I do software consulting for a living. A lot of my practice is small organizations hiring me because their entire tech stack is a bunch of shortcuts taped together into one giant teetering monument to moving as fast as possible, and they managed to do all of that while still having to write every line of code.
In 3-4 years, I’m going to be hearing from clients about how they hired an undergrad who was really into AI to do the core of their codebase and everyone is afraid to even log into the server because the slightest breeze might collapse the entire thing.
LLM coding is going to be like every other industrial automation process in our society. We can now make a shittier thing way faster, without thinking of the consequences.
I have seen how useful it can be to people who dont know how to code. I think it would help more if you already know how to. Maybe for generating scafolding for functionality to be built on.
I think the biggest benefit is for people that cannot code or are just learning. Before a python script to do X or Y was a real problem. Now it is easy.
Plus it may help with Linux adoption - LLM can describe few commands in terminal plus some text config easily, but will struggle with Windows-like graphical configuration.
This is definitely an issue with AI and is why it shouldn’t be used to replace people.
The real value of AI in my opinion is for a non coder like myself to be able to use it to quickly create a blender addon in python to help me do small things like delete keyframes on every other frame or add a button to the ui that automatically adds a shrinkwrap modifier to the object I have selected. Small things that are really convenient to have but not worth the effort of learning python and the blender codebase to do.
How do you keep your sanity? Do you just have to compartmentalize everything as extremely abstract and comical when your task is detangling someone’s 25,000 line spaghetti God classes and obscure async timing bugs?
Honestly I almost never have to deal with any of those things, because there’s always a more fundamental problem. Engineering as a discipline exists to solve problems, but most of these companies have no mechanism to sit down and articulated what problems they are trying to solve at a very fundamental level, and then really break them down and talk about them. The vast majority of architecture decisions in software get made by someone thinking something like “I want to use this new ops tool” or “well everyone uses react so that’s what I’ll use.”
My running joke is that every client has figured out a new, computationally expensive way to generate a series of forms. Most of my job is just stripping everything out. I’ve replaced so many extremely complex, multi-service deploy pipelines with 18 lines of bash, or reduced AWS budgets by one sometimes two orders of magnitude. I’ve had clients go from spending 1500/month on AWS with serverless and lambda and whatever other alphabet soup of bullshit services that make no sense to 20 fucking dollars.
It’s just mind-blowing how stupid our industry is. Everyone always thinks I’m sort of genius performance engineer for knowing bash and replacing their entire front-end react framework repo that builds to several GB with server side templating from 2011 that loads a 45kb page. Suddenly people on mobile can actually use the site! Incredible! Turns out your series of forms doesn’t need several million lines of javascript.
I don’t do this kind of work as much anymore, but up until about a year ago, it was my bread and butter…
