What an exciting time to be building software! With AI, we’re able to achieve production outages with unprecedented frequency!

I’m not so sure the “open source” part is working either when you think about how AI tools were trained.

It’s really sad, because the accessibility of developing software and collaborative nature of the open source community is a big part of what drew me to software engineering as a career, and it’s always been one of the first things I mention about why I love it. But, of course, these fucking evil companies found a way to take every individual part of something good and twist it into something awful.

I am staunchly anti-AI, but the company I am working for unfortunately pushes AI tool adoption extremely aggressively. A lot of the things in the post are similar to sentiments I have. Specifically the sections around vibe coding offloading the burden of work to the reviewer and how to mitigate that by pushing back against those sorts of PRs.

I agree with you, though, that the post ignores the simplest solution of just not using AI tools. It may be the case that the author doesn’t have the ability to enforce that, but it should still definitely be listed as the first and most logical solution.

I’m at the point where I’m seriously considering creating a blocklist of certain engineers at work that spam out vibe coded trash PRs and informing my manager that I will not do code reviews for anyone on the list.

Sharing this from the article to hopefully save the post a few downvotes:

Coding was never the bottleneck. Not recently. Not in the last decade. Arguably not since we stopped feeding punchcards into machines.

I’m not even going to bother commenting on that train wreck of a post, but I just wanted to mention that I hate the writing style of programming-related LinkedIn posts. They’re just chock-full of sweeping generalizations presented as absolute truth in an extremely patronizing tone.

Why can’t people just say, “In my opinion, X technology is a better fit for Y situation for Z reason,” instead of “Every time you encounter X, you must do Y, otherwise you’re dead wrong.”

It’s just simultaneously so arrogant and also aggressively ignorant. If someone spoke to me like that in real life, I would never want to speak with them again. And these people are broadcasting this shit to their entire professional network.

To be more specific, in the US, it is definitely not.

The P.Eng society is working on this, so that only actual engineers can use the title engineer.

Which is why I specified I was talking about the US. Also, fair. If the term ever actually has a clear set of requirements, then of course it would be incorrect to claim the title without meeting those requirements.

Software “engineers” should just be called code monkeys.

I hope you realize how elitist this comes across. I’ve worked with a lot of contractors, web developers, etc. that have a strong understanding of software development and are able to author software really well. I would be so embarrassed if they knew I referred to them as “code monkeys”. Something tells me that you’re the kind of person I’m very grateful to have never had the misfortune of working with.

we should deregulate hospitals, too

You do realize that the term “software engineer” isn’t regulated, right? There’s no test, no license, no bar/board. Unlike doctors, who are required by law to have a medical license.

I really don’t get the point of gatekeeping a job title.

There’s no official license or certification for software engineering in the US, so anyone claiming you have to meet some requirement to call yourself a software engineer is factually wrong. Now, pretty much every tech company calls anyone who writes code some form of engineer, so much so that SDE/SWE is a pretty universal acronym.

I really don’t care personally, and I don’t go around grouping myself in with other engineering fields. But for the past 7 or so years, my actual job title has had the word “engineer” in it despite the fact that I don’t have a Bachelor’s degree. I feel like jumping through hoops to say, “well, my official title is Software Engineer, but technically I’m a programmer” is just pedantic and probably more confusing for most people.

I could see an argument for differentiating between those who participate heavily in the design and evolution of an entire codebase (as opposed to those who just pull tickets and write code), but even that has kind of just evolved into the junior/mid/senior/etc terminology.

For the FAANG companies, they do it in part so they can then turn around and make those flashy claims you see in headlines like “95% of ours devs use [insert AI product they are trying to sell] daily” or “60% of our code base is now ‘written’ by our fancy AI”.

Maybe we will lose low effort artists but gain great music by passionate people.

This is such a bizarre take.

I wouldn’t characterize musicians who depend on some financial return as “low effort” at all. Almost all the best musicians, going back to classical music and beyond, were dependent on their music as a source of income.

If anything, the people who do music as a side hobby are usually more “low effort” than those who actually make it their main career. And if artists can’t make money of their music anymore, we’ll really only get music from rich people who can afford the lessons, instruments, recording studio, production, etc. as an expensive hobby rather than a source of income.

This isn’t really an answer to the ‘universal negativity’, but for a somewhat reasonable analysis of the pros and (surprisingly high number of) cons as well as some interesting grey areas, there’s an old LWT episode on this topic: https://youtu.be/AJm8PeWkiEU

Any company that pays for ads closely tracks the efficacy of ads and can more or less prove that the ads are worth it. There’s no guess work.

This is one of the reasons I love AI. It enables you to write security vulnerabilities at inhuman speed!

Oh, nice! Thanks for explaining that. I didn’t realize there was a way to run a cluster without HA.

I’m not sure how well that works if the cluster is only designed to be temporary, since removing a productive node from a cluster is a bit risky

Good callout. Just did some reading on the concept of maintaining a quorum, which I didn’t know about. Definitely need to be careful if I go with that approach, but it does sound interesting! I’m not entirely opposed to leaving the old laptop as a node and then using it for experimental stuff or maybe running just one specific standalone service on it after moving the critical stuff to the new server.

Sounds pretty straightforward. Thanks for the info!

That’s a fair point, but I kind of want to tinker around on the laptop without worrying too much about breaking things and figure out what all I actually want to self-host. That will help me figure out what sort of hardware I need.

It should have never gotten through code review, but the senior devs were themselves overloaded with work

Ngl, as much as I dislike AI, I think this is really the bigger issue. Hiring a junior and then merging his contributions without code reviewing is a disaster waiting to happen with or without AI.