Pointless rant. Please ignore. I’m a software developer and we all know how AI has changed our industry. How we work or why we’re fired and why we can’t afford PCs.
Anyways, we’re already all forced to use AI already and we’re already atrophying the minds of our juniors. It’s great.
New team meeting and one of our managers tells us that we’re never going to write code anymore at all. The AI will read the JIRA ticket and create the pull request (change request to the codebase) on GitHub. Our job is to only review the code on GitHub and then rank how well AI did and then comment and then get AI to fix it. We have to do this so we can improve the AI process. Which is funny because none of the people who plan this AI shit are data scientists. The only way they can change things is by promoting, it’s not like we’re releasing our own coding models but anyways … He’s like, now you should be able to do much more work and just review PRs all day now and that we should never be doing only one thing. You can only tell AI through a GitHub comment to fix a mistake and then you can start reviewing the next thing.
We were like, if it’s a simple fix why can’t we just fix it?
“Because we need to improve the AI process”
But then, I have to context switch.
“Yes that’s the point you can come back to it later”
Why come back to it later when we can solve it now? We can even use AI to solve it now.
“No, we want you just comment on the PR so the bot can handle it”
Context switching is free apparently… It’s actually infuriating because apparently we’re not using IDEs any more. I personally use the GitHub plugin to review PRs in my IDE but no one else seems to do it so I don’t think they even took that into account.
These guys have auto merged AI code that’s taken us weeks to unravel and which we still haven’t fully been able to fix. They just merge shit all the time and a lot of it is fucking slip. AI merged hundreds of tests and no one cares when they break. They didn’t configure prettier because AI doesn’t use it so it breaks out formatting when humans do it.
I ranted to my own manager for 30 minutes about it today and he was just as upset because every developer is now asking what exactly are they doing. My manager asked me what I would do. I said the process sucks but what are we supposed to do as devs. If I review 20 PRs a day, how is the company going to ensure my skills are gonna be sharp? What are we doing about taking in ideas from regular devs? How do we ensure code ownership when we’re just merging tickets we don’t write and code we had no hand in shaping?
Sorry. I actually thought I had faith in my company with AI because they were coming up with thoughtful approaches but it seems like utter incompetence.
In sociology, we call it McDonaldization. By reducing a job to a series of fixes, repeatable steps, they can pay less.
Form a small company with colleagues. Call it UnSlopify.
It sucks, I feel you. I’m also in tech but changed jobs and got lucky.
Anyhow, wing it. Nobody cares. Take care of yourself.
Apocalyptic times for engineers.
Lol why are you training it? You’re a software dev with a product, not ai qa. Wild times we’re in. Should really just cut your losses and gut all ai and go back to where you were before it. If you can’t do that, then your company no longer has a purpose.
“Where’s the fix for ticket #6618?!?”
“Sorry boss, the AI hasn’t gotten it right yet.”
“You said it was a quick fix!”
“For a human it would be. But we’re on infinite monkey time now. It may never be done.”
“It was the best of times…it was the blurst of times”
Ahhh, here comes the great filter. The Fermi paradox is solved.
Seems like exactly the wrong way to use AI.
We have to do this so we can improve the AI process.
I’m curious what they mean by this. Are they just clueless about how anything works? Maybe AI companies are signing contracts with companies to upload all their code, data, traces, etc; so that the AI companies can improve their models? I.e. companies are acting like reinforcement tuning contractor firms for AI companies?
Are they just clueless about how anything works?
That’s certainly how I read it. They seem to think that if you feed the LLM a new prompt that tells it it made a mistake, it’ll update itself to avoid that mistake in the future. Which isn’t how any of this works, but I can understand why they wouldn’t know that given the marketing from the big AI companies.
A couple of years from now everyone will know this was really dumb, but right now only the engineers know that, and management won’t listen to them. I guess they’ll learn the hard way.
Sounds like a plan to make tech debt skyrocket and make productivity tank.
If I were you, I would start looking for another job. And, once you get an offer, tell them in your resignation letter why: you see the company is going to crash compared to its competitors due to wasteful use of AI and the loss of productivity that comes with it
It seems like the trend is don’t even watch the code, many vs code forks for vibe coding now don’t even have the coding portion, it’s a giant prompt in some electron app
For example Google antigravity
Or windsurf that openai almost paid 3 billion before changing idea (now renamed to something else) also became just a prompt
It’s going to backfire spectacularly, approving pr by just reading them in the browser is insane
One thing is “I’m lazy to do this specific thing, I ask the tool to do the specific task by inserting only the useful files in context, then review manually before committing”
Another is “I write a generic prompt “add a photo sharing feature” then it directly opens a PR where another bot reads it and generates a review with so many emojis that it must good 👍🏻😊 boom merge it all the tests pass ✅ ✔️ ✅ ✔️” and then nobody actually knows what it did
Of course the ai companies prefer the second approach before without a subscription the first uses 1 cent in tokens, the second uses $100 in tokens.
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Even with examples and docs, I spent hours 3 days ago to try to sort an issue on our side using AI.
Gave up, solved it myself better than our examples in 5 mins
Run like fifty agents in parallel and get lauded for how “productive” you are while you find another job and hopefully before they get the bill.
This, but only after you have the other job’s offer in hand
More doorman fallacy bullshit from idiots who couldn’t develop their own thought if they were on fire.
“Gemini! It burns! Help, what should I do?! Answer with urgency and you must get it right. My skin is literally melting from my face right now. And optimize to use as few tokens during the processing as possible.”
Just mark everything it produces as perfect
This is the way. Otherwise you’re willingly investing your time into training your replacement.
These people don’t care if the ai is productive right now. They just care that it’s productive eventually so they can get rid of you.
