Corollary:
The job market will be flooded with a shitload of junior devs who never actually earned their degree in the coming years, and anyone older than a mid-gen zoomer is gonna be able to pretty much write their own check.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
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Just think though what you will be doing for that check you write yourself, going through mountains of incomprehensible AI code. Just make sure you add 20g to whatever salary you were thinking.
20g? like gold coins?
No like 20 extra grams of that guud
Gotta get my nut
With the ever rising prices of gold that might not be a bad idea
I spent a big chunk of my career going through mountains of incomprehensible human-generated code. I eventually learned that it was generally easier to just start over from scratch. At the same time I learned that nothing makes corporate bosses' heads explode faster than telling them that their codebase sucks and needs to be rewritten from scratch. My solution to this fundamental dilemma was to become a school bus driver.
Maybe I should be glad I never got the dev jobs I wanted and was relegated to help desk.
For me, developing applications was a joy ... but only when I was left completely alone to do everything by myself. Such opportunities were just becoming rarer and rarer.
You left off a zero
If I’m gonna have to un-fuck your AI slop codebase, you better fucking believe I’m going to charge you through the nose for it.
Maybe the 20 was meant as monthly lol
Applicants should be asking employers: how extensive has your firm's use of AI generated coding tools been over the last few years?
Honestly this is one of the things that was slightly tempting me to become a programmer, but like actually learn how to do it not overly they on ai
Instead though I'm becoming a machinist cuz I'm better with my hands
Ngl I kinda want to get into metalworking. It looks super fun, tbh.
The hard part of software development is not the coding. The hard part is coming up with something actionable, reasonably well defined, internally consistent and technically possible from limited bits and pieces of information, more often than not all of them vague and contradictory; and they change if you ask the same stakeholder again a day later.
I don't see that part getting replaced by AI any time soon.
Most of my career was spent working for small shops that provided custom software for small-ish clients. The absolute number one skillset required was the ability to talk to clients, understand their business and figure out what they needed the software to actually do. Not only are these skills not taught in Computer Science programs, it's never even suggested that you might possibly need them at some point in your career. In my opinion, this is why CS types cling so tenaciously to a rigid division of labor in software development: they want somebody else to do this and then hand them a well-written requirements document.
Important distinction is "Computer Science". My degree is "Software Engineer" and project management was a significant part of the program. We had a junior group project that started with our class doing a client interview of the teacher to extract what the project requirements where. I think a lot of people don't know that software engineer programs are even an option.
It's nice to see academia adapting (somewhat) to the work environment, even if it took a few decades.
Neither does my boss, he's not completely delusional. He's a dev himself. He's just the normal amount of technooptimist delusional, luckily
The code you hand produced is made an AI.
It just stands for "Actual Intelligence" in this case. 😌
“Why should I? He’s the one who sucks.” — M. Bolton
Your code could be what was ai generated.
My employer is trying to get people to use AI more, too.
I'm skeptical of AI, but I'm finding it useful for menial tasks - things that you'd otherwise automate using an AST-based codemod tool (like jscodeshift, libcst codemod, etc), a hacky find/replace, or do by hand (boring, tedious work that I'd rather not do). Giving the AI system an example patch for something like migrating away from a legacy API, and saying "do this same thing across these 200 other files", can have pretty good results.
In general, it seems like a good tool for things where the entire process is well-defined - the prompt and context provide all the info it needs - and I include example code in the context.
I don't trust it for brand new code in a large existing codebase.. Even the best AI models still get a lot of things wrong.
For sure. I copy JSON from swagger and get a Typescript interface all the time. It's boring stuff to do manually, and yeah there are definitely tools I could use for this, but it's not as easy. It's basic stuff, and the AIs can do it reliably.
I have a bunch of chat contexts for things like this. SQL -> DTO object, JSON -> Typescript, etc. So it's kinda a swiss army knife kind of tool where it can do a bunch of basic stuff. Sure there are specific tools for each of these things, but it's easier to have all of those basic functions in one place.
But this week I was doing some very complicated logic that required in depth knowledge of the data structures and consideration for a whole bunch of edge cases... so I didn't even touch an LLM this week. Though next week I might add some new tables to the DB, I'll think about the data relationships and get that right, and then I'll have the AIs deal with all of the boring shit involved in getting it to the FE.
Yep. There’s lots it can do, but more I wouldn’t trust it with. Useful for certain tasks.
It's a tool and has its place. For me it's currentl place is replacing Google searches about programming stuff. This is not to say the AI answers are perfect, they are just generally a better use of my time than Google results because Google has gotten so bad.
But you get ai answers with Google now so... It's basically the same.
So AI in Google searches has improved Google to the point where it's as good as it was before enshittification. Anybody want to guess what the next step is?
AI product pushing, absolutely. I actually fairly shocked there isn't more. Probably because they can't actually predict the output.
"You can do get the most efficient results at the lowest TCO with [insert vendor's product]!"
He's late for the fad and should know better by now.
You should see my former bosses, when everyone else was slowly realising AI isn't a magic tool to solve everything they tripled down and implemented AI into every possible single process in the company.
The AI bullshit is like 40% the reason I left, the other 60% being micromanagement.
they'll never accuse me of using ai to write code since i've been using ascii cats not emojis in my comments for years.