Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
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It’s much easier to write your own Forth than to make your own screws! It’s a wonderfully simple and expressive language. Ages ago I wrote a tiny Forth that interactively compiled to 68000 machine code.
More recently I learned Elm — that was extremely mind-bending and hard in a very satisfying way.
I’ve also had fun making screw-like threaded inserts because I needed bigger ones than I could easily get.
I’ve had so much fun learning new things to build stuff I wanted and needed.
Making tools to make this work easier is an essential part of this process — and making tools to make tools.
Some folks who are heavily into LLM-assisted programming seem to be getting lost:
Paraphrasing:
“This is the last month that programming will cost anything and I’m examining the implications of the cost of code going to 0
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I’ve had so much fun learning new things to build stuff I wanted and needed.
Making tools to make this work easier is an essential part of this process — and making tools to make tools.
Some folks who are heavily into LLM-assisted programming seem to be getting lost:
Paraphrasing:
“This is the last month that programming will cost anything and I’m examining the implications of the cost of code going to 0
@stepheneb I need to get my tap and die game on. But/and: I get so much more out of understanding older techniques and subtractive processes for making things, vs friends who 3d print or CNC route everything. And making tools to make tools is everything about long-term process improvement.
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@TheMNWolf @yon @Purple yeah, i suspect many teams understand their code less and less as the time goes.
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@stepheneb I need to get my tap and die game on. But/and: I get so much more out of understanding older techniques and subtractive processes for making things, vs friends who 3d print or CNC route everything. And making tools to make tools is everything about long-term process improvement.
Yes!
And sometimes I use my 3D printer to make jigs for precision work in wood or metal. It’s a wonderful affordance to be able to minutely change a dimension or angle and reprint.
It’s also great for this kind of work! Many iterations involved to get it to work just right.
Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm) (@stepheneb@ruby.social)
Attached: 1 image @justyourluck@masto.ai Screenshot of the FreeCAD model showing the parts of the filter holder that are installed onto a fabric mask: the fabric of the mask is captured between the lower fabric flange and the middle threaded flange element. The sandwich of the two layers of stainless steel mesh with a center layer of MIRV-16 filter fabric are captured between the top of the threaded flange and the threaded cap. The filters should be replaced every 3 months.
Ruby.social (ruby.social)
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple i have a lot of feelings about how many senior devs i am working with who are starting to rely on ai shit
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple Oh hey I just posted about this a couple hours ago too. Yes. It's insane.
SlightlyCyberpunk (@admin@mastodon.slightlycyberpunk.com)
@awfulwoman@indieweb.social After seeing the way people use it in my workplace, no, it absolutely does not have a place in code. The code it produces is generally unreadable, unmaintainable, and inconceivably inefficient. I am *constantly* taking shit that someone says they've been vomiting back and forth into the mouth of the AI for six to eight hours and rewriting a version of it that *actually fucking works* in a span of about fifteen minutes. I think I am literally watching the people I work with lose intelligence. They'll tell you the AI told them to run some slop code and they waited six hours for the result and it was useless. You look at the ONE SINGLE LINE OF CODE they were running and ask them what it does, and they can correctly identify that it will select a random record from the database. You then ask them how they thought selecting a random record would help with their task of determining the overall disk consumption of each table in the database and the only answer you'll get is "the AI told me it would." And then you have to fix it for them because they're not willing to spend five minutes reading documentation anymore, if the info didn't come from the AI it can't be any good!
Slightly Cyberpunk Mastodon (mastodon.slightlycyberpunk.com)
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple asking people to explain "their" work needs to be a thing, both in work and in education. If they cannot, the inference is that they didn't do it.
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@stepheneb I need to get my tap and die game on. But/and: I get so much more out of understanding older techniques and subtractive processes for making things, vs friends who 3d print or CNC route everything. And making tools to make tools is everything about long-term process improvement.
@danlyke @stepheneb @Purple One of the things I did when I bought my KLR650 in 2012 was to buy a set of US and Metric taps and dies, both Lowe’s house brand, and both fairly cheap. I use them for all sorts of things, including threading the tang of a knife so I can use hardware-store hardware to form the pommel [1], restoring stripped threads in all sorts of household things, and most recently, making my own damn screws.
Buy cheap, use them, upgrade if needed.
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@f4grx It's exactly this!!
People who used to do their craft just fine but have now almost kinda turned into zombies?
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@reiddragon Eventually the house of cards will collapse because the technical debt being created is enormous
So yeah, I assume investors absolutely love it for now, but when the tide turns who picks up the rubble?
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@f4grx It's exactly this!!
People who used to do their craft just fine but have now almost kinda turned into zombies?
@Purple I know it's ridiculous. Cant wait for all of this to be over.
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@Purple i have a lot of feelings about how many senior devs i am working with who are starting to rely on ai shit
@dexiheart @Purple At the kickoff for my current project we were going through the technical design doc and when we came to one section, the lead eng just casually said "Ignore this part. It's an AI hallucination."
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@TheMNWolf @Purple The amount of verification needed goes up steeply as you can trust the AI. You can’t trust a human to write perfect code (hence tests), but an AI can just go wild and do anything.
So if you don’t understand the business rules needed nor can develop at the level the AI is trying to do, it won’t work.
But if you let it into production the good old “it will happen and your options don’t matter” kicks in.
It’s like having me review papers about quantum mechanics. I can find some spelling errors, but I will have no clue if something is plausible sounding gibberish or the real deal.
Well I guess the upside is that qualified and trained developers will become more and more scarce. Yay future we didn’t want.
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@TheMNWolf @yon @Purple yeah, i suspect many teams understand their code less and less as the time goes.
@river @TheMNWolf @Purple Code and *business rules*, the much more difficult part vs most code written today.
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple@woof.tech yup, about a year ago my old boss switched over to being dependent on chatgpt, then claude exclusively and then shilling it as the only way developers should be doing things ;~;
I think that developers are particularly vulnerable to being lobotomised via ai because many are so dopamine hungry for a quick hit of solving a problem in the most efficient way, and ai seems like it’s efficient as the person using it isn’t using their own brainpower, if efficiency is measured by how much we use. We need to try and make it so developers care about the efficiency of code itself rather than creating the code otherwise it’s just gonna be a bunch of trash -
Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple seniors often develop dementia as they age, maybe the AI in LLM use is Accelerated Incoherence.
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple On the bright side, there are "some" benefits that I've seen in my experiments. The biggest is "planning"
We get requests from clients for modifications that often make no sense and are simply a disaster..... yet, we often just get to it and start framing it out so we can really get an idea of what needs to be done.
with this AI stuff, you can write up the entire process - the business logic - and then include the steps to getting it done and really get it planned out. Then you can have something like Claude CLI dig through it and actually write up a plan - not the code. And THEN, you can break it into manageable pieces, push them into individual branches and THEN start work.
at that point, I'd say 70% of the front-end UI can be done with AI, and then you do the rest. I mean, it is no different than the scaffolding that you get with AngularCLI or VisualStudio, etc...
The real problem is laziness. It's too easy to just make it work and push your PR without even looking at "how" it works.
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Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.
@Purple So far I've only seen AI vomit from junior devs... Which got better over time, mostly because they learnt it's easier to review and fix it themselves before sending me a MR for review to which I reply, that they should fix the obvious stuff first and then get 30 comments from me in the following iterations anyways...
Most seniors don't really use AI... Some even forget they have an AI subscription...
I'm one of the seniors that use it more often. But I'm using it more like a glorified search engine, getting inspiration for problem solutions (good way to find methods in libraries that I might have missed... if they exist and are not hallucinations), sometimes to get clues on cryptic compiler errors.
I don't usually accept generated code/changes but tend to do it myself after I understand the suggested solution. In my experience it's a lot faster than cleaning up up the generated code. -
I think AI is incredibly weak at actually understanding problems with any moderate degree of complexity.
People forget it's a language model that is just very advanced at predicting what would be a likely, or seemingly sensible answer to a prompt. It's kinda inherent to it's design, they try to overcome it by having it write it's own prompt ("thinking mode") but even then it still just doesn't grasp the full idea
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@anne_twain @halfy In all honesty I hope to be out of that place before that happens
