30 years in the industry for me. It’s been a wild last few years watching this transformation. Like the OP I find it wholly unpleasant and I also can’t deny the productivity boost. I’m very glad I’m nearly ready for retirement and I look forward to watching this “progress” from a comfortable distance.

My org has restructured to gear up for reducing engineers' necessary skills

They've changed our job titles from 'Engineer' to 'Developer'.

Power (in the form of talking to business owners, organizing work, setting engineering direction) has been centralized. We had 6 engineering managers now we have one 'Director'.

I don't think I've solved a real problem in 8 months.

For a hundred years software was inscrutable enough to normies that you could be an artisan. But most professions haven't had that luxury for a long, long time. Try making and selling pretty much anything else you built by hand.

Now it's software people's turn to feel the pain of being a starving artist and watch as your attractive friends with no skills and a social media presence "make it" with their genius.

We haven't even begun to feel the weight of it yet.

Why do some software engineers love AI and some hate it?

I've got senior engineers (20+ yoe) who have never been having more fun and then some who feel like OP here.

Why is it so decisive? There's no other tool (not even emacs) that's caused this sort of division.

I anticipate and welcome the market price of slopware dropping to zero, given that it’s now in infinite supply. Too much talent has been cohabiting with SO copypasters, MBA idiots, and management dorks for too long, time to break up.

In another decade I expect the processes and procedures will catch up.

We're at that awkward time where there is still an expectation to fill out JIRA tickets, but it is possible to ship multiple features at once in less time than the planning meeting takes.

As the models improve, the slop will reduce. As the humans improve, the processes and procedures will change to match the new paradigm, whatever it becomes.

I'm sitting at about a decade of experience and it feels equally bad here. Honestly right now I'm mostly waiting for either AI to blow up and companies to scale back massively or for other engineers to deskill themselves into oblivion so that skilled engineers get the edge again.

If neither gambit pay out then I'll just go find some other career and keep software as my hobby. I'm not going to let this billion dollar industry ruin the thing I enjoy.

I can't deny this is true, but it hasn't made me hate my job. More than anything, I'm trying to figure out how to thrive in a very different environment. I've definitely realized that sitting there and handcrafting my code to try to make it perfect isn't what my employer is going to want; they want a balanced trade-off. So, I need to find a good split in the middle where I can still add value by using my experience and skills to shape good quality, maintainable code, but I also am trying to use LLMs in places where they are doing a good job. The quality of the generated code, sans the unbelievably bad English prose, has gone up a fair bit, making me wince a bit less about it.

But, the sentiment about drowning in slop, well. Yeah kind of. I am not sure the polite way to tell people they should be thinking for themselves rather than just repeating what an LLM told them.

I absolutely use LLMs to assist in reviewing my own code as well as others, but I am always using my own judgment and speaking in my own voice. I will never copy-paste an LLM comment as if I wrote it, and I don't think even with a proper disclaimer that I'll ever copy-paste an LLM comment that I don't understand enough to confirm and rephrase on my own - instead, I use the LLM insights as a starting point. If I don't understand them, I dig deeper. If I disagree with the comment, I disregard it. And finally, if I understand it fully and agree with it, then I bring it up in code review, in my own voice.

I'm a little more lax when it comes to LLM generated code. A lot of test suites are already kind of a bit pointless thanks to the flawed prioritization of code coverage as a metric (it isn't a bad one generally, but there are cases where it is tragically bad, like when the code you are testing is effectively a DSL and the assertions are restatements of the DSL's contents...) and even when it's not, LLMs are often useful for generating decent test suites. Still a good idea to read them, but I give LLM-generated tests less attention and manually exercising code more attention: it seems like a good tradeoff to get a productivity improvement from LLMs.

To me the biggest sin is using LLMs or generative AI and pretending it is your own human expression. Please use your own words. If that's too much effort, I'm afraid I don't really want you working where I work or posting where I post, just for the sake of everyone's sanity. All of your LLM-assisted blog posts read like absolute shit and I'm tired of all of the excuses for it.

>I’d love to find a corner of the world where this hasn’t happened yet [...]

Start one?

There's definitely a market for software that doesn't give off the corporate, mass-produced, one-size-fits-all energy. 37signals famously made quite a business out of it.

How much of modern software was slop before AI? Is this really something new? I argue it's been happening in many companies since at least 2010. Made with good old fashioned humans and some help from ZIRP. Remember that time I worked at Twitter?

SQLite is the most popular database in the world. It's maintained by 3 people. There's hope. AI is a great tool that's here to help you if you want, but at the end of the day, the output matters and it's quality not quantity. Don't work for people who don't agree.

There has always been some level of misalignment between the (beauty of high) quality of products made by craftsmen and the value of these products by whoever consumes them.

If you zoom out and look at other industries, we've seen this before many many times: Fast food completely commoditized the food industry. There are still extremely skilled people making the "highest quality" food. For example those at michelin star restaurants, these businesses typically don't make money by selling food anymore, they stay around for other reasons (hotel needs a fancy restaurant with a famous chef). We've seen the same when it comes to many other products: toys, furniture, most electronics, etc.

Nobody can swim against the forces of capitalism here, just not enough people care about high quality hand crafted software (the only people that really do are people right here in this thread hand crafting software). Sure there will be some corners of the economy where people doing everything by hand will keep their head above the water.

Think of it this way: back when people were sending letters to each others and responses took weeks, people (non professional writers) put a lot of thought into writing these letters. I'm sure if you show these people the average (non AI) emails we've been sending each other the last few decades they will complain about all the slop too (including how we all converse to each other right here). But you can definitely argue that this exponentially increased communication and sharing of ideas has outweighed our decreased ability to write properly (in self defense: I'm not a native english speaker).

This obviously sucks for those who care about high quality hand crafted software, but this is going to open the floodgates in terms of the accessibility of software development. And it's yet to be seen whether this is going to take all our jobs away or not. What's very much true (like the article says) is that the future job of software dev is going to look different, and the change is coming fast.

After we get through this slop phase, I think software engineering won’t be about code at all, if it even exists as a profession. Feels like the beginning of the end for the craft.

It's strange to see this on the site:

> While I may use AI for work, my website, and all the content on it, is entirely written by hand.

I mean, if you're tired of the slop and what AI is doing to the industry, why do you need to use it for a simple personal website?

Some people never really liked writing code. They liked the result and the paycheck much more. Those folks are having the time of their lives now. Well, until the fall happens and software development is assmebly-lined.

"software engineer" covers a wide range of responsibilities. some engineers spend all their time contributing to the physics in a massive graphics engine. some spend most of their time as the sole maintainer of a web api that mostly plumbs together a bunch of services and provide data to UIs. some are frequently spitting out new services while other are maintaining 10 year old legacy codebases. the work we need to do, the tradeoffs we need to make, its just so vast.

now couple that with the wide range of variety (and dysfunction) that come from the business and organization. being a dev for a company which sells software is a whole different beast than being an in-house dev for a company which sells other products. startup, big org, old org, new org, strike team, the list goes on.

finally, engineers enjoy different aspects of building software more than others. the puzzle, the crafting, the api, the data structure, the architecture, solving end user needs, so many facets to what makes it enjoyable as a career.

this is a big reason why ai discourse online is so uneven and often unhelpful. were all assuming too much about what being a software engineer is; forgetting that my day-to-day can be wildly different than yours.

a lot of ai speedup comes from effective delegation of work. i do it, but i don't like it. it actively makes me feel tired in a way i don't feel when i do the work myself, or when i mentor and grow my team to do the work.

many other devs don't feel the way i do. some suddenly have these ai tools that make them feel more empowered and energized and excited.

llm's are genuinely a new computing paradigm because of their nature: plain human language as the interface. this is different enough that mapping our past computing concepts (like the evolution from assembly to C) may not hold as well as seem they should.

this all digs deep into who we are as individuals with specific desires, career history, goals, a specific role at a specific company. the part that's fucking beautiful and unique and human.

But if the aggressive industry-wide layoffs aren't enough of a clue, these giant ass companies (and the ai gatekeepers driving this shift) are not compatible with individual humans.

i dont mind llms as a tool, but im done with the perverse level of greed and inhumanity they seem to inspire in corporate leaders.

It’s because there always were two types of engineers and the difference was never clear until this technology existed. Some love the craft, and some love the results.

It's a Skinner box of productivity. Of course it's polarizing.

My own enthusiasm varies wildly day to day. I've been sick of squinting at punctuation marks and opening sequences of of tabs to trace through annoying abstraction layers for a long time; so I'm really excited to see those activities effectively automated away. But the same tools enable some really bad behavior (in myself and others), which really gets me down.

It’s the NES Game Genie.

Unlimited lives and the ability to walk through walls is great fun for a bit. But also, you never actually played the game and it kinda ruined it for you, for all time.

You’ve seen the outcome, you solved nothing, learned nothing, and there’s zero reason for you to ever be proud of it.

The outcome isn’t yours, it’s the chatbots. Maybe you lie to yourself a bit… but you were barely necessary.

  > Why do some software engineers love AI and some hate it?

n=1 but i'd say 3 aspects for me:

1. its forced on me at $job; its just a tool so let me use it when i need it and stop making my work-life miserable with childish tokenmaxing leaderboards

2. co-workers who send low-effort low-quality pr's that introduce tons of complexity and waste everyone's time and that they cant answer basic questions about because they no longer know how it works

3. the absolute cult-like manic behavior with some people around "ai"... yes its fun and interesting and cool tech so please stop treating it like a religion ffs

just my 3c

It's not hard to observe what the tools and systems can do. It's impressive. But I suspect for some the trade-off is not worth it based on their principles. No amount of disbelief or encouragement will change that.