Posted by keybits 2 days ago
1. Someone raises a PR
2. Entry-level maintainers skim through it and either reject or pass higher up
3. If the PR has sufficient quality, the PR gets reviewed by someone who actually has merge permissions
I cannot justify to myself writing code by hand when there is literally no difference in the output from how I would have done it myself. It might as well be reading my mind, that's what it feels like.
For me, vibe coding is essentially a 5x speed increase with no downside. I cannot believe how fast I can churn out features. All the stuff I used to type out by hand now seems impossibly boring. I just don't have the patience to hand-code anymore.
I've stuck to vanilla JavaScript because I don't have the patience to wait for the TypeScript transpiler. TS iteration speed is too slow. By the time it finishes transpiling, I can't even remember what I was trying to do. So you bet I don't have the patience to write by hand now. I really need momentum (fast iteration speed) when I code and LLMs provide that.
Obviously, I suck at business and marketing. I only had one relatively financially successful product (my open source project, ironically) but I'm definitely able to build features quickly and in a stable way according to spec.
[pedantry] It bothers me that the photo for "think of prototype PRs as movie sets" is clearly not a movie set but rather the set of the TV show Seinfeld. Anyone who watched the show would immediately recognize Jerry's apartment.
https://nypost.com/2015/06/23/you-can-now-visit-the-iconic-s...
It looks a bit different wrt. the stuff on the fridge and the items in the cupboard
https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/yfbmn2/sony_pictu...
In any case, though, neither one is a movie set.
It's not rocket science.
This feels extremely counterproductive and fundamentally unenforceable to me.
But it's trivially enforceable. Accept PRs from unverified contributors, look at them for inspiration if you like, but don't ever merge one. It's probably not a satisfying answer, but if you want or need to ensure your project hasn't been infected by AI generated code you need to only accept contributions from people you know and trust.
/s
I am the founder and a product person so it helps in reducing the number of needed engineers at my business. We are currently doing $2.5M ARR and the engineers aren't complaining, in fact it is the opposite, they are actually more productive.
We still prioritize architecture planning, testing and having a CI, but code is getting less and less important in our team, so we don't need many engineers.
That's a bit reductive. Programmers write code; engineers build systems.
I'd argue that you still need engineers for architecture, system design, protocol design, API design, tech stack evaluation & selection, rollout strategies, etc, and most of this has to be unambiguously documented in a format LLMs can understand.
While I agree that the value of code has decreased now that we can generate and regenerate code from specs, we still need a substantial number of experienced engineers to curate all the specs and inputs that we feed into LLMs.
We can (unreliably) write more code in natural english now. At its core it’s the same thing: detailed instructions telling the computer what it should do.
More productive isn't the opposite of complaining.
Tells me all I need to know about your ability for sound judgement on technical topics right there.
> the engineers aren't complaining
You're missing a piece of the puzzle here, Mr business person.
> code is getting less and less important in our team
> the engineers aren't complaining
lays off engineers for ai trained off of other engineer's code and says code is less important and engineers aren't complaining.
They can focus on other things that are more impactful in the business rather than just slinging code all day, they can actually look at design and the product!
Maximum headcount for engineers is around 7, no more than that now. I used to have 20, but with AI we don't need that many for our size.
If I survived having 65% of my colleagues laid off you'd better believe I wouldn't complain in public.
I'd also be looking for a new job that values the skills I've spent a decade building.
I wonder if the remaining engineers' salary increased by the salary of the laid off coworkers'
Someone barking orders at you to generate code because they are too stupid to be able to read it is not very fun.
These people hire developers because their own brains are inferior, and now they think they can replace them because they don't want to share the wages with them.
Never does.
I don't see how you could think 7 engineers would love the workload of 20 engineers, extra tooling or not.
Have fun with the tech debt in a few years.
Management may see a churn of a few years as acceptable. If management makes 1$M in that time.. they wont care. "Once I get mine, I don't care"
Like my old CEO who moved out of state to avoid a massive tax bill, got his payout, became hands off, and let the company slide to be almost worthless.
Or at my current company there is no care for quality since we're just going to launch a new generation of product in 3 years. We're doing things here that will CAUSE a ground up rewrite. We're writing code to rely on undocumented features of the mcu that the vendor have said 'we cannot guarantee it will always behave this way' But our management cycles out every 3-4 years. Just enough time to kill the old, champion the new, get their bonus, and move on. Bonuses are handed out every January. Like clockwork there's between 3-7 directors and above who either get promoted or leave in February.
I don't see how any business person would see any value in engineering that extends past their tenure. They see value in launching/delivering/selling, and are rolling the dice that we're JUST able to not cause a nation wide outage or brick every device.
So AI is great... as long as I've 'gotten mine' before it explodes
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".