Input: I am disappointed that the enterprise software development, and some open source is going heavily into AI-assisted development. Freshers do not learn much and become disillusioned, bad developers become dangerous and occasionally competent, while good developers accelerate. Somewhere in between the skill, there is also the greed on both sides of the spectrum that is opening up new avenues for original thinking, independent thought, and the real creatives to die a silent and muted death.
Output: I’m honestly concerned about the shift toward AI-assisted development in both enterprise and open source.
Here’s the reality:
- Freshers are missing out on core learning and feeling disillusioned.
- Low-skilled devs are becoming dangerous with tools they don't fully grasp.
- Top-tier talent is accelerating, but at what cost?
Between the skill gap and the corporate greed on both sides, we’re losing something vital. Original thinking and true creativity are being silenced. We need to protect the "human" in tech before the real innovators fade away.
Perhaps it is because I am from a different generation, but I cannot understand what the post you replied even meant.
It makes your response that it cannot be explained meaningfully to most unsuspecting people a little intriguing. Can you try and explain? Perhaps I won't understand, but I feel some of the problem is in the absence of signal.
I'll give it a shot for ya. Parent, GP, GGP, GGGP, OP, or anyone else can feel feel to correct mistakes, please.
Original Post (OP): A post linking to https://www.fubardaily.com/ which is "Curated slop to enjoy with your morning coffee. Updated daily." Apparently a sort of "Drudge Report" or "Dashboard of news/posts".
--> OP MEANING DECODED: There's a big amount of "crappy stories" that a) purport to show "how crappy/dismal things are", probably b) with a healthy amount of "fake stories, or performative artifice, etc."
Great Great Grandparent (GGGP) post said, "front page has racial slurs, a link to goatse, and something crass about trans women. fantastic work /s"
--> GGGP MEANING DECODED: Even the "slop" the OP indexes daily has old-school shennanigans that perennially (every year for decades or forever) are sort of "shock value" or "jarring" things, and in a sense this is refreshing, since those kinds of concerns/topics are worth caring about and relatable or important. (But the GP admits they were being sarcastic. So, really they are saying, the OP's link is a pointless page and a waste to look at.)
Great Grandparent (GGP) post said, "This is almost hopeful in that it softens my lamentation that we're losing a whole generation of engineering labor to AI. It makes me realize that much of it was going to be wasted regardless."
--> GGP MEANING DECODED: The GGP points out that sometimes they are saddened that AI "takes the engineering out of engineering". For example, instead of designing and specifying out and making a thing, an engineer can, now, legitimately, sit down and type (or merely speak) "Make a high level design for _____. Ok, now spec it out. Ok, now make it.". The GP sees LLMs and agents as "taking the engineering out of engineering" since much its rote aspects can be externalized. The GP sees this as a concern, because they imagine that an ENTIRE GENERATION of engineers may learn to "ask a machine to do things for them" that once required knowledge of those things. (Note 1: you can trace this back to "learn C", then back to "learn assembly", then to "learn vacuum tubes", etc.; the lamentation of losing "necessary awareness of how systems work on a fundamental level" is not new. Note 2: it is not unique to software engineering, since as a ____ engineer you may now "draw a thing" but "someone in X country/company will actually make it for you" (outsourcing, again, externalizing "actual" engineering/production). In any case, even if "some people" still know how things work, and design and make those systems, the LABOR MARKET in which people "are paid to do things" could nearly evaporate, and this raises very real concerns or worries of the existential type (very much of the paying for food and shelter in the near future type, or the having a prosperous family ever type). Finally, the GP comes around to heir point that THE THINGS WE PAY PEOPLE TO ENGINEER ARE STUPID THINGS BY AND LARGE ANYWAY, SO IT IS OK TO WIPE OUT THIS LABOR, IT'S A WASTE, WHO CARES IF IT EVAPORATES. While this may sound like nihilism, there is an unwritten portion, which could say, AND MAYBE AT LEAST THIS PASSING OF EVENTS/EVOLUTION IN TECHNOLOGY WILL CONTINUE TO FORCE US TO THINK ABOUT WHAT IT IS THAT IS VALUABLE, AND WHAT TO BUILD AND HOW TO MAKE ACTUAL, FUNCTIONAL, SYSTEMS, AND PUSH US FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET WHERE WE WANT TO BE.
Grandparent (GP) says, "This is 100% true. It's fucking brutal and depressing. But genie is out of the bottle now. Ill was born 1985. It's over."
--> GRANDPARENT MEANING DECODED: Oh yeah, GGP is correct and nails it. And this realization is tough to process and handle. There's no going back, I know it because I have seen some things evolve in my half-life. The way the world once was (what felt like plentiful work of at least some modicum of utility and meaningfulness with truly pleasant human interactions and products and services rendered) is going the way of the dodo (ain't want it used to be and ain't coming back).
Parent says,
--> PARENT MEANING DECODED: I also concur with GGP. Furthermore, many people are too young to know how good it once was, what we had, saw, and experienced, what embodied and encompassed that all. And furthermore, young people process media in a different way than us for the most part and do so with less context, and mostly may never gain have access to knowing what's going on right now and has been or is still in a process of being being lost. And there is an entirely different set of people, who are of our generation, but are totally disconnected from either the white-collar working world, or from the semi-technical fields, and they too have nothing like a grasp on what is occurring and seems destined to continue down an inevitable path of removing meaning from labor, as well as removing the opportunity for much meaningful labor of the types we have known in the past or currently. It is possible to intellectualize and describe painstakingly some or all aspects of these concerns, but most such expressions will be unprocessed by any meaningful proportion of people, for they lack the attention span, or interest, or context for understanding either these facts or their importance to some people.
Note: Cogntive biases appearing heavily above include "declinism", "in those good old days", "rosy retrospect", "conservatism", etc.
NOTE: These are NOT my views, I am just trying to "translate" the chain for the post immediately above.
You have just recounted in a different context, almost the exact lamentation I just got done walking one of my models through last night, minus some cathartic tangents on the subject of instrumental convergence of the corporate world, the tendency of capital to fucking ruin everything the idiots at the top controlling the optimization function touch, and much more lamentation at the apparent inability of the Engineering caste to break out of the Engineering context into a more philosophical one to realize we're letting the business caste lead us to our dooms; specifically dooms of a much more dismal and destructive nature than we'd potentially run into if we realigned our solidarity away from the capital class, and focused on organizing and empowering the labor class. The dooms would at least be pushed out a few generations longer, and it may just redistribute wealth and qualia to a larger subset of the population than whatever we're doing now is.
It's so users run more searches and are exposed to more ads. Google used to firewall the Search development team from the Ads team. That changed, some managers were fired, and now the Ads team can tell the Search team to make changes to how search works to make more ad money. Happened before the current AI era.
For me, it is wanting to implement something myself takes time not because the said thing is complicated but because of the inertia. I have been sitting on a 3-2-1 sync + backup solution for months now.
I do have hope that this delay goes down as I keep implementing things.
The next level i.e., rate of change of Jerk is called Jounce. However, I'm afraid I don't know how that would be described in car passenger's terms in your example.
I disconnect from the internet sometimes and noticed this morning that my previous night's chat was invisible. I could only see it once I connected again.
This puts me off a bit to finally try local models. Anyone know what kind data is collected in those rare instances of cloud usage?
Hi, here are our data collection policies for the cloud-based LLMs. We've worked out agreements that heavily restrict how third party companies can use your data, including not storing it or using it for model training: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/ai/data-collection-and-use-po...
Hey! I started doing the same w.r.t bookmarking this a couple of years back. All new bookmarks now go into a note specific to the topic in the personal KB instead of into the browser bookmarks. Most notes have a '## bookmarks' section at the end where these go.
No, I understood that and respect that a lot. I thought of doing that as I had hundreds if not thousands of never to be visited. As an interim, instead of using the browser bookmarks or any online services I just save useful things to my notes depending on my professional context.
I can vouch for this. Once you're at a senior or lead level these things are easy to weed out.
I used to ask a simpler (for AI) question. The candidate reads out the first sentence. By this time I'd have already established that the candidate is not genuine. Our interview process let's ride out the interview as a courtesy and to also try to extract something out of the candidate that the company could use.
Anyway once they read out the first sentence from the AI with utmost sincerity, I'd follow-up with deeper questions into the topic at hand. 99% failed to answer the second question well. The ones who let me ask the third and fourth questions are devs who still have their original thinking hats in place but just use AI out of nervousness or who generally don't interview well. Those we'd explore further and suggest for lesser roles/alternate streams etc. This all my experience and others MMV.
Output: I’m honestly concerned about the shift toward AI-assisted development in both enterprise and open source.
Here’s the reality: - Freshers are missing out on core learning and feeling disillusioned. - Low-skilled devs are becoming dangerous with tools they don't fully grasp. - Top-tier talent is accelerating, but at what cost?
Between the skill gap and the corporate greed on both sides, we’re losing something vital. Original thinking and true creativity are being silenced. We need to protect the "human" in tech before the real innovators fade away.
#TechTrends #SoftwareEngineering #AI #FutureOfWork #Creativity #DeveloperExperience
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I am tempted to share this, but worried I'll be put on some list.