Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?

Maruno Ulfdrengr

@Purple Yeah, sounds familiar sadly. One day one of my colleagues can write perfect high quality code and the next day I am looking at a PR and the WTF/min is incredibly high and I know what happened... When confronted in the way if "I am not really sure why you wrote it like this, normally you have a very different style" they admit they used AI that day cause they were lazy...

And it's often very obviously weird stuff... Like for example we always program Python with typing and suddenly there is no typing anywhere to be found. Recently I even got a PR where >everything< was done using getattr meta-programming instead of typed property access and that >should< be something you almost never need to use and wonder when reading even once.

I really like my colleagues and normally they can make wonderful stuff, but when things like this happen... I don't know, they just given up or something?

Nekaī

@Purple
You are absolutely right.

Lots of people are blindly trusting AI tools and completely bypass their critical thinking braincells.

I am glad to be the only engineer in my team and thus do not have to deal with people like that. Even though i have access to a few AI tools, i will never have them make engineering decisions for me.

crypticcelery

@Purple I was lucky to be in a project where this effect was somewhat subdued.
Outside of that context:
I just got started scrolling through the docs to configure something specific, only for someone else to pose a question to a chatbot, which of course made something up.
A senior colleague was trying to get a camera drone to launch, I open the manual online, he started talking into his phone (guess who got the right answer, though the LLM nonsense was tried first).
There’s more.

Glitzersachen

@Purple

I have seen this for processes...

crypticcelery

@Purple so yeah, you are not alone.
I used to think my (now previous) employer mostly had a staff that actually somewhat cared about the craft. I am not so sure anymore.
On the contrary, I more and more get questioned on or have to justify my decision to avoid these tools wherever I can (sure, being able to do so is a privilege, depending on current pressure at wherever one works to feed and house themselves).

pounce

@Purple it's also happening to senior academics!

Purple :verified:

@pounce We will definitely experience the consequences of this in 5-10 years from now

arjan

@Purple
yes and I got fired shortly after probably because I was not "productive" enough compared to them

moments before sunrise 🏳️‍⚧️

@Purple at large, i see this as capitalism digging its own grave, unfortunately at the expense of individuals.

what's a good argument against "we all should use ai to solve problems of a business faster" given that garbage throwaway code has silently been acceptaed across the board?

Purple :verified:

@river

The frustrating part is, in order to be able to convince someone they need to have a deep understanding of what output the AI is producing.

To the lazy or unsuspecting eye its output looks superb and perfect. But only if you have a reasonably deep understanding of the engineering challenge you've asked it to solve, you will understand it's more often garbage than not.

I don't see a way to win this battle, other than finding a company that doesn't fall for AI and keeps producing high quality services, even though they may take a little longer to build than competitors. Eventually others will start to collapse under the technical debt

食 Shoku the MN Wolf

@nekayee @Purple can we go back to the days when AI was discovering protein sequences and identifying Pokémon on a standalone raspberry pi? Maybe then I would have my AI tool for automatically generating alt text because my brain has so much trouble with it for reasons I can't understand.

mkj

@Purple @kitcat To say nothing of when you've faced a problem, figured out a fix, and can *actually explain why that fix is correct*, and *apply the same reasoning in other situations*. Not just the same fix, but the same *reasoning*.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned like that, but actually having figured something out brings me joy. Even if it is stuff that lots of other people know. Learning how the pieces fit together to bring the result I get out of the thing I made.

Ozzelot :anarchy: :linux:

@mkj
To have made something is to have overcome some challenge that comes with making it. (And if making something in particular is easy for you, congrats, you're a great overcomer.)
@Purple @kitcat

Intaglio Whitegraven

@Purple As someone who basically refuses to use AI for anything, it's likely I'm unaware of just how much the use of it has pervaded people's working behaviors.

My understanding is that AI and LLM's are meant to be a tool. As with any tool, if used properly, it can be helpful and effective in completing a task. But there's a reason that people are educated on how to do things manually before they're allowed to use tools: there needs to be that sense of intuition that informs a person whether something seems correct or doesn't.

What you're describing, seems to be an outsourcing of critical thinking to these tools. It's like putting someone in the driver's seat of a self-driving car and now they're panicking when they have to take manual control.

Maimuaika 🇵🇸

@Purple I think people are burned out and are just find AI easier to just continue earning money and do less.

source: me, coding makes me wanna kms

Maimuaika 🇵🇸

@Purple I think there would be less stories like these if the industry was more focused on just programming rather than having overengineered cringe solutions to suck off investors, so people do things that are actually interesting and have a real impact for the good rather than putting stress, pressure and making engineers just hate their hobby

Mr. E. Grey Seale

@Purple using AI is just like managing a fairly incompetent Junior. Welcome to management. This is the fear and dread and uncertainty that you feel for the first couple of years after somebody has put you in charge of a software team. Where productivity can't be managed, and the results are not really within your control. How long do you wait to fire your AI assistance and go looking for another?

四

@Purple I think it’s more exposing than changing.

AI coding won’t make you able to do something you can’t do, it can give you code you must understand and verify.

It can’t replace someone with knowledge, but it can, if used sensibly, augment some parts. Like boring refactoring and generating some simple boring stuff.

Quincy

@Purple same here, and I hate it so much, it's beyond words

Marijke Luttekes

@Purple I haven't seen it at these extremes in AI yet (with seniors).

What I have seen is that someone pushed a huge upgrade out in record time, one that would normally require careful consideration and planning.

Turned out they instructed an LLM to do the upgrade and not much else, because I later spotted some pitfalls mentioned in the upgrade guide (and not a long one, either).

To me, LLMs are tools; you can use them, but they do not absolve you of your responsibility to at least try to do your due diligence as a programmer (which goes beyond writing code and shipping it).

Wandering Adventure Party

Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?