced by people who aren't in a position to review it, or that the externalities of all of this are large. But capitalism isn't going to give a shit, so we're getting all of this anyway whether we like it or not
Show threadGlyphMar 7
@mjg59 do you have some way of evaluating that progress in the last 6 months in some way that is not the subjective impression of improvement?
Show threadMatthew GarrettMar 7
@glyph not at all, other than my occasional requests for the robot to write code for me getting increasingly close to code I'd be willing to deploy
Show threadGlyphMar 7
@mjg59 thanks. that kind of data is really hard to come by, so I am just asking everyone with this experience :)
Show threadgunstickMar 7
@glyph @mjg59
The machine is still not generating code I can use. Apparently it is not trained in bash scripting.
Show threadMike RoachMar 7
@mjg59 @glyph Same. I’ve asked it to write things that I know I can do but don’t want to context switch to that domain and it actually does a remarkably good job both at understanding what I’m trying to do, the constraints, and producing code that’s correct and performant.
Show threadBrian SwetlandMar 7

@mjg59 I dunno. Sure we'll get a lot of (more) terrible apps, services, etc in the short term. "AI" is sort of accelerating the "everything is unreliable slop-ware" trend that's been infecting software development for the past decade plus.

At some point I suspect there may (once again) be a market for software that's not utter garbage.

I feel bad for everyone stuck working for these awful companies (increasingly *all* companies), while the industry destroys its capability to write software.

Show threadVal Packett 🧉Mar 7
@swetland @mjg59 hilariously tho we just aren't seeing any new successful startups built on "vibed" code, it's all headlines from big corps like Microslop about how "AI" writes like 80% of their code already and blog posts about building a clone of a web page to do $thing that's been done a hundred times, but… nothing in between????? As Ed Zitron likes to ask: where are the startups??
Show threadBrian SwetlandMar 7
@valpackett @mjg59 Yeah I'm pretty strongly on team "if this is such a miracle technology why are they expending all their effort trying to convince others to use it rather than building things that couldn't possibly by built without it?"
Show threadNicolás AlvarezMar 7
@mjg59 "we're getting all of this anyway whether we like it or not", sounds like slippery slop argument
Show threadviqMar 7
@mjg59
On one hand, very much yes.
On the other, I just read an article about where we currently stand with climate change, and I don't think "where will senior programmers come from" is going to be that much of an issue.
Show threadNicolás AlvarezMar 7
@viq @mjg59 because we'll go extinct before that becomes a problem?
Show threadviqMar 7
@nicolas17
Or if not that, wars for resources and otherwise trying to keep enough of farming going will require too many hands directly applied to problems for them to be spending time on keyboards.
@mjg59
Show threadJason Haar Mar 7
@mjg59 Musk tweeted that this is the Year of the Singularity, so I don't think you have to worry about the senior developers part either... 🤓
Show threadJason Haar Mar 7
@mjg59 actually, if AI gets that good, why will the public ever need to give money to any commercial software company? You'd just ask your AI to build you a solution and throw it away after using it. In effect, the software industry is racing towards doing itself out of business.
Show threadGregMar 7
@mjg59 every mid-to-large FOSS project is seeing their "Good First Issue"s getting sniped by 20 LLM bots. Those exist to feed new contributors into dedicated ones. If you cut the bottom rungs off the ladder, how is anyone going to be able to get to the top?
Show threadMatthew GarrettMar 7
@greg yeah, exactly. I've helped people turn into senior devs, I don't know how to turn an LLM into one - embodying good taste is a different problem to generating code that meets a functional description
Show threadpenguin42Mar 7
@mjg59 I think of it in the same ways a lot of programmers just use high level languages and never look inside - I guess many juniors will be LLM minding from a high level task; the better ones will be the ones who figure out when it has a weird problem or think of a better way than it did.
Show threadPaul BrzeskiMar 7

@mjg59

I think we are going to see the end of the agency model being entrusted with deep technical knowledge and concerns.

But we are also seeing the beginning of a new leaner type of business where senior specialists can now establish their own business remotely, with developers of all skill levels reporting to them from around the world.

This is a huge disruption that I think is going under the radar. Or perhaps is intentionally under reported cause it's a threat to the capitalist agenda.

Show threadmahadevankMar 7
@mjg59 I'm obviously missing something - they are definitely not that good.
Show threadMatthew GarrettMar 7
@mahadevank It involves a bunch of handholding, but honestly pretty much?
Show threadMatthew GarrettMar 7
@mahadevank Definitely not for all cases - they're massively better at boilerplate than implementing a poorly written specification
Show threadmahadevankMar 7
@mjg59 ah ok, as long as we're talking of handholding - in my experience, its destroying Juniors - they've stopped using their brains because the tech lords have told them to focus on "higher-order" problems and not worry about code.
Show threadBerslMar 7
@mjg59 As someone who is trying to develop the high-level design intuition to become a senior dev, I honestly think that I'm going to crash out before I get there. I don't want to lead a group of agents who will build a thing for me. The prospect of that feels so unrewarding, and it's probably the thing that will take the ambient devaluation that I've felt increasing for a long time and push me over the edge.
Show threadMatthew GarrettMar 7
@bersl2 oh god the idea of not getting to actually help people develop is deeply depressing
Show threadSteve Hill 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺Mar 7
@mjg59 having spent the last week debugging an intermittent timing bug in multithreaded code, which only occurred on a loaded production system, I'm wondering how an LLM will do that...
Show threadDemi Marie ObenourMar 8
@steve @mjg59 Time to rewrite it in Rust! /heavy sarcasm
Show threadAndrewMar 7
@mjg59 I say this to everyone who will listen to me.